Sunday Times - Scotland
18 September 2005
What may be the last throw of the dice in the struggle to save the Scottish regiments and preserve them in their separate and distinct identities will be made this week when an action is brought before the Court of Session, petitioning it to declare as illegal the effective disbandment of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and its incorporation in the proposed Royal Regiment of Scotland.
The petitioners have a nice legal point. The KOSB were raised in Edinburgh in 1689 by the Earl of Leven and the regiment’s establishment was authorised by an act of the old Scottish parliament. The argument is that the act cannot be rescinded since the parliament that passed it no longer exists; and that the Westminster parliament is in breach of the Treaty of Union should it pass a measure disbanding the regiment.
The case may offer meat for lawyers to chew on but, alas, it cannot have much chance of success. It is, as I say, a last throw of the dice for it is evident that most of the steam has gone out of the campaign to save the regiments, despite its endorsement by leading politicians from the opposition parties, including Alex Salmond, Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Sir Menzies Campbell. The Ministry of Defence presses on regardless and since the attempts by campaigners to influence the general election made little impact, I doubt if the government is now much concerned.
Yet it is still a deplorable decision. The proposal shows a failure to understand what motivates young men to join the army. In truth, many don’t join the army as such; they join a regiment. It is a sense of belonging, of family and local loyalty, that leads them to sign on. Take that away, treat such feelings with indifference, even contempt, and recruitment will fall away.
Furthermore, almost all independent observers agree that the infantry is overstretched. The recommendation that service overseas and in the field should be balanced by sufficient periods of deployment at home is regularly disregarded. This makes the retention of servicemen more difficult. The response should be to expand the infantry, not shrink it. Yet shrinkage is happening.
This is all the more undesirable because it is the infantry regiments that are best suited to the role the army is now, more and more, required to play: that of serving as a peace keeping force. We need more infantrymen, not fewer, but this reorganisation makes it probable that there will be fewer.
|
Some, especially among those of us who opposed the Iraq war, may view this development with equanimity. They may indulge themselves with the hope that we shall soon get beyond war: that there will be no more need for the British Army in places such as Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Sierra Leone. For two reasons this is wishful thinking.
First, the world remains a dangerous, disturbed and unruly place and there will be occasions when either our national interest or the claims of common humanity, as interpreted by the United Nations, make it expedient or necessary that our armed forces are engaged in foreign lands. When this happens, we have to have enough of them to do the job efficiently and again this means enough infantry.
There will always be wars because war excites politicians. Democratic politicians, being mostly decent, may not like to admit this; yet it is an obvious truth. In the early months of his presidency John F Kennedy called Richard Nixon, as a leader of the Republican party, into the Oval Office to brief him on the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. “This is the real thing,” he said excitedly, “I mean who gives a f*** for things like the minimum wage when you’ve got this going on.” War is an inescapable part of the human condition because, as the American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, a veteran of the civil war, said: when people seek to make irreconcilable worlds, there is no remedy except force.
We need an efficient and strong army because the world is as it is. The proposed amalgamation of the Scottish regiments will weaken the army and this is sufficient reason for opposing it.
There is also another reason. In destroying the regiments and the ethos they have developed over the centuries, you are sweeping away what many hold dear. This represents an attack on both local and national identity. The regimental spirit is not only a military virtue; it is also a social one. Men belong to their regiment long after they have ceased to be serving soldiers. It inspires feelings of affection and loyalty and such feelings are to be valued, not carelessly disregarded.
What we are seeing in this assault on the identity of our regiments is a withering, which will lead to the extinction of the Scottish military tradition. Some doubtless will shrug and say “So what?” Others may be ashamed of that tradition and be happy to see it fade away. But most of us are proud of it, just as we respond to the music of the pipes and the sight of a regiment on the march. I cannot see how anyone could gaze on our war memorials and not feel both proud and humble.
When the Ministry of Defence has had its way, something very Scottish will be lost. That is a great sadness.
|
