The media seem to be waking up to this en masse now. Minette Marrin has
a piece in the Sunday Times today:
It would be nice to think that this [requiring berieved families to pay for records - BE] was an unusual error — a bureaucratic blip — and that the armed forces and their families are normally treated with the respect and gratitude they deserve. Not so. In fact the way that servicemen and women are treated is almost an object lesson in how to mismanage and demoralise what was once one of the greatest military forces in the world. This has been obvious for a long time but we seem to have reached some sort of tipping point.
Her final paragraph:
This is not just wrong. It is decadent. For if we lack the will to defend ourselves, or rather to defend those who are there to defend us and to fight for us, then we are simply rolling over to display the soft underbelly of decadence to the world’s predators and scavengers. Those who think that our armed forces don’t matter will soon discover that other people’s do.