It’s zero for real heroes as long as villains keep playing cheap games
OLD soldiers who fought in wars don’t like to share their battlefield memories.
Which is why I was surprised, many years ago, when a former Japanese PoW opened up to me.
He’d been watching some televised royal event and grown angry at the rows of medals on the chests of men who had never seen action.
He told of young comrades fighting heroically in the Burmese jungle, and how those who made it home, emaciated and broken, were given no recognition or reward. Indeed, were treated as an embarrassment.
“Heroes come cheap in this country, son, never forget it,” he told me.
I thought of him years later when a BBC poll named the 100 Greatest Britons. Amid 10 monarchs, countless dukes and knights and one Queen Mother, gawd bless ’er, sat The Unknown Warrior. That great symbol of the ultimate sacrifice.
A sacrifice which, you would imagine, guaranteed top slot on the national hero charts. No.
The Unknown Warrior came in at 76, one place ahead of Robbie Williams, and 73 places behind celeb aristocrat Princess Diana. Now that’s cheap.
To those who had long mocked the skewed version of heroism in Britain, it came as little surprise.
Neither have the recent kicks in the teeth of workers we were told last year are the nation’s guardian angels. Remember being urged to take to the streets every Thursday to applaud the mostly low-paid NHS staff and care workers who tirelessly battled on in the face of a killer pandemic?
Remember all those political soundbites when the Prime Minister’s life was saved, about the need to recognise the courage and dedication of key citizens we’d taken for granted for so long? History told us they were always going to be nothing more than empty platitudes.
As recently as 2017, hundreds of Tory and DUP MPs had gleefully voted down Labour’s proposal for a fair pay rise for NHS staff despite them being shown evidence that some nurses were so hard-up they were using foodbanks.
Only a duped fool believed this Tory government would back up their words with actions and reward workers who had seen more than 230 of their colleagues die and thousands left debilitated through fighting Covid, at times without proper protection.
In January’s New Year Honours List 1,239 citizens were decorated for their services to Britain but only 123 of them, or 10%, were NHS or care workers. And they mostly got minor trinkets.
In this week’s Budget and pay review there was less than nothing for the heroes of Covid. Just a pitiful 1% pay rise that will fall below inflation and a tax allowance freeze, meaning a drop in living standards for years to come.
To put our gratitude in context, nurses will take home an extra £3.50 a week while private firms, many with links to ministers, take £37billion from taxpayers for a failed test-and-trace system.
With the NHS also facing a real terms funding cut, it means that as hospitals work through the 4.5 millionstrong waiting list, the frontline staff who are already exhausted from the Covid battlefield will be asked to graft harder, and longer, for less. And the Government doesn’t care.
Heroes come cheap in this country. Never forget it.
Only a duped fool believed the Tories would back up their words