Henry Allingham & Harry Patch's Last Post

The deaths of these old servicemen, the last to serve in the Great War, remind us the price this country paid for being at the 'Heart of Europe' to satisfy political dreams and worthless aspirations. At the UKIP husting last year at Stroud I pointed out that there was a monument to the cost of us being involved with Europe in every town, village and hamlet in the land, the War Memorial for those who fell in the Great War.

This was a war that was clearly not in our interests in 1914 fought to defend 'poor little Belgium' a country that had been created by the London Treaty of 1831 as a buffer state between France and Prussian. Previously it had been part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and known as the Austrian Netherlands. Holland only accepted this arrangement under force majeure and recognised Belgium in 1839 under a second London Treaty with an international guarantee of Belgian neutrality underwritten by you have guessed it the UK and signed off by Lord Cupid himself, Palmerston.

The sick joke is that out of a population in 1914 of 7.5 million Belgium had 14000 men killed in the War! The British figure on the Western Front, Flanders was 585000 killed plus those from the Dominions that totalled over 100000 fatalities. Thus poor little Belgium lost roughly 0.2% of her population, the UK 1.6% of her population ie. 8 times more dead. The Dominions & Colonies relative loss would have been higher.

The lesson of this tale is that we have the same thing going on today in Afghanistan where it is the UK & US troops that are doing the fighting and dying whilst our EU partners are safely tucked up in their barracks. Our politicians Blair, Brown and useless Bob Ainsworth are coming out with the same irrelevant justification that Palmerston, Asquith and Lloyd George and every other UK politician uses of 'defending British interests'. Its Kipling all over again. We are all citizens of the EU but when it comes to fighting and dying for EU interests its step forward Mr Tommy Atkins. Kipling never recovered from the loss of his son in the Great War and neither will the now almost 200 British families who have had their sons and daughters killed in Afghanistan.

What is really scary is that now we are ruled by the Franco-Prussian axis we have no say in where our young men and women will next be required to sacrifice their lives in wars which are not in our interests.

I would like to think UKIP might change this but in my heart I know that while Farage and his Cabal control UKIP they will continue to take the EU's Euro, live in Brussels and run UKIP from Brussels and in turn be run by the EU. We have some good independent UKIP MEPs who I hope one day will help restore UKIP to its original aspirations and democractic ideals for all our sakes.