Support our allies in need
AT LAST some influential voices are speaking out to decry the disgusting policy of refusing to grant sanctuary to those Afghans who served us as interpreters during the decade we were fighting there. Without their help with the languages of Dari and Pashto our soldiers could never have communicated with the locals at all. Their job would have swung from extremely difficult to impossible. Yet now, with the Taliban surging back in the Afghan civil war, all who helped us are in extreme danger of reprisal attacks on themselves and their families. They are only a couple of hundred and we let in tens of thousands who have done nothing for us and never intend to.
We even let in our sworn enemies and our appeal tribunal judges grant leave to stay to rapists and career criminals. Political correctness and EU rules, you see.
One of those roaring his displeasure is Field Marshal Lord Guthrie, former chief of defence staff, an old-fashioned soldier who knows the rule: you never turn your back on those who have been loyal to you, saving only in the event they have turned on you.
Of course, that does not apply to bureaucrats and I’ll bet one of them was behind the recent spate of refusals, including the turn-down of one interpreter who committed suicide rather than go back to be murdered, and the others trapped in Calais for lack of a piece of paper.
In a country that could remember where it put its pride, those Pecksniffs with a cosy job for life would be given their P45s by sundown.
Instead these mandarins who never heard a pop-gun go off sit behind their Whitehall desks and whinge that Kabul is “safe” now (oh yeah! Ever been there? I have and it’s lethal).
Home Secretary Theresa May does nothing but like all politicos seems to be helpless in the face of bureaucrats. What with the EU and the civil service, our Parliament seems more and more to be an expensive irrelevance.