Dear Editor,
Four hundred and fifty seven British servicemen were killed in Afghanistan.
That’s 457 coffins covered with the Union Jack, carried down the back ramp of an RAF transport aircraft and driven through the streets of Royal Wootton Bassett past grieving relatives and silent respectful crowds.
Hundreds of other British servicemen lost limbs or eyes in the fighting and ambushes.
Along with Canadian, Danish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish and twenty-two other nationalities, there were 1037 non-American servicemen killed alongside 2,440 Americans in Afghanistan. (Yes, the Canada and Denmark whose territory Donald Trump now wants to grab.)
Yet the boorish and oafish President Trump has now insulted our armed forces and denigrated their sacrifice by claiming that we and the other non-Americans had taken a back seat in the fighting.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has rightly described Trump’s insult as “insulting and appalling”.
Prince Harry, who served two tours of duty in Afghanistan and now champions disabled servicemen via the Invictus Games, condemned Trump and called for him to show more respect.
Even the King sent a note in the diplomatic bag. Lance-Bombardier Parkinson of the Parachute Regiment, who lost both legs in Afghanistan, described himself as “stunned… this is a new low” and his family called Trump’s comments “the ultimate insult”.
Corporal Andy Reid of the Yorkshire Regiment, who lost both legs and an arm when an IED exploded, described it as “disrespectful”.
These are better men than Trump himself, who like most right-wing turkeycock American militarists got himself exempted on medical grounds from military service in Vietnam leaving the less privileged to do the fighting.
The Donald Trump who insults Britain’s armed forces is of course the same Trump who in the past has been endorsed by Conservative politicians.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has endlessly praised Trump. At her first appearance in the House of Commons in 2024 after being elected Tory leader, Badenoch found no fewer than five ways to praise Trump’s victory in the American presidential election.
In March she described Trump as “consistently telling the truth”.
When he visited Britain, she demanded that he be allowed to address Parliament, which would have had to be recalled from holiday to hear him, as if he were the Monarch.
Many of her policies, like reneging on the previous Tory commitment to take action on climate change, parallel Trump’s own ignorant views.
Earlier this month she backed Trump’s violent kidnapping of Venezuela’s President and his wife, killing 32 of their bodyguards.
And curiously our local Tory MP, based in Tarporley but imposed on South and East Chester by Tory redrawing of the electoral boundaries, a member of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, often echoes the Trump administration’s view of international affairs whether it’s the Chagos islands or the US-backed Israeli slaughter of 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, has made no public comment on Trump’s insult to our armed forces that I can locate.
When I did a Google search, the AI response was “A review of search results indicates no direct connection between [her] and this specific incident regarding Trump’s comments on Afghanistan.” Has the cat got her tongue?
Yours,
Phil Tate
Chester
(Image by Gage Skidmore, creative commons licence)
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