So the NUT have decided that army recruiting material should be blocked by their members in schools. They have not, as the Daily Mail has it, banned the army from schools. Thankfully, the teachers' unions have no such power, nor was that the intent of their motion.
Still, speakers at their conference played their game of petty politics in comedic and predictable style. People like Paul McGarr - a man who could benefit from a stint in Helman province almost as much as the country would benefit from his prolonged absence - who tell us that the army is there to provide "imperialist occupation" (never mind that the Afghans want us to stay.. that doesn't fit in with the viewpoints of an good, old-fashioned Marxist like McGarr). Young people who choose to serve their country, McGarr alleges with a good Marxist's condemnation of an entire class of people, will go abroad and "torture" the natives. McGarr is, for all his progressive language and claims of sympathy for soldiers as individuals, simply another lower-middle-classed scoundrel, playing on some of the oldest stereotypes and tricks in British politics, perhaps from a sense of inferiority and resentment. As Johnson would have suggested, maybe McGarr "thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier".
Wrapping himself in a pretence of concern for the young people whose routes out of unemployment and poverty he is seeking to block, McGarr expresses concern that soldiers may be injured and die. He also claims that he has done such a poor job of educating those in his care that they don't realise that the army fights wars with the risk of death or injury, and that they will, instead, be signing up for the free parachuting courses and tobogganing. I look forward to next year's conference, when this paragon of concern insists that students be denied access to literature - sorry, propaganda - from other such murderous organisations as the lifeboat service, the fire service or charities running gap years in the third world.
Kipling summed up the behaviour of McGarr's type in a way that such a vile little man will never appreciate:
"Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll- "