Cash for honours and printing money but no medal for Arctic Convoy veterans

Cash for honours? No problem. Now what have you done for us? A few hundred thou? A school? What about a K? Or how would the ermine go down?

One thing is sure, the ermine would not go down as fast as a merchant ship on an Arctic Convoy.

Whatever the official pronouncement, the UK public were left in no doubt at the end of the Tony Blair ‘cash for honours’ scandal that there were ways for wealthy and determined business people to be ennobled.

That is one side of sick Britain.

But for that same culture to renege on the promise of a medal to very special war veterans is not just corrupt, it is morally and spiritually bankrupt.

The current Prime Minister, David Cameron, had given  his pledge to the long neglected veterans of the World War II Arctic Convoys that they would  – at last – be awarded a medal to recognise their unique  and awe-inspiring service.

Once the self-described ‘heir to Blair’, Cameron has now been instrumental in the denial of that recognition. He has been shown to have written to House of Commons Leader Sir George Young putting an end to the matter.

He is said to have judged that these veterans have had enough already because – pause for incredulous laughter – the Atlantic Star medal had once had its remit extended to include the Arctic operation.

There were, of course, Atlantic convoys regularly running the gamut of U-boats and the Atlantic Star was well deserved.

But the Arctic Convoys not only had unimaginable physical conditions to overcome, they were subject to very much more intense danger. In addition to U-boat pack attacks, the Luftwaffe, through occupied Norway, was in a position to launch landbased air attacks on them which the Atlantic convoys did not have to face.

There is absolutely no reasonable foundation for making the Atlantic Star serve as recognition of the very different service of these men and the very different theatre of operations in which they performed that service.

We collect and publish the stories of as many of these veterans as we can get to. We have assistance from some very energetic and remarkable folk of their number:

• Roy Elwood (who did torpedo training in Loch Long) and Derek Hirst, both of whom served on Naval destroyer escorts for the convoys – many of which escorts were trained  for this duty in Tobermory;
• Jock Dempster, a merchant seaman who is Chair of the Scottish Russian Convoy Association and centrally involved in the establishing of the Arctic Convoy Museum at the convoy departure point of Loch Ewe, whose launch Roy Elwood reported for us;
• Jack Harrison, through his carer, Mike Rowlands, who has been inspired by what he has learned and who has become a very well informed and tireless friend to many.

We have learned massively through this work, through the connections it has also brought with Elizabeth Miles and her Harrison family at Pool House at Loch Ewe – the former Admiralty House there – and through knowledge of what the Harrison’s have done for and with the many veterans whom they have come to know over the years, the most recent of which initiatives we have reported.

Nothing like the Arctic Convoys will ever happen again. This was a genuinely unique and uniquely demanding service none of the rest of us can even imagine and conducted in the most appalling conditions with a dispiriting frequency of losses of ships and men.

Never forget Convoy PQ 17  – which lost 24 of its 35 merchant ships in a week-long series of heavy enemy attacks in the daylight hours.

Through an error of military judgment of the sort that is inevitable in the chaotic circumstances of war, the merchant ships in Convoy PQ 17 were ordered to scatter and left without their escorting destroyers, which were detached to counter presumed German raiders on the way. We owe these veterans.

Convoy PQ17 stands as an emblem of the service of all of the royal and merchant navy seamen who served in the war of attrition that was the Russian or Arctic Convoys.

Had Russia been lost, the war would have been lost as it was Hitler’s felt need to fight simultaneously on two fronts that cost Germany victory. The seamen of the Arctic convoys kept Russia physically alive through the food supplies they brought in through the Kola Inlet and Murmansk – and kept it militarily alive with the armaments that were also their cargoes.

All that these enduringly brave men have been given is the tiny lapel badge of the Arctic Emblem – a Tony Blair fop off, which is not a medal and which they may not even wear on the same side of their chests as a medal. This is good old classist Britain at its worst, obsessed with the detail of protocol and missing the big picture altogether.

Let’s get our values straight and do it, for once, while there is still time.

In a country that has happily printed £275 billion of worthless money to fail to address a problem created by the unregulated greed of the banks, what, for God’s sake, is wrong with printing medals for the Arctic Convoy veterans? These men did something selfless and positive, that could not have been more important for our survival as an independent country – and saw their comrades die for it.

Scotland’s Angus Robertson MP has put down a motion in the Commons calling for an Arctic Convoy medal to be awarded, struck and presented without delay. He is right in every respect. These are old men whose service we have insultingly discounted for far too long. Let’s put that right – at once. Because we can.

And a curiosity – wasn’t it David Cameron who described Britain as ‘broken’ and vowed to fix it? How exactly is this manoeuvre of his supposed to do that?