Scots Guards

Britain's more cholerically conservative newspapers have been predictably delighted by this scandal.

The Telegraph solicited a quote from Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of the Conservative Party and a former lieutenant in the Scots Guards, who thundered that it was astonishingly stupid and tantamount to having our uniforms made by Nazi Germany in the nineteen thirties.

This is a bit of a reach and has probably got IDS bumped off the guest list for this year's Chinese Embassy Christmas wingding, but there is a point here.

A uniform is about as fundamental as military kit gets.

But, you know, reform are not having a good time of it at the moment.

And when you have people like Zia Youssef who accuse someone like Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, a Scots Guards officer, a man who was decorated for his service in Northern Ireland for catching an IRA active service unit red handed.

When a man like Zia Youssef then calls a man like Ben Wallace a traitor, there is absolutely no way we can do business with people like that.

Fine, but then what...

I mean, just yesterday, sort of by chance, I was reading about the British war in what was then Malaya in the late 1940s, just because I'm reading China Miéville's new novel, which is partly set during the conflict.

And in the book, the Batang Kali massacre is mentioned, and, and this is an event in 1948 where 24 unarmed male civilians were murdered by the British Army's Scots Guards, sometimes referred to as Britain's My Lai, referring to the American massacre in Vietnam.

And I did a quick check online to find out a little bit about this, and no charges were ever brought against the perpetrators.

The British government has never apologized or offered any form of redress.

As you said in your introduction, I was British Army officer for 20 years.

I was in the Scots Guards.

And during my time, I did... quite a number of interesting things.

I commanded the regiment on operations.

And the people there tend to be of the type of, that special forces might attract.

So in the 30s, there were lots of people who in the early days of skiing were great skiers or mountaineers or explorers, as well as having interest in other things.

And early in the war, There was a group of them who were recruited actually into my regiment, the 5th Battalion, Scots Guards, which was a ski battalion formed to go to Finland to help the Finns fight the Russians.

And Because skiing package holidays didn't exist.

Now, the reason for introducing this particular report now is that I have recently spoken to Lincoln Jopp, a Conservative MP who who put forward a private member's bill in the ballot.

Now, he's also a former commanding officer in the Scots Guard, so he's got personal experience from time as a soldier in Northern Ireland, and therefore has a particular perspective on it.

But the idea is that this is to act as a countermeasure to the bill that the government is trying to push through.

But rather than explaining too much in the first instance, what I'm going to do is just play a short clip from Lincoln speaking, explaining what it is that his bill was designed to do.