Queen and Country

 

Carry on dying

It’s a very strange sense of priorities. Carry-on films were chosen before war dead.

For years I have asked Government, The Post Office and Veterans association to have a commemorative stamp to mark our recent war dead.

My most recent plea came last year with this EDM:

“That this House congratulates the Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen for his work Queen and Country, which depicts photographs of 98 British soldiers killed in Iraq printed in a stamp format; and calls on the Royal Mail to respect the wish of the artist and the loved ones of the fallen soldiers and produce a commemorative issue of stamps displaying this powerful and moving work of art.”

Steve McQueen has been campaigning for three years now to persuade the Royal Mail to make his artwork into real stamps to commemorate those killed in the war. So far, despite wide public support, the campaign has remained unsuccessful, a situation that clearly frustrates him.

"The insulting thing is, with no disrespect to Sid James or Barbara Windsor,  the Carry On films is now going to be on stamps. These people died for Queen and country so surely they should appear on a stamp as a portrait? They should be visible. I don't understand it," he says.

Tonight Steve McQueen is meeting Gordon Brown. I wish him luck.

 

Lost balance

Was it mega-scandal or media hype?

 

For the first time on the Public Administration Committee my good friend Gordon Prentice and I had different views. Gordon pitched into Minister Ed Milliband and Civil service Supremo Gus O’Donell on the scandalous loss of Government data. Both were given a thoroughly justified rollicking for failures to make data security a prime concern of all civil servants. But there is another side.

 

I asked Gus whether he sometimes felt like Adolf Hitler in the Berlin bunker. In the final hours of his life he was sending armies into battle launching fleets to sea... but no-one was taking any notice. Gus O’Donell told of the dozens of documents of advice and  guidance that have been dissemited to civil servants. Few seem to have been read. Not even by people who worked in Downing Street.

 

I asked what he thought of  Tony Blair’s aid Jonathan Powell’s confession that he was worried that he might have been mugged when he frequently carried heaps of secrets documents home ‘illegally’ on his bike. It is a criminal offence to lose official secrets even accidentally. No-one has been prosecuted. Not even Jonathan.

Gordon Prentice is great deal more agitated than I am about ‘innocent’ people whose DNA is held on databases. All our criminals started out as ‘innocents.’ There is also another side to this PR disaster for the Government. Has anyone seen a headline that said?

 

Nobody harmed by loss of data

Private data loss is the same as Government data loss

Improved Government data brings public benefits.

 

Yes all those headlines are as true as the entirely justified headlines that condemned the wretched systems that encouraged the losses.

 

A bit of balance might help.

Comments

[Huw O'Sullivan]

Sorry?
What faith in this milleniums unpopular military adventures?
Stamps with war dead from these would simply divide people between those who whether they agree with these things or not feel it would be patriotic to support them and those who feel a cynical government was attempting to manipulate them into on some level approving or supporting these things that led to many more deaths than would be represented.
Division is hardly to be desired when choosing postage stamps. Carry on, pretty popular with the vast majority, if for nothing more than nostalgia and so much more appropriate for stamps.

[paulflynn]

John, I am sure that you are correct. I did raise the subject in America of their 'invisible' war dead. if we faced the awful truth, it would undermine the incredible faith in the Iraq and Helmand ventures. I hope the pressure from the bereaved families might work.

[paulflynn]

Gareth. What an unworthy thought!. I have only one small drink a day. It's a rush trying to do too much. Perfection we can rarely attain - not first time round.

[John]

I hate being a cynic here Paul but isn't it obvious why the Dead soldiers have not appeared on stamps. Just as the war dead are not shown arriving in their coffins in the USA for fear of turning the population against this waste of life. No Government is going to advertise its dead in such a way as this will raise the awareness of the man in the street to the waste of life these wars cause. ANd that would never do would it with so many political careers wedded to the continuation of these wars.

I hope I'm proved wrong though but I doubt it

[Gareth, Newport]

Tut tut Paul. You are usually such a leader in the spelling, grammar and punctuation stakes. Were we a little tipsy when we wrote this blog? :-)