Telegraph Did it to Help Heroes, Right?
Andrew Pierce was on Today this morning and his telegenic features are popping up on Sky and BBC news channels. He tells us how the Telegraph’s noble role in the expenses scandal has saved the taxpayers hundreds of thousands already, how it is leading to the reform of the system and how it was achieved because outraged moonlighting soldiers providing security at the plant where the data was being redacted, provided the evidence. The whole story is out today in a book, No Expenses Spared, from the Telegraph’s chief reporter, Gordon Rayner.
The Telegraph headlines that MPs Lived Lavishly as Soldiers Died, it quotes their source as saying “It’s not easy to watch footage on the television news of a coffin draped in a Union Jack and then come in to work the next day and see on your computer screen what MPs are taking for themselves... When they’re out in Afghanistan they’re out there for Queen and country, earning £16,000 or £17,000 a year, knowing they’re going to take losses, while the MPs are sitting in Parliament on £65,000, with massive expenses, and meanwhile you’ve got bodies coming home.” Clearly the whistle-blowers were motivated by a justified sense of moral outrage at the troughing of MPs and the parsimonious way they treat the troops, their comrades. £20 a day for MPs’ lunches versus rations for them. Guido called up Gordon Rayner, one of the book’s authors, to ask was it true that he was donating the royalties from his book to Help for Heroes? “Look, I’m not going there” was his response.
So no royalties spared...
UPDATE : Lembit thinks all profits should go to Help for Heroes
you didnt think journo had morals ?
The Telegraph has to put £110,000 in the Help for Heroes fund NOW. They have made a shedload of money out of this story and they are using our Squaddies as their justification for paying the whistleblower.
The very least they can do now is pay our Brave servicemen and women a similar amount. NOW
Why not let any MPs who have a guilty conscience be given an “expenses pardon” if they pay what they fiddled to the Help for Heros fund?
Quite, let’s see some of the sanctimonious troughers coughing up to Help the Heroes if they start banging on about how the DT should do so. As usual it all descends into the usual bollocks. The absolute reality should be that HMG funds, pays and treats the armed services properly – this stuff is a sick sideshow. On the other hand, a la lanterne les politicos!
Oh, and that includes cheeky chappy Lembit:
Montgomeryshire MP Mr Opik claimed £111,880 from the public purse for his second home in seven years.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1180981/MPs-EXPENSES-Lembit-Opiks-Cheeky-2-500-expenses-claim-new-TV-rejected-expensive.html#ixzz0S7dY2dOV
“Why not let any MPs who have a guilty conscience be given an “expenses pardon” if they pay what they fiddled to the Help for Heros fund?”
MPs & “guilty + conscience” = Oxymoron
“Why not let any MPs who have a guilty conscience be given an “expenses pardon” if they pay what they fiddled to the Help for Heros fund?”
Why not let any MPs who have a guilty conscience have a twelve week holiday in Afghanistan as a squadie on full army pay, in one of our search and destroy units?
Those who commit their fellows to war should be prepared to go to war.
Remember to sign the petition
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/housekeeper/
now 317 signatures and 23rd position
The whistle-blower was paid out of private money not public money. And given the risks that any whistle-blower faces – especially so given the nature of this corrupt government -what’s the problem with him making a few quid? The information was pukka and its disclosure was clearly in the public interest. The whistle-blower deserves a medal and a pension for rendering a much needed public service in outing the nest of troughers at Westminster…scumbags.
As for The Telegraph profiting from the story well, that’s another matter. Quite frankly, so what? Business is business. I would have thought that the story needs no justification at all.
However if The Telegraph are going down the ‘we did it for our heroes’ route then yes they should cough up a substantial part of the book’s sales proceeds for the servicemen and women.
You are confusing the editor and the owners. The editor may well be a patriot who is prepared totake risks to support our troops. thenew owners are a differeent kettle of offshore fish!
