Please, no more heroes thwarted by jobsworths
HEROES don’t always wear capes – though most of the ones I’ve interviewed were in a uniform of some sort when they earned the accolade the hard way.
There was Baillieston boy William Reid who became a VC when he, despite being wounded, pressed on to the target in his Lancaster bomber with his flight engineer dead beside him and the windshield shot away by a night-fighter.
There was Aberdonian pilot John Cruickshank, also a VC, who came home like a human colander and with his navigator dead after he sank a U-boat bristling with anti-aircraft guns.
And John ‘Mac’ McAleese, the Stirling SAS man who blew in the balcony windows of the Iranian Embassy before killing one of the Iraqi-backed terrorists in the 1980 siege.
They all knew the risks when they joined up but even when things got deadly, they did not falter.
In the recent spate of terror attacks across Europe, we have seen uniformed heroes such as French policeman Arnaud Beltrame, who sacrificed himself to save a hostage. And we have seen many more civilian heroes who ran to help as best they could in atrocities.
How heartbreaking, then, to hear the testimony of a Manchester firefighter ordered to stay back after a suicide bomber massacred innocents at an Ariana Grande concert.
‘We just wanted to help… paramedics were coming back questioning why we weren’t doing anything. To a man and woman, the ambulance service went in despite it being an active incident.’
Risk-averse, health-and-safety obsessed top brass ordered fire crews to wait while victims lay maimed. Helpless, one woman saved her own life by fashioning a tourniquet from her bag strap.
Colonel Clive Fairweather, later Scotland’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, was in initial charge of the SAS Embassy siege operation.
Had today’s pettifogging H&S rules applied, it would not have been ‘Go! Go! Go!’ he radioed to McAleese and the ‘Pagoda Team’ counter-terrorist unit.
It would have been: ‘Hold on, Mac. Just polishing off the risk assessment paperwork and as soon as the highaccess team gets here with scaffold, safety ropes and hi-viz vests, we might get going. You have signed your personal injury waiver in triplicate, right?’
It’s not just in armed conflict that craven timidity costs lives. Alison Hume ebbed away in a mine shaft in Ayrshire a decade ago while those who might have saved her dithered, hidebound by protocols more suited to rarefied courtrooms and training scenarios than life-anddeath reality.
Look, I’m not advocating forcing people to take extreme risks, even when the lives of others are at stake.
But I’d bet that had the police said to the Manchester firefighters: ‘We fear there may be other terrorists. But people are hurt – who’ll volunteer to go in?’, every one would have stepped forward.
NONE of us can say how we might react if we are caught up in a horror accident or attack. We might run away or we might run to help. CitizenAid is a free service that provides online advice on what to do in a critical incident. It has even got a simple-to-use tourniquet for a shade over a fiver and its slogan – ‘Be prepared, not scared’ – is advice we can all heed.
No more heroes any more? We have many among us today with a McAleese or a Beltrame inside.
But certainly there should be no more heroes held back from saving lives by ‘rules-is-rules’ jobsworths.