Cameron's cannon fodder aims to get 'em young

Cadets in schools. First mooted during Gove's tenure at DfE and now the focus of a wodge of cash to enable state schools and academies to get their pupils into uniform and learn some discipline. Just think, the young learning how to wear a decent suit (khaki, navy or air-force blue), do up their ties and sing the national anthem - oh, and how to shoot straight should they come across some goddam liberal pinko surrender-monkeys. I can think of a many more worthwhile places where that cash could go, and none of them involve indoctrinating the young.

War - and the failure of politics

This is what political failure leads to . The images are striking and have had a profound affect on public opinion. War is not an acceptable or 'normal' part of the human condition - it certainly isn't 'generational' or inevitable. I'm reading a collection of pieces written by First World War veterans that was published originally in 1930. Time and again, they use the phrase 'never again', and many were firmly convinced that they had taken part in the last war ever to be fought; there was no way they could ever imagine another conflict after the horror and loss they had witnessed - no politician could ever make that mistake again. But now, we see remembrance used in a very different way: remember the past, but also with an eye to contemporary and future events - almost as if the past is being used to validate future political shortcomings: 'we fought before and we'll fight again' has replaced 'never again'. On Sunday, I'll stand before a war memorial, as I did in years gone by with my granddad and my dad - veterans of the First and Second World wars. When I was young, I wondered why dad didn't wear his medals when the others did. He replied that they 'meant nothing' to him, and that the regimental mascot, a bulldog, had been given the same ones. For dad - who fought in North Africa, Sicily and Italy - war was neither normal or inevitable. He'd been brought up in a family where is dad and uncles had fought - and in one case died - in the war 'to end all wars' and he knew that the conflict he had had to endure was a result of the failure of politicians to secure a lasting peace, compounding the failure that led to the First World War. Now, I have to stand on my own, my granddad and beloved dad have gone, but I go to honour their memory and remember the suffering they and their comrades and former enemies had to endure. But I have a growing sense of unease when politicians now speak of war was inevitable, or of engendering military discipline in our schools, because this makes conflict seem commonplace, even acceptable, especially when fought in far away places, where its victims are not placed in the public eye - we hear about the casualties, but the ambulance trains do not bring the wounded home to the full glare of the public gaze, as in those earlier wars. The suffering has almost been sanitised and the media - especially the tabloid end - uses this language and imagery to perpetuate the old myth: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