Don’t you have to take the Hypocrite Oath to become a journo?
Guido was going to donate all from the McBride story to the Help for Heroes fund.
You know it is ? Jealousy! The Telegraph are clearly hopping mad they couldn’t get the McBride story and are now amusingly bitter and petty about it.
Some people think I have a house that looks like Balmoral but I think it does me just fine.
Simple. No donation to H4H or royalties, no book sales.
My cat has a better moral character, her kittens are homed with the proviso they pay a donation to H4H, we got £150 for the charity with the last litter.
I understand why the Houses of Parliament are on the front cover, but why the picture of Yvette Cooper in the lower right corner?
Because Labour is a load of Balls?
Empty balls.
I would be the honorable thing to donate the proceeds. It would also be yet another two-fingers up at the MPs. Show them how they ought to act to be called “honourable”.
No, they did it to make a profit.
I thought you were in favour of that.
Exactly. In a free, capitalist society we believe that personal profit and public gain aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. It’s a sad lapse on Guido’s part that he implies they are (maybe he’s been reading the Gaurdian too much).
I understand they could have sold it to another paper for a higher price but only the Telegraph would agree to publish the whole thing. They have thus kept to good capitalist principles.
As a libertarian, quite how they spend their legally earned money is none of anybody else’s business. Guido should be ashamed of himself, for not sticking to his own principles, for this post.
Perhaps Guido is a socialist after all?
It might not be “our business” if someone spends money in a way that shows them up as bullshitters. But in that case its none of our business to know whether a jounalist is lying to us.
Fair enough, personal profit and public gain are compatible, but that doesn’t mean Andrew Pierce isn’t a santimonious, hypocritical tit.
I think there are some sour grapes here…..
Just shows how far the socialists have taken control of the agenda that the DT is too ashamed to say “Yes, we did it for the money, as we are a business. Happily we have had a massively beneficial side-effect, in that the public now knows what scumbags their MPs are” but have to give us this sanctmonious shite about our brave boys.
Eh? Why can’t they turn a few quid out of it? Let’s face it Guido, the MSM is skint, they need an earner or two.
Besides, no one makes money out of books these days.
I agree it would have been a nice touch to donate 10%, but they can’t really do it now, it will look crap. And anyway, anyone who actually does give a toss for British soldiers shouldn’t be wasting their time worrying about kit, pensions or injury compensaiton – they should be demanding that we get our troops out of wars that are none of our concern.
That’s the real scandal – that we are fucking there!
You just don’t get it Frank.
We are there to smoke an elderly troglodyte, who is dependent on walking sticks and a kidney dialysis machine, out of his cave.
That’s why we’re invading Pakistan next March. Just in time to declare a State of Emergency before Browngabe was gonna be forced to ask Her Majesty to dissolve Parliament
I’m very much afraid you have called it right. Peter Poppet would like to win an election as it looks so much better (even if you have to cheat a bit) but if absolutely necessary….democracy is dispensible. Shouldn’t think they’d go to the trouble of lying about a dodgy dossier this time. It will be straight in there with the SoE and the Queen told to appear on telly and look reassuring or else the corgi gets it.
The only thing I can think of is a military coup led by Arry Ewitt. Unfortunately, he’s an idiot. Unless, of course, it is a cunning disguise. Bloody good one, if it is a disguise.
Crazy thing is, the dude is dead! He’s dependent on a massive kidney dialysis machine with all the backup that requires. No way hosay can he be hding out in the caves with that lot
In any case all the war has done is alientate the British Muslim population, as well as the Afghanis. If the Govt is serious it should have bought up all the opium crop, for medical morphine – of which there is a shortage throughout Europe. Hoons
Frank, you’re right.
Debates over kit, helicopters or the treatment of casualities, etc. are important, but they are still secondary to the issue of ‘why on earth are we there anyway?’
