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What a carry on In the latest body blow to the British Army, Scottish soldiers have been denied their heritage as the latest supply shortages hit the infantry.
The British army’s decision to end its 150-year relationship with a kilt maker has left Scottish regiments with a shortage of dress kilt uniforms.
The 5,000 soldiers in the Royal Regiment of Scotland only have enough kilts for one out of every 15 men, The Daily Record of Glasgow reports.
Jeff Duncan, campaign manager for Reinstate Our Army Regiments, blamed Prime Minister Tony Blair.
“Mr. Blair promised they would get whatever was needed — what they need is a change of government,” he said.
This is a government that cannot provide basic equipment for its soldiers. Private Widdle would be shivering in the Khyber Pass but he would probably be dead, due to a lack of body armour.
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Kilts are bl@@dy expensive, let ’em wear troosers
“Are you afraid of the Devils in Skirts?”
From Carry on Up the Khyber, one of the truly great pieces of post-war cinema.
“You are a better man than I am, bung it in”. (apologies to R. Kipling”.
Kilts are hardly essential pieces of fighting equipment are they?
I’d sooner they spent their ever dwindling resources on boots’n’guns than man skirts.
Kilts are ceremonial wear – since we spent most of our time in Combat 95 we didn’t need them. The public duties battalions and the Royal Guard obviously do. It has always been the case for decades that the Scottish Division holds just enough ceremonial Archer’s Green jackets etc to cover Royal Guards etc and no more. What is the point? Even when we all had kilts ie Mackenzie for the Queen’s Own Highlanders or ameron for their pipers, we only wore them if we were officers/Senior NCOs etc on duty. Indeed most days there would only ever be a dozen out of 650 men wearing kilts anyway. A small story being blown up by ex RAF and SNP “useful fool” Jeff Duncan who claims to speak for soldiers in an Army he has never served with and when serving ones tell him to wind his neck in, he slags them off…..
PS: Yes I know that the Lowland regiments are wearing kilts now but most of them only stopped wearing them in the 1920s anyway so it is nothing new for them.
Kilts are ceremonial wear – since we spent most of our time in Combat 95 we didn’t need them. The public duties battalions and the Royal Guard obviously do. It has always been the case for decades that the Scottish Division holds just enough ceremonial Archer’s Green jackets etc to cover Royal Guards etc and no more. What is the point? Even when we all had kilts ie Mackenzie for the Queen’s Own Highlanders or ameron for their pipers, we only wore them if we were officers/Senior NCOs etc on duty. Indeed most days there would only ever be a dozen out of 650 men wearing kilts anyway. A small story being blown up by ex RAF and SNP “useful fool” Jeff Duncan who claims to speak for soldiers in an Army he has never served with and when serving ones tell him to wind his neck in, he slags them off…..
PS: Yes I know that the Lowland regiments are wearing kilts now but most of them only stopped wearing them in the 1920s anyway so it is nothing new for them.
Sorry for double post – damm non kilt wearing Internet!
Labour know the price of everything and the value of absolutely bugger all. For what they do – and for the fact that morale relies at least partly on the maintenance of tradition – the armed forces should get the nearest thing to a blank cheque.
Ah shoot me down in flames here
but wasn’t the kilt, as we currently understand it, invented by an Englishman
in the 19th Century?
I would much prefer that our troops had bullets and guns that worked properly, but Bliar cant even manage that!
“probably be dead”? I’ve tremendous respect for the bravery of our boys out there. I think it’s awful that they’re so underfunded, and that what funds there are are spent on a political basis to show EU solidarity. That said, I’ve been back in London since mid-September (out again mid-January) and since then I’ve read a lot of headlines about how many people were being killed in Afghanistan.
3 men died in that time. Gary Wright, Jonathan Wigley, and Richard J. Watson. Three. Since ’01, you’ve been more likely to die if you were a North Sea Fisherman than if you were a soldier out there. The total figures for the whole war are 12 RAF, 4 Marines, and 27 Army.
That doesn’t make it OK for the Government not to fund them. It doesn’t mean that the deaths are not tragic and the world not the worse for the lack of Gary Wright. Still, it is an egregious falsehood. If it were the kind of falsehood that was universally understood to be just rhetoric, it wouldn’t be harmful. It’s not. There’s a lot of people who really believe that the war in Afghanistan is going that kind of way and it’s a significant part of the motivation to abandon the Afghans. To my mind, when your rhetorical flourish comes too close to imitating the lies of the despicable, you need to be more careful in your choice of terms than you would normally.
The kilt brouhaha is not all that important in itself, but it illustrates a wider generality. A minarchist libertarian like me would say that pretty much the core functionality of a government is to provide for defence. The lack of kilts doesn’t affect operational capability, of course, but the similar dearths of good kit a bit closer to the front line does (q.v. functioning 12.7x99mm ball, Afghanistan theatre of operations, lack thereof). It’s been remarked before that the Armed Forces are the sole example of a working element of the British State during the Dear Leader’s rule, and the sole example of a part of it that hasn’t been blessed with gobs and scads of taxpayer’s money thrown haphazardly at it in the hope that some will stick. It’ll be worse when the Gobblin’ King ascends the throne.
Under the agreement signed in 2000, military equipment has to be from E.U. companies whenever possible.
This does not effect kilts – as the company involved is British owned (and therefore counts as E.U.), but it does mean a lot of other military equipment is both much more expensive and of much lower quality than it needs to be (especially as many British based companies are American owned and therefore do not count as E.U.).
Many people have died because of the above.