Years ago, before government began to take its toll I remember reading an interview with young David Cameron published by the Dundee Courier. The paper wanted to know if the leader of the opposition (as he then was) had any plans to reverse the army reforms that bundled all the Scottish infanty regiments together to form the Royal Regiment of Scotland. As I recall, Mr Cameron (gently) suggested he was unlikely to be able to unpick that reform but stressed he was mindful of the importance of local afiliations and that he understood the depth and breadth of sentiment attached to the regiments in Scotland.
Aye, weel, tht was then and this is now. No-one should be surprised that the army plans, according to the Daily Telegraph to kill-off the ancient regiments once and for all. The Black Watch will be no more, instead they’ll be known as 3 SCOTS – the kind of nomenclature that may please officials but can mean nothing to the general public who will, understandably, confuse 3 SCOTS with 2 SCOTS (previously, the Royal Highland Fusiliers) and 1 SCOTS (the regrettably-merged Royal Scots Borderers) and whoever else is left after these latest cuts that, service chiefs laughably claim, will leave the army “more flexible and powerful”.
All this is bad enough and the kind of bad faith exercised by successive governments of both left and right (dating back, incidentally, to Options for Change 20 years ago.
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