So you’re saying that 9/11 is not our concern? That not only do you not really care about our soldiers, you also don’t care about the people killed in a the tube bombins in London, a plot we know as initiated in Taliban held terrirtory in northern Pakistan and used training camps in Afghanistan?
Are you a pacifist? Are you using the fact the west has cocked up its wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as cover to hide the fact that you don’t agree with them even if they had been unalloyed successes, that you think 9/11 should have gone unanswered militarily, like the USS Aden and US Beruit Embassy attacks that preceeded it? If 9/11 or the tube bombings aren’t enough for you, how big an attact would justify us sending our army overseas? Hitler invading Poland? That was none of our business technically as well as being us that started hostilities between us and Germany. Do you disagree with that too??
“9/11 should have gone unanswered militarily” Reminds me a bit of when you ask an old bloke “which way to the station?” and he says “half past three”
Does it occur to you that there might not actually be an appropriate military answer to the question of 9/11 or the tube bombings? An approximate answer would do you perhaps – like bombing leeds?
the 7/7 bombings were motivated by this country supporting the Americans’ repsonse to 9/11. The actions of this government invading Iraq have helped radicalise some easily led morons.
If you are playing cause and effect perhaps you should ask why 9/11 happened in the first case. Why did a group formerly funded by the CIA seek revenge on the US?
I thought it was the international Zionist conspiracy
No, its just lizards that make themselves look jewish.
15 of the terrorists on 9/11 were saudi arabians which means:
we should have invaded saudi arabia not Afghanistan.
and I think it safe to say that saudi arabians are not zionists.
george bush personally authorised the evacuation of members of the family of osama bin laden from america when no one else was authorised to fly.
the only conclusion that can be drawn from these facts is that george bush is the friend of the leader of the alqaeda aswell as being the friend of the warmongering zionist occupiers.
playing both sides I think it is called.
the bush family are traitors to america.
Don’t be a twat all of your life, Mr/Ms Biscuits.
So you’re saying that 9/11 is not our concern? That not only do you not really care about our soldiers, you also don’t care about the people killed in a the tube bombins in London, a plot we know as initiated in Taliban held terrirtory in northern Pakistan and used training camps in Afghanistan?
What? The Taliban launched 9/11? That’s a new one on me. They bombed our tube? Blimey.
IF there is a country in that region that has, over decades, posed a security threat to the UK it is not Afghanistan, it is Pakistan. And *IF* we wanted to deal with that, we’d start right here in the UK, at the immigration desk.
And *if* Islamism poses a threat to us – as I believe it does, although more to our morale and ethical positions, than our lives, then the threat comes more from Bradford and Leicester than Afghanistan.
We have no fight with the Taliban.
Well said Scary Biscuits.
Bollocks.
I guess it’s you who’ll tell all the bereaved relations that their boys died or were maimed for nothing.
Are you up for it?
The book will sell fuck all anyway – everyone knows what’s in it.
Quite.
Its perhaps a bit early. The kind of shite that sells at christmas.
If anything shows the level of idiocy that ended up with people borrowing too much, its buying people shite at christmas. “oooh uncle ronnie was on about that, lets buy him the book”.
Sorry. I said shite too much.
I’d rather have a Val Doonican jumper at Xmas than this stockingfiller.
Whilst Help for Heroes is a fantastically worthy cause (and I support it), the very fact that it is necessary at all indicates how little soldiers are appreciated when it comes to government …
hear hear
seconded.
Very much agree.
Sadly true.
I also wonder how many of the returning soldiers will end up on the streets or in prison when they leave the army.
And now the BBC are attempting another smear on the armed forces, apparently 10% of the prison population are ex-military (notice they don’t highlight that a third of the homeless are ex-military) my sister tried to ask that question at a Cambridge ‘Question Time’ — not topical or relevant was the BBC reply.
I turned the set off when PM asked the boffin, “So you are saying that those with violent tendencies go into the army?”
