In Memoriam

Summer

Our local rememberance day parade was as well attended this year as it has been for many a year; and there were people of all ages - not just the old and the very young. My neighbour wore his Suez medal 'for the first time ever', he said.

Especially poignant were the young/middle aged people who left flowers for family now serving in Iraq and Afganistan. Let us not forget them, and keep asking this appaling Government - who sent them there under equipped - just what they are doing in those countries, risking thier lives!!!

There is no doubt that the soul of the English people was on show today.

(And in answer to Trevor Phillips yesterday, just how many ethnic minorities attended rememberdance day parades today? Did he count those too!!!)

Paul B

We owe this blog-an outlet of freedom of speech- to those who made, and are continuing to make, the ultimate sacrifice. I am eternally grateful. We should never forget.

mac

Summer, the award of the VC in 2005 to a Grenada-born British soldier (Johnson Beharry), gives the lie to the sweeping generalisation which you seem to be offering in your final paragraph.

Your selective "English people" has no exclusivity in selfless service to the British Crown.

Summer

Mac

Read the post properly. I said ethnic minorities ATTENDING rememberance day parades, ie in the crowd.

No where did I say that black people had not served selflessly in the British army. That is your interpretation. And as I'm a strong supporter of rights for the Gurkers, and know my history well, I'm afriad it's your prejudice that is showing. A prejudice which I really am rather tired of. Yes, I choose the word English specifically, because those were the people at our service.

So mac, how many ethnic minorities attended your local service?

mac

Summer,

I wasn't entirely clear of your position before, but you have now removed any doubt. I suspect the predjudice you assign to me is anti-English wishy-washy liberalism, is it? If that is so then you are wide of the mark!

You ask how many ethnic minorities attended my local remembrance service. Counting black or brown faces wasn't uppermost in my mind on Sunday morning but, according to your logic, if I'd discovered the proportion of Labour or Conservative voters present, or counted male as opposed females attendees or hat wearers as opposed to non-hat wearers I'd have a reliable indication of the relative level of patriotism amongst these groups, would I?

seb

A number of the RAF's personnel were volunteer heroes from the Caribbean. The free world's undying thanks go out to each and every one of them and to all the merchant mariners and combatants and front-line non-combatants of whatever background who helped rub out nazi-ism.

David Lindsay

I am wearing my poppy with pride, and will of course be observing tomorrow's two-minute silence, to remember the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, namely the American breaking of the stalemate between the Allies and the Central Powers, resulting, not in the return to the pre-1914 position that would otherwise have been inescapable (though with bellicosity exorcised from all the cultures in question), but instead in the disastrously cack-handed carve-up of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires, in the emergence of the Soviet Union, and in the spitefully triumphalistic, manifestly unjust war guilt clause, which made the rise of Nazism inevitable.