I’ve searched in vain on the internet for information about the fate of the young Scots Guardsman who was taken off ceremonial duties at the Royal Wedding after making some disparaging remarks on a social media site about the bride.
Eighteen year-old Cameron Reilly also made some very unpleasant anti-semitic and anti-immigrant comments on the social media site. I’m kind of concerned that this idiot has been given a gun at public expense and taught how to kill people. He seems, at his present level of maturity and brain function, to be one of the last people who should be given a firearm.
But, he is only 18-years-old. And a lot of money has already been spent on training him. The part of me that says just boot him out of the Army is wrestling with the part that says he should be given a chance to straighten-up and fly right. I suspect that young Guardsman Reilly didn’t confine his rants to social media sites and it concerns me that no-one appears to have made a serious attempt to persuade him to put his brain in gear. Or maybe someone did. If they did and he ignored the chance to mend his ways, then he probably should get the boot right now. If not, then he should get a second chance – but only one.

So, it now turns out that as recently as 1993 the British government helped torpedo an investigation into a massacre of around two dozen rubber ethnic-Chinese plantation workers in 1948 by a Scots Guards patrol in Malaya. Malaysian detectives had wanted to come to Britain in 1993 to interview former soldiers who have admitted that the workers were killed in cold blood and that there was no  mass escape attempt; as the British Government claimed in 1948. But the Foreign Office managed to pressure the Malaysian authorities into dropping their inquiry into the massacre.
A Scotland Yard inquiry, launched after members of the patrol came forward to admit there had been a massacre in the early 1970s, was also closed down when Labour was voted out and replaced by a Tory government. It’s not clear if the 1993 inquiry shutdown was due to another Tory government being in power.
What happened at Batang Kali is pretty well known by now. The two big questions remaining are “why” and “why the continued cover-up”. The British government does not protect squaddies. Who is it protecting? The women and children at the plantation were taken away in army trucks. A “rogue” patrol doesn’t order up trucks. It obviously continues to suit Her Majesty’s Government that there is an “official” shot-while-trying-to-escape version of events and a second “unofficial” version in which the finger of blame is pointed no higher than the members of the Scots Guards patrol.
Last November the Government refused to hold a new inquiry into the massacre and now it is threatening relatives of the victims with having to pay the legal costs of a judicial review of that decision if it fails. Isn’t it time the full truth came out? Don’t we owe both the victims’ families and the surviving patrol members that? I’ll say it again, the British Government does not run cover-ups to protect squaddies. 

The Americanization of Canada continues apace. I always felt sorry for US sailors forced to serve aboard ships with names such as the USS Alvin Hunsucker III; named for some long-dead and forgotten hero of the Great Republic. Well, not quite forgotten, I suppose their great grandchildren know who they were and what they did.
Now the Canadian Coastguard has decided to name nine new patrol vessels in honour of members of the uniformed services who have been killed on the job – two soldiers killed in Afghanistan, two Victoria Cross winners, two Mounties, two members of the Coastguard and one fisheries officer. What I wonder is how do they chose who to honour? More than 150 Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan. Is it fair to pick out just two? Was their sacrifice greater than the others? Were they somehow braver? One of the soldiers selected is the only woman to be killed in combat. Is a woman's death more important than a man's? That seems a bit sexist. I'm all for doing everything we can to honour those killed, but this ship-naming lark seems like a very slippery slope. 

Luckily, there aren’t a lot of jobs in which you can get other people killed. Sadly, reporting from war zones is one of them. Listening to the radio, I heard about four journalists from the New York Times who were captured by pro-Ghadafi troops in Libya. They were beaten; their Libyan driver has vanished and may well be dead. One of the journalists was Stephen Farrell. He and his Afghan helper Sultan Munadi were seized in Afghanistan back in 2009. A British soldier, Cpl. John Harrison, and Munadi were killed during Farrell’s rescue. I’d like to think Farrell’s just unlucky. Back in 2001 Yvonne Ridley sneaked herself into Afghanistan before the Taliban were outsted power there. She was caught and the two Afghans helping her were arrested. I’ve asked contacts in Afghanistan and Pakistan whether it is true that the two were executed. No-one has been able to tell me. I remember Ridley from her days at the Journal in Newcastle upon Tyne. I wouldn’t have put my life in her hands. One of the problems with journalism is that journalists increasingly tend to come more and more from privileged backgrounds. In the world they come from, people don’t get killed or murdered. I remember one journalist who was killed by gangsters. The thing is that she didn’t believe they would kill her. She didn’t carry on in spite of the death threats, she just didn’t take the threats seriously.  On the other hand, I took death threats seriously. It’s not clear to this day how many murderers I went to school with; because a lot people think one guy confessed to a killing he didn’t commit in exchange for the real killer not murdering him, his sister and his mother. I never backed away from a story because of death threats but I took them seriously and I took precautions. However, I did pull out of one story, only time I did so in my whole career as a reporter, which involved organised crime because it would have involved working with another reporter to tie up an important loose end. I just didn’t think she had the brains to take the precautions necessary to keep both of us alive –  too much of a glory hunter. I tried to get the information other ways but it turned out that the only way to get it would have involved bringing in someone I couldn’t trust. You can't file a story if you're dead. Glory hunters, both in the military and in journalism, all too often get other people killed.

So, one of the “Highland” battalions of the Royal Regiment of Scotland may well be about to get the chop. Future British Government spending cuts on defence are expected to mean the RRoS will be reduced from five battalions to four. The speculation is that either the 4th Battalion (the old Highlanders) or the 5th Battalion (the old Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders) are most likely to get the axe.
In the old days it would have been the Argylls that got the chop as the most “junior” unit. But the Argylls have powerful friends, so don’t rule out The Highlanders vanishing instead.
Let’s get beyond the imaginative bankruptcy that led to successor to three of the most storied Highland regiments, the Gordons, the Seaforths and the Camerons, being saddled with the uninspired moniker of The Highlanders.
Once a battalion is killed off, it can’t be brought back to life. The experience of the Argylls when it was reduced to company strength in the late 1960s and then rushed back to battalion level in 1971 serves as a stark warning. The unit was plagued with disciplinary problems for years afterwards and the rapid reconstitution must be considered a major factor in its woes.
The infantry has been cut too hard too many times in the past by clueless civil servants. I’d suggest that rather than disband a battalion, the RRoS should spread the redundancies across the existing five battalions. This will mean that one battalion will need to be supplemented by at least a company from another battalion for service in Afghanistan – but I thought the ability to do that was supposed to be one of the benefits of creating a super-regiment.  Of course, I may be sadly out of touch and augmenting at company strength may already be common practise. I remember last time I was home, The Rifles paraded through Edinburgh following their return from a tough time in Afghanistan – but the guys marching in front of the news cameras were wearing Tam o’ Shanters, which suggests there were a number of RRoS guys attached to The Rifles. Anyway, retaining all five battalions may make the return to sanity, when it’s realised that we don’t have enough infantry soldiers as it is, a lot less painless and wasteful.
By the way, as far as The Highlanders name goes, maybe the Gordons should have bitten the bullet at the time of the amalgamation with the Queen’s Own Highlanders (Seaforth and Camerons)  and the new unit could have become the Queen’s Own Highlanders (Seaforth, Camerons and Gordons). Or the unit called have been called The Highland Brigade. Maybe it’s a little confusing to label a battalion as a brigade but there is a precedent – the old 94th Foot, the Scotch Brigade. Folk could have called the 4th Battalion RRoS "The High-Bees".