Wow, the BBC mentioned as statistically large number of a certain group of people (ex-army) that the left hates are in prison, without mentioning that statistically large number of a certain group of people (immigrants) that the left loves are in prison.
Who’d have guessed?
Its much worse than that. The destruction of the services as a bastion of conservative (small c) values is what is intended. “They joined up, don’t vote NuLab; what are they bitching for and why should we care?”.
We should not need Help for Heroes. It is a fantastic organisation, which we must all support nevertheless, raising funds, and awareness of the plight of the services and especially the care of the long term disabled which the Government should provide for the servces, without comment, itself; building a families residence at Headley Court for example should not have been built on charity. The contempt in which the Government holds our services is best illustrated by Bob Jobsworth the defence secretary, a man who would be out of his depth in the bath and with no relevant skills whatsoever.
Whilst one can only applaud and help H for H, what about the mainstream Army Charities, the Army Benevolent Fund, the British Legion and many other smaller regimental charities that have some small means at their disposal but are flooded with genuine calls for help. If 664 have been seriously wounded this year, according to the press, is it the government’s aim to destroy service charities too? Should there not be a grant immediately?
One can easily understand the whistleblower’s contempt for this government and all the shits in it.
Hear hear Willie
When Brown had his reshuffle he published the relative status of the new ministers. Ainsworth, Minister of Defence, was 2nd formt he bottom ffs! This is evidence enough of Brown’s attitude to out defences, and the Armed Forces
There’s a pattern to all Brown’s thinking and doing – he will cling on so long as he can keep furthering the destruction of Middle England and all its values. Maybe he’s not such an idiot as we take him for – maybe he’s very clever!
And maybe he’s right – the election will come too late to reverse [Middle] England’s slide into chaos and oblivion
I think the Telegraph were right to publish the story – but all this sanctimonious bullshit explaining why they published makes my toes curl.
Ask them the straight question “if you knew in advance that publishing the story would reduce circulation numbers; would you still run the story?”
Answers on a postcard.
Mother Theresa they aint
Agreed.
But better that they (or anyone) published it, rather than the troughing remaining redacted.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Lets be straight, do not fall into the weasle word trap of the House of Filth. These expenses were not “redacted”, they were covered up. There is a difference, the former is obfuscation the latter is the reality.
They published Damian McBrides’s rebuttal the day Guido got him.
I can’t see how they thought that might increase their circulation, more like they were pissed off that Guido ended up going to the Times instead.
Is not the Serious Crime Squd supposed to look into crime that has gone on for more than six months and are not ALL assets of naughty suspects up for grabs sequestration etc.?
Bastards!
Was the initial £110k paid to the outraged soldier spread out amongst other soldiers to enable them to obtain better kit? And of course the profits made by the Telegraph were likewise shared out?
Fained outrage is the worst kind. Yet in saying that, it is not a newspaper or journalists or soldiers duty to make sure our troops are adequately supplied. That is the duty of the Governmant of the day.
It wasn’t paid to a soldier. The soldiers were moonlighting as security staff to get money to pay for personal items (e.g. better boots) they wanted to replace the standard army issue items.
The leaker was one of the Stationery Office (or agency) staff who were editing (i.e. obliterating sensitive entries) from the expenses files prior to their release. He sympathised with the soldiers need to earn extra money for those things and was in a position to see what the MPs were raking in on extravagant expenses claims/fiddles.
I don’t suppose his sympathy extended to sharing some of the £110,000 with any of the soldiers. In demanding/accepting a large sum of money for leaking the documents he put himself in the same category as the grasping MPs.
Thank you for explaining that to me.
How do you know what he did with thenmoney? I dare say as a man (or woman) of principle he/she may well have made donations to service charities. In any case he/she was presumably risking the termination of his/her career, and prosecution – esp if he/she was a civil servant.
I don’t know what he did with the money. That’s why I said “I don’t suppose … “
Not so sure that I agree with Andrew Pierce when he said that we have a much better Commons because of a result of it.
