Gashman,
It certainly won't turn the Armed Forces into something full of truculent recruits, threatening to sue nasty instructors for shouting at them during basic training (anyway, the RAF has had that since 1987) and it won't allow groundcrew the right to demand not to go out in the wet and cold (.. 1918).
But it will act as an interface between the men (at all levels) and the g'ment, and society. It won't be a political party, it won't campaign (by stature I think) on matters relating to pay etc, but it will crystalise a massive range of issues ranging from depemdents having their married quarters fixed whilst the serving member is deployed, to an independent eye on matters such as resettlement and JPA performance. If you think thats gonna smash effectiveness overnight, you've possibly got a different take on it to me.
Lord Garden saw a need for it, as has Tim Collins. But as Beattie so rightly points out, it needs to be more than a job club for retired Starships and PUSs, and it needs to be able to go straight to the heart of the matter.. the committees where the warhorses stalk and where they take a perverse pride in clobbering their own side (as long as the opposition isn't doing it too!). BAFF needs to be able to strike the right chord, have the right credibility and for that, I imagine, it needs people like Mike Jackson, Chris Patten, Geoff Hoon, Paddy Ashdown maybe.. Robin Gibb.. people who care and people who have nothing to gain apart from doing the right thing. People like this wouldn't allow it to become a soap box ship for idiots, so I wouldn't worry unduly.
But if things
did change, so what? I am against the idea in principle of simplification so that Forces life is like Civvy Street simply for the sake of it and so a few wets can say its all 'equal' (if anything, Civvy Street should raise its game, and not compel the Forces to dilute
its), but change shouldn't be feared. I always thought that the idea that a 21 year old could impose child impacting financial penalties and incarceration on a 40 year old family man,
simply because he went to Cranwell for a few months, completely absurd. But that doesn't mean that I'm against strict Forces discipline that is different from what an ASBO ignoring chav might get.
This will hopefully increase efficiency, raise morale, maximise retention, attract more recruitment and as soon as the system knows that its under the spotlight, it raises its game too. God knows what might have been different if we had BAFF 5 or 5 years ago. We need to look ahead.. if things are this bad now, what might they be like in 30 years?
http://www.tgarden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
(Hi Beattie.)