Most of the Asylum
seekers and Economic migrants I see on the news are young men fleeing their
homeland. Did our own young men enjoy the luxury of escapement all those years
ago? No I fear most of them stood to fight to give us a better life.
On 4 August 1914,
the United Kingdom entered the war with Germany. By December over one million men had volunteered to fight
to defend their homeland. By the end of the war more than four years later, almost one
quarter of the total male population had served in the armed forces.
On 3 September 1939 Britain
declared war on Germany in response to their overwhelming attack and brutalization
of Poland. The British army already
totaled about 200,000 men but this swelled to 875,000 as men volunteered to
fight for our country. Parliament then passed 'The National Service (Armed
Forces) Act' which imposed conscription on all males aged between 18 and 41
who had to register for service. Those medically unfit were exempted, as were others
in key industries and jobs such as baking, farming, medicine, and
engineering. In all an estimated 20million soldiers were recruited from
Great Britain to fight in World War Two. That figure included hundreds of
thousands of volunteers under the age of eighteen. Some as young as sixteen.
They wanted to play their part. Nazi Germany was rampaging across Europe
defeating all in its path and eventually heading for Britain and our young men were
going to stop them.
There are 17 countries within the ‘Middle Eastern’ province with a population of over 410million people, 137million from Iraq, Syria and Turkey alone. I do not pretend to be an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, nor do I fully understand how exactly each country interacts with each other. And I also understand that the middle eastern turmoil does not have any fixed lines of rights or wrongs and includes distorted mixtures of allies and enemies.
But more importantly than all of
that, for me, I know how grateful I am to those men and women who stood and fought to
keep us safe in mine and my father’s lifetime
We owe a lot to those who
went before us - to those who carved out our special land - to those who
struggled to keep our English way of life. I for one want it to stay, for
me and my children and theirs to come.