Cadets

Time plays tricks on memory – especially when you look back 40-odd years. In my mind, I’m sitting on a coach outside York railway station. It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in Spring 1977 and the light streaming through the windows is adding to an air of dreamy contentment, the kind that settles after sharing joint endeavour and the talk is of what our group of teenagers have been doing since Friday evening. I’m with a group of Sea Cadets (SCC) from units throughout North, South and West Yorkshire. We’re on our way back from an adventure training weekend on the North Yorkshire Moors. We’d gone up on the Friday and camped behind the Horseshoe pub in Levisham. The Saturday was taken up with an extended orienteering-style event, walking a set route around the Levisham, Hole of Horcum area, with checkpoints and set tasks to complete. Come Sunday morning, we’d packed the tents away after breakfast and then had the presentations. My team came last – we’d messed up the map reading and missed out a checkpoint. A group of teenaged boys – even those with a modicum of Naval discipline – aren’t the most organised cross-section of humanity you will ever encounter, and a general air of ‘sod it’ had meant that we’d taken a joint decision to keep walking the previous day, rather than try to find the checkpoint and complete the task they were waiting to give us. But failure was forgotten as we basked in the sun while the Sheffield team got their gear off the coach and headed into the station for the train back home. There was music playing over the coach sound system and my memory serves the song up as Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill, his supposed anthem to the leaving of Genesis. But as a general ode to leave taking it will do to mark a time of impending change for many of us on that coach, myself included. This was May 1977, and I would leave school later that month, returning only for CSE exams (the Certificate of Secondary Education was a relatively short-lived qualification that allowed you to boost your exam marks with course work: a grade 1 equalled an O level, but not many employers seemed to know this, with the result that many who took it unwittingly condemned themselves to a second class qualification. Nowadays, CSEs don’t even feature in those drop down box qualification lists you get on job application websites). Others were to face greater changes. Initially, I’d wanted to join the Navy, but poor eyesight prevented me from being offered either of my two preferred jobs: control electrician or tactical radio operator, and rather than go with the only alternative on offer – steward – I opted instead for a printing apprenticeship, following a short period working for one of the sea cadet officers who had an electrical contracting business. For several others on that coach, along with friends at my sea cadet unit who didn’t take part in that weekend, careers in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines did indeed beckon. As cadets, we weren’t trained for war, although we did march with some very decrepit ‘drill purpose only’ Lee Enfields and have the chance to shoot .22 rifles at a local TA Centre on a Tuesday evening. Of those who joined up, however, war would come to several of them just six years later: one of my former cadet training ‘shipmates’ would be shipwrecked when HMS Coventry was sunk by the Argentine Air Force on May 25 that year – Argentina’s national day. Another was wounded when HMS Glamorgan was hit by a land-fired Exocet missile two days before the end of the conflict, while a third took part in the fighting on land as a Marine Commando. The cadets, for me, represented an extension of things I’d grown up with. My dad had fought in WWII and he, along with his friends, had a strange ambivalence to the conflict; there was a recognition of the suffering and loss, but also something approaching a yearning for the closeness and comradeship they’d known as conscripts, forced to face the horror and uncertainty of war. As an only child, prone to bullying at school, and lacking any interest in sport, the camaraderie of dad’s generation was something I found echoes of with the cadets. Membership also brought a sense of belonging and shared identity: a sense of purpose and friends away from the rather lacklustre council estate on which I’d grown up. For his part, my dad seemed to take a vicarious pleasure in the uniform pressing and ‘spit and polish’ that went with a parade. Chief amongst these was Remembrance Sunday, when I would be treated to illicit under-age beer after standing in the cold and observing the silence. There was, then, also a class-based air to being a cadet – by far the majority lived on council estates and attended state comprehensives. 11-plus successes were rare – it was abolished by the education committee in my home town for children of my age and younger, and the older cadets who had places at grammar schools seemed strangely reticent about admitting it. Likewise, our officers and instructors were, mainly, from the same background: drivers, police officers, fire service, and the then GPO were the more usual occupations followed by our leaders. I can only remember two who were teachers – and one of those was in charge of the district and lectured at a further education college in Harrogate, well beyond our common field of experience or endeavour. Being part of the cadets, however, was a thing that set us apart from our school contemporaries. There was the outward appearance of shorter hair for one thing, and the having something else to do two evenings a week and several weekends during the year. On one joyous occasion, I was even granted a week off school in late 1976 to attend a week’s course at RAF Lossiemouth in northern Scotland. I was chosen to go as an instructor and placed in charge of a room that housed around a dozen younger cadets. School mates were envious, and I remember leaving school on the Friday with a new found sense of purpose as I headed for home before being dropped off at my unit to board a coach for the long drive north. There was, as it turned out, little enjoyment to the journey. Around Pitlochry, sometime in the early hours, several of the younger ones developed communal travel sickness, and a Mexican-like wave of hurling went round the coach. One poor kid was held up as the champion puker because his friend swore blind that he’d seen him forcibly eject vomit from his mouth and nose simultaneously. The days were happy enough to warrant remembrance and reminiscing: there is a thriving community of SCC veterans on Facebook, people for whom, I suspect, schooldays were not the happiest times as they grew up – their fondest memories stem from parade nights and illicit snogs with members of the GNTC, walking to the bus stop or over cups of frothy coffee in late night cafes. Lessons in life dressed up in blue serge or baggy No.8s. So it is that I see the government’s interest in forming cadet units in schools with rather a jaundiced eye. We have had many years of conflict – near and far away – since I was a cadet; now there is a very real prospect that those who do join up will face participation in the ‘generational conflict’ with Islamic extremism threatened by British involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan. Added to which is the form of cadet service envisaged by our private school-educated leaders. For this isn’t the working class style of the SCC, but rather the private school Combined Cadet Force (CCF), with its Navy, Army and Air Force branches and school-teacher/cum officer corps. The government wants 100 school-based CCF units by September 2015 – a figure that the MoD is now baulking at on cost grounds. They, after all, provide the uniform and kit, even though the government is dipping into the fines it imposed for the LIBOR bank rate setting scandal to fund its militarisation of education. And again, here, there is a departure from the very voluntary model I knew. Placing the military in schools has been a pet theme of politicians for a while now, not just cadet units, but fast-track teaching training of former military personnel, stand as testament to a desire to instil discipline – or more sinisterly – to ensure a steady stream of recruits at a time when unemployment amongst the under 25s is stubbornly refusing to shrink to manageable proportions. Another, perhaps more fanciful explanation, could lie in the advanced aged of Conservative voters. An injection of younger people, who have learned to ‘know their place’ on the playground-turned-parade ground of the CCF could be just the thing the Tories need to fill the gap as their older voters – like old soldiers – fade away.

Your Country's Commemoration Needs You, By Jingo!

The choice of Lord Kitchener's image - and blunt 'your country needs you' slogan as the coin design to commemorate the centenary of World War I bodes ill for those, like Jeremy Paxman, who feared the coalition government would turn this event into a jingoistic flag-waver, or worse, a flag-draped smokescreen that could be harnessed for electoral purposes. My granddad, who served as a Driver in the Army Service Corps in Greece and Macedonia in that conflict used to joke that they gave them a medal that said they'd fought 'for civilisation' because the powers that be couldn't admit to not having a clue as to what the war had actually been about. The forthcoming centenary will evoke many feelings - while my grandfather's generation have now passed on - they left a powerful evocation of the suffering and horror of war, even though they were told not to talk about it when they returned - and many didn't because deference to authority was such a powerful element of early 20th century society. Times have changed, and the memory of our loved ones - both those who returned and those who did not - taken together with our current prediliction for conflict and even involving the military in schools means we should not merely accept the events and artefacts given to us to remember but rather actively question their motive and appropriateness over the next four years.