There was me, holier than thou, congratulating Jeremy Corbyn for going to speak to veterans after yesterday’s Remembrance service and condemning David Cameron for preferring a VIP lunch, paid for the taxpayer no doubt, instead. Well, I was angry when I read it. I’ve no time for Corbyn as Labour leader but on this occasion, fair play that man. Except that there was no VIP lunch. The inconvenient truth was rather different, that Cameron actually returned to Number 10 to host a number of veterans, as he has done every year.
“If it’s on the internet, then it must be true” is a phrase I have ridiculed for as long as the internet has existed. 9/11? A conspiracy, of course. It says so on the internet. Princess Di murdered? A conspiracy, of course. It says so on the internet. The only thing that’s missing is, annoyingly, evidence.
So I walked into the trap, too. I read a whole host of tweets and Facebook posts “confirming” the VIP meal and in my mind’s eye there was Cameron, up to his eyeballs in caviar and claret, literally looking down on the marchers below, along with all the other very important people.
There’s a lesson or a reminder here. The lesson is that you should certainly not believe everything you read and the reminder is that you probably knew that in the first place. And even someone like me, who believes Corbyn will be a disastrous leader for the Labour Party, and has no chance whatsoever of being PM, spoke first before engaging brain by feeling the need to promote his common decency in contrast to the VIPs. It was probably the soft left class warrior that still blazes within. I still detest the Tories in general and Cameron in particular, despite my less than revolutionary political leanings, and so the red mist descended. Especially after the Sun’s absurd mudslinging non-story about Corbyn’s alleged non-nod at the Remembrance service yesterday.
I would rather discuss George Osborne’s decision to end automatic pay increments for soldiers, just like he has ended them for all other public sector workers. Or the ex soldiers, like David Clapson, who having earlier in his life served in Northern Ireland, died starving and penniless last year after Iain Duncan Smith’s vicious benefit sanctions regime saw him have his JSA stopped because he missed an appointment.
Yes, there’s much more to discuss about Remembrance Day, not least Jeremy Corbyn’s handwritten message on the wreath which should have referred specifically to British and Commonwealth soldiers and not all of them, but all of this is a distraction from the real issue and the people that matter.
We were meant to remember our brave service personnel and we ended up getting distracted by flimflam. Including me. Only fools rush in and I was one of the fools this time.
