Like a government defends its people, the Ministry of Defence should be defending its hero troops too
As tank-chasing lawyer Phil Spencer is struck off for wrongly ruining lives of brave veterans, the Sun columnist asks why the MoD isn't protecting its soldiers
THE first duty of any government is to defend its people. So how is our blundering, super-cautious, top-heavy Ministry of Defence doing with that?
Not too well it seems. Russia is flexing its muscles. The Nato defence alliance is crumbling. But the desk-top generals in Whitehall suck their pencils and waste billions on weapons that don’t work.
They send the Navy to sea in destroyers that conk out in warm waters, meddle with the design of new frigates until they became unaffordable and buy armoured cars too big to be flown to the battlefield.
It sometimes seems they set out to make life harder for the brave men and women we put in harm’s way.
But it doesn’t end there.
The MoD doesn’t just send our troops to war with no boots or body armour. It then hounds them through the courts at taxpayers’ expense when they get home.
Greedy tank-chasing lawyer Phil Shiner shocked the nation with 2,470 trumped-up claims of murder, torture and mistreatment by brave Iraq veterans.
He ruined the lives of brave soldiers who thought they were fighting in a just cause.
But the greater scandal is that shyster Shiner’s unscrupulous witch-hunt was funded and encouraged by the very same Ministry of Defence that sent these soldiers into battle.
We now know that a “rotten core” of civil servants bankrolled Shiner’s baseless campaign to criminalise innocent squaddies.
Shiner’s law firm was handed a fat £200,000 cheque by the infamous Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) despite mounting evidence of his corruption.
Taxpayers even gave a six-figure sum to a dodgy Iraqi informant on his payroll.
In the five years since IHAT was launched by Labour, it has clinched only one successful prosecution — against one of its own members of staff.
It was ex-soldier MP Johnny Mercer who yesterday identified the “rotten core” of MoD civil servants who acted against our soldiers “without ministerial or military” accountability.
His parliamentary inquiry will next week slam IHAT as “unfit for purpose” and demand the £60m shambles be shut down immediately.
The shocking verdict will be too late to save hundreds of servicemen whose lives have been ruined by Shiner’s deceit.
But it comes as no surprise in these days of grievance-seeking vigilantes.
Some learned the hard way from the spiteful police vendetta against journalists and the rubbish claims against pop star Sir Cliff Richard that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Police, politicians and officials cannot be trusted with unbridled power.
The deaths of vulnerable NHS patients and the systematic abuse of young girls in Rotherham has shown they will always lie to cover their own backsides.
Phil Shiner was encouraged by the Ministry of Defence to throw decent soldiers to the wolves. It should never happen again.
Yet we are still ploughing ahead with the blatantly one-sided investigation into all 3,000 murders in Northern Ireland during The Troubles — EXCEPT, of course, those committed by the IRA.
It seems we have learned nothing from the 12-year Bloody Sunday inquiry which looked into 13 deaths, cost £195m and was denounced as a waste of money.
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Defence supremo Michael Fallon hates this farce, but insists he is powerless to intervene.
After the IHAT fiasco he should think again before his department is stained by another scandal.
He might talk to former guardsman Dennis Hutchings, charged with the attempted murder of a suspected IRA terrorist more than 40 years ago.
At a demo outside No10, emotional Hutchings said: “There are a few MPs who have had the guts to highlight the gross abuse of servicemen and women.
“But the majority — and I include those buggers in the Ministry of Defence — have done absolutely bloody nothing for us.”
He’s right, isn’t he?
THE Bank of England’s job is to silently and discreetly guide Britain’s economy by nudging interest rates up or down, as necessary.
But Mark Carney, a Canadian who should have remained neutral, gatecrashed the Brexit debate with fraudulent forecasts of gloom and doom to please then-Chancellor George Osborne.
Nobody in the financial world now takes this man seriously. He is a standing joke.
He won’t quit, of course.
But if he had a shred of self-respect, he would go tomorrow.