We shouldn’t care if he spends it all on Horses, Whores, Colombian Marching Powder and then merely wastes the rest. The service rendered is invaluable all round.
Here Here, very well put.
Er may I remind you, you wouldn’t have been so principled, Guido, if you could get away with it…
[Chris Hope Telegraph journalist] is stunned. ‘Are they genuine?’ he asks, five times. He makes notes. The Bloody Mary emboldens me. A figure of £20,000 is discussed.
and
I get two opinions. Both agree that I will have a strong public interest defence if the dark forces of Downing Street decide to give me the Damian Green treatment — except if I do it for private gain. Forget making money. Damn
http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/3540431/part_3/a-bloggers-notebook.thtml
I think he might have you there, Guido… Hmmm…..
Andrew’s awfully good on the radio. Managed to get it all in before Thought for the Day without a slip.
Propping up with charity things that should rightly be funded by the Government is a slippery slope. Help for Heroes has impeccable motives and that sort of altruistic activity is praiseworthy – but gives the Government a chance to avoid its own financial obligations to our servicemen and women. Just look at how Lottery funds are diverted into areas which should be State-funded.
Jealous, Guido?
The Telegraph were correct in blowing the whistle on the current bunch of money-grabbing, attention-seeking, half-wit MPs.
If only the MPs caught out had donw the decne thign and resigned.
Why have they put a picture of a racing pigeon on the front cover?
you should have gone to specsavers.
Think “Two Ronnies!”
Bit OT… I had (at last) the opportunity to use their best joke yesterday. I make beeswax candles and had ordered some wax.
The parcel delivery arrived and husband asked what it was, “fork ‘andles!” Bliss.
Airey Belvoir is right about the slipery slope. How much Lottery dosh is going into the 2012 Olympics to the detriment of hundreds of small but worthy causes?
This is another stealth tax when they came to power in year Zero (1997). They saw all this lottery cash and thought ‘why is being spent on silly little projects’ and grabbed it for their own wheezes.
The Lottery bastards denied funding to St Dunstan’s once, being the charity home for blinded servicemenr
They probably regard them as war mongers .
bunch of c unts.
Guido, I am sure many of your esteemed contributors will be concerned at the possibilty of the invokation of the Civil Contingencies Act. Well heres how , perhaps, to spike it -
Dear Mr Brown,
It would be a tragedy of gargantuan proportions if you fail to win the general election.
If you lose, we lose the greatest Chancellor we have ever had. The world would lose the authority of the world’s greatest economic advisor.
Your wisdom and acumen are the on;y things that stand between us and catastrophe,
Without you at the helm of the ship of state we are doomed. We would undoubtedly sink in a sea of troubles which originated, sadl, across the Atlantic Ocean. You must continue at the helm.
Our thoughts and prayers are with you.
God bless you.
Copy the sentiment and send to 10 Downing Street.
The mad bastard is quite likely to fall for it and resist a ‘Reichstag’ moment designed to invoke The Civil Contingencies Act.
Good luck!
Have an OBN, sir!
You’ve copied that out of one of those resignation letters he keeps getting
Union Jacks are on ships, It should be Union flag, or the Flag of the Union.
Specifically flying from the “Jackstaff” in the Bow ..
Well done the DT, supposedly a Conservative leaning paper, for putting the Duck on the cover and therefore giving the impression that it’s largely about Tory troughing, when the contest was in fact well and truly won by Nulab.
And they wonder why they are losing their core readership.
That apart fair do’s, they did their exposure without fear or favour as far as I can see, but the real scandal was not that revelation that some MP’s, given the chance, will demonstrate unscrupulous greed, but that we have an administrative system that from top to bottom puts its own interests over that of those it is supposed to serve.
Wherever you look they are at it, from the posties knocking off early to get their feet up through the various goverment departments paying themselves bonuses for actually doing what they are paid to do to these troughing oiks right at the top they are all on the take.
