Shee Nish! (Peace Now!)

This blog brings to fruition ideas that have been rattling around for a while, with no real way to take further.

Last year I finally made tentative links with off-island peaceniks again, and started raising the idea of some kind of Manx peace or anti-militarist group.

In my years here there have been two - or three if you include the Manx branch of the Celtic League monitoring military exercises around the British isles, and in the process linking them to fishing vessels which sank after ‘non-existent’ submarines got tangled in their nets and dragged them under.

The ‘Manx Peace Group’ in the mid-1980’s tried to raise interest in the UK peace camps (despite a refusal to list our meetings and general outright hostility from what then passed for a Manx media – in particular the government subsidised Manx Radio). A looser group based on the Stop The War Coalition questioned Iraq intervention in 2003 - and at least got a press mention - but never built on the wider island interest in such matters which might have been created.

What finally pushed me was this month’s sad news that the UK’s so-called ‘military covenant’ was being extended to the island (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/54293/manx-government-to-sign-military-covenant ), and further that our so-called independent government was bending to Westminster’s whim without so much as a whimper.

Because extending this laughable ‘covenant’ to the British Commonwealth has nothing to do with protecting soldiers, If anything, it is the reverse. This is the UK refusing to honour commitments to soldiers recruited from elsewhere (e.g. housing, resettlement back into civilian life or after injury, help to widows) and a cheap attempt to get the Commonwealth to shoulder those responsibilities instead.

Much of my better recent understanding of this comes from discoveries made after a Channel 4 news story about the plight of some Commonwealth soldiers on 2^nd July last year (see http://www.channel4.com/news/should-f-c-soldiers-whove-been-disciplined-be-deported

).

In particular note:

“There are currently 8,505 foreign and Commonwealth soldiers serving in the British forces, not including the 3,880 Gurkhas who previously won the right to residency.

Of these some 2,200 are Fijian, like L Cpl Baleiwai. His case is "just the tip of the iceberg", according to Veterans' Aid, who say there are many more soldiers affected.”

Unsurprisingly, the MOD, in a website reference to Commonwealth soldiers (see (http://www.army.mod.uk/welfare-support/23209.aspx ), was vaguer, saying:

“There are about 7000 Commonwealth citizens serving in the British Army from outside the UK. They serve on the same terms of service as UK citizens and receive the same, pay, allowances, compensation and pensions.”

The MOD lying outright about themselves would be nothing new, but the disparity in figures becomes more interesting when considered in conjunction with something else. Around the year 2000, it became obvious to the British government that UK citizens are –well – no longer interested in going to nasty foreign places and getting shot at by angry natives. Sure, they will throw small change in a bucket for bogus ‘military charities’, shed crocodile tears for ‘our brave boys’ and wave flags about, but actually join up? Get real!!

So, what to do?

One obvious answer was to sign up more victims from cash strapped Commonwealth countries, just as UK areas of mass unemployment were the main recruiting ground after Thatcher & Co decimated such communities. Another – less publicised for obvious reasons – was to employ mercenaries, sometimes by the new US precedent of ‘private security’, but possibly even directly. Military bigwigs looked into it, and concluded that if the percentage of military personnel thus employed ever topped 10% the ethos and sense of national identity of the UK armed forces would be dangerously altered or even lost.

That figure was surpassed within a few years. 

Also consider, the official figures do not include Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey, whose politicians also cannot vote on or influence Westminster defence policy, or indeed vote not  to take part in a British war. They also do not include Northern Ireland (where  only one community joins the army and Stormont dare not vote on overseas wars) or the Republic of Ireland .

Because, make no mistake, the UK army also recruits in the Irish Republic, even though it is against Irish law to recruit troops or mercenaries for a foreign army and  complaints are regularly made by Irish nationalists. The MOD gets round the problem by  'advising' interested parties to join up in Liverpool or London, meaning legally they weren't recruited in Ireland. The Irish government –grateful for any lowering of massive unemployment figures that such scams bring – simply looks the other way.

Also consider that the Isle of Man makes a direct £3million annual contribution to the UK defence budget, last set in 1992 by Westminster. This cannot be negotiated by Manx politicians, who also cannot set any conditions or parameters as to how this is used.
There will be many similar involuntary 'military taxes' in place around the  Commonwealth, with the exception of countries like Australia, New Zealand
and Canada, and the smaller islands in particular have no apparent way of  renegotiating them.

Over here we now have all the 'Armed Forces days' and veiled schools recruiting the UK is seeing, with the difference that effectively they concern another country's military policy, not ours, yet there seems no political interest in questioning this.

Certainly, this may be partly down to a change in Manx culture. As recently as the 1980’s I knew of vigorous opposition to any lazy assumption that we were British and that British military campaigns, interventions and invasions were ‘ours’ too. If that is less heard, it may partly be because since about 1990 over 50% of Manx residents were not born here, yet as increasingly they were not born in the UK or other old empire countries either perhaps that 'natural' link should also be questioned.

So – much to be talked about, many topics which never get an airing on the Isle of Man, and I was just one of the people not talking about them.

That just changed.