Gordon Brown has announced today that he plans to set up a National Veterans Day every 27th June with a series of ceremonies across the UK. According to the press release, former service personnel will be presented with medals at local events. Methinks that this shower of incompetent buffoons are digging themselves deeper and deeper into the mire of deceit and dishonour. I have emailed Mr Brown as follows.
Dear Mr Brown
I have just learned of your announcement to create an annual event to honour ex servicemen/women. This is a gesture which is to be applauded. However, there is one dark cloud on your blue sky of good intention. The veterans of the Malaya Emergency/Borneo Confrontation have just received the biggest insult that could be delivered to a veteran. The HD Committee has advised Her Majesty to approve the award of the Pingat Jasa Malaysia but permission to wear has been withheld. Our Australian and New Zealand comrades, who have their own HD Committees but the same Queen, have been better treated - they have been given unrestricted acceptance. The press release announcing your plan states that former service personnel will be presented with medals at local events on National Veterans Day. What, pray, will be those medals? The decision to withhold the wearing of the PJM is a gross insult to all those who served during those conflicts. Worse, it is a denigration on the memory of those who did not return. Furthermore, it is an unforgiveable snub to the King and peoples of Malaysia, who have made the offer in good faith and at their own cost. I urge you to visit a newly created web site at
www.fight4thePJM.org, where you will be able to gauge the depth of feeling on this subject, which is gaining strength and support worldwide. For your National Veterans Day to be successful, it will require the support of the veterans and this may well be missing from the Malaya/Borneo veterans. If you truly believe in honouring the Nation's veterans, and are not just expelling the usual political rhetoric in an attempt to appear to so honour us, I suggest that you use every ounce of influence to get the HD Committee's decision corrected.
Yours
Gerald Law (ex RAF Borneo veteran)
Perhaps if we can give the Chancellor of the Exchequer the problem, he might be able to budge it?
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Gerald Law (ex RAF Borneo Veteran)