Until we can change this culture of unashamed self reward for mediocrity we will never prosper as a country.
All this moralising
Has the telegraph lost its lobby access?
Whatever this man’s principles, I’m glad he blew the whistle on this. The endless propaganda from government tells us what they want us to hear and, unless people are better informed, they will keep getting away with it.
We need more people like him to tell us what’s really going on.
Karma is like gravity. If you sow evil you reap evil, as simple as that. And by God our MPs actions will rebound on them over many lives to come.
Keith Vaz will get chicken karma.
Karma Chameleon
Incidentally, if you were to place a chameleon upon a tartan rug, it would explode
Karma Sutra
I believe it was wrong to pick on the hard wanking, eh, working MP’s.
If you take away the option of being able to make personal gain for whistle blowing then you won’t get any whistle blowers.
Once you’ve been found out as a whistle blower you almost always lose your job and would have a hard time finding an equivalent job somewhere else.
Whistle blowers need to be able to make personal gain out of blowing the whistle, because once the whistle’s blown they’d usually have no other/alternative way to make a living.
Similar logic applies to the media; they’re bussineses; if they can’t make money then they go bust and once they’re bust they can’t publicise future whistle blowers.
And that’s just the cash-survival angle.
There’s also the question of whether it’s morally right for anyone involved to make money. If the whistle-blowing (and its publication) brings about a positive change for the greater good then why shouldn’t someone make money? I see no moral problem with that. You can be altruistic and still make money; they’re not mutually exclusive.
shit; just look at microsoft; they earn billions in profits, but they also give away billions to charitable causes. If they didn’t make any money then they wouldn’t be able to give away anything to charitable causes.
Take away the profit aspect and you also take away the charity aspect in the end.
It’s no different to the tax system, in that if you tax people too highly then you drive them out of business and they therefore go bust and can’t pay any tax at all; the same kind of logic applies with charity/profit; you need to have a balance, you can’t just give 100% of your time/cash to charity because you’ll go bust and end up not having any time/cash left for charity going forwards.
Everything about the “well, if you’re altruistic then you should never make any money regardless of what you’ve done for the greater good” argument stinks.
Don’t you just hate it when people try to make money from the papers and then try and claim they were acting in the public interest? Well played there guido.
So you are up now Jimmy. I am surprised you can type today after the amount of time you spent wanking last night.
I’ve never found it a problem. Do you find it effects you that way? Anyway I don’t see what my incessant onanism has to do with Guido’s crusade against sanctimony. I hope you’re not suggesting they are in some way comparable.
You mean “affects”. Maybe you’re not the Geordie journalist, who would know the difference.
Sometimes, Guido, you are nothing less than a pathetic little creep. So you want to know if the whistleblower got paid? Maybe he did, insurance against possibly losing his job, possible prosecution & subsequent legal expenses.
You know perfectly well that £110,000 is peanuts when compared with what MPs made from the trough, and the DT made from extra sales, but you just have to smear. You were keen enough at the time to propagate the MP expenses revelations, but now you you want to drag down the whistleblower.
“Plots, rumours & conspiracies” is what you do, it says so in your banner. Why should anyone take you seriously?
In total agreement with what you say and well done to the DT you did us all a huge service.
Do I smell the tainted stench of news reporter hypocrisy?
Yes
Sorry, those who did the leaking and the reporting did our country a great service and as far as I am concerned they can do whatever they like with the money they earned from it.
I agree with that.
Its not that they kept the money
Its that they kept the money AND claimed they had some high minded moral purpose.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive in this instance, as other people have already pointed out.
They all do that though.
Strikes me there is a good dollop of hypocrisy all around.
There are plenty of people loafing about in the UK at somebody else’s expense, and, in any case you have to be dafter than an 9 bob note to join up and fight the fuzzy wussies.
When the Taliban start rowing down the Thames intent on duffing up our MP’s let me know I might join in I can think of one or two honorable members that need a good kick up the arse!
I hope that the original whistleblower gave his newspaper fee to Help for Heroes too.
As I’ve said, Brown and his lietenants should be put on trial for treason and manslaughter by a military tribunal
THEN HANDED TO THE ARMY AND BE PUT UP AGAINST THE WALL AND SHOT.
Cowards like Brown have already died a thousand deaths, you can see it in the tallow face.
He is spineless , yellow AND UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES will fight an election-I’ve known this for months on gut instinct, but going on health grounds and not on a “had enough” basis is definitately how he’ll do it to help assuage the massive ego that this arrogant bastard posseses.
How civil revolt has been avoided under this necromancer is beyond me.
With his tallow face he’s not worth holding out a candle for.If the firing squad aim for the top of his head he should light up for the first and last time.
“When they’re out in Afghanistan they’re out there for Queen and country, earning £16,000 or £17,000 a year, knowing they’re going to take losses, while the MPs are sitting in Parliament on £65,000, with massive expenses, and meanwhile you’ve got bodies coming home.”
..and that bastard Brown taxes their income whilst they are there. What a star he is!
Hypocrites!
Totally O/T (for which I apologise) .. but thought others might find this as funny as I did … http://grumpyoldtwat.blogspot.com/
Give that man a patent.
“Lembit Opik thinks”….
Are you sure about that?
I’m aLimpDem !! Cogito, ergo dumb !
The author, when asked about the proceeds going to “Help the Heroes” said “He wasn’t going to go there”. Fine, no problem. Don’t go there – to have a look at what the troops face in Afghanistan.
He could, without too much personal discomfort, stand at Wooton Bassett – or, as everyone seems to ignore, the military wing at Selly Oak Hospital. The dead, sadly, are dead – the living and wounded are as personified by Fusilier Tom James at his colleague’s funeral service. The money would not go amiss there.
Words are cheap – from the journalists, they are cheaper still. I can conjure up a cheap headline – but I have also been a Royal Marine Commando, seen it, done it and bought the t-shirt. But – and a big but – I wouldn’t sell them down river for a cheap suit and a nice car.
Pay the money into the funds – your newspaper bought the information that you profit from – not you. You profit on the backs of righteously outraged servicemen who have to moonlight to get anywhere near the average wage.
There’s “balls” – and then there’s “bollocks”
Sorry, that was not to infer that the comment 111 was “bollocks”, quite the opposite
As a serviceman I fully support the Help for Heroes charity, but the big question must be why the hell is it there in the first place … surely our heroes who need the help should receive all the help and financial support from the government who put them in the position in the first place, not from charitable donations. If the government had any morals at all they’d make a big gesture and replace help for heroes with cash from the treasury, really supporting our injured trooops, not just offering sound bites.
I try and support the ABF, Combat Stress and Help for Heroes. I have a huge degree of scepticism about what we are trying to do in Afghanistan. Totally underresourced. Sallying forth from a base, getting shot to bits and blown up. Going back to base. Repeat the next day. For a corrupt regime. It’s an absolute disgrace.
I loath the way the benefits/accident/HRA culture has degraded this country – but if a few squaddies start winning multi million pound settlements for the suffering they’ve incurred, then perhaps our lying cheating polticians won’t treat human life so cheaply in their attempts to grab the Churchill mantle.
Andrew Pierce is rapidly becoming as odious as Stephen Pound and several of the other pundits wheeled out be Sky and BBC to ‘review’ (copy) news-stories in the newspapers.
I nearly threw up this morning listening to his hypocitical justification for promoting the book. Yes the profits shoul be given either to charity or back to the taxpayer, where the stolen information came from in the first place.
Proceeds of Crime Act, anyone?
Some imaginary ‘soldier’ just got front page on The Telegraph website in an advertising peice for the book (pretending to be a news story).
So why not name this soldier, Mr Pierce? Wouldn’t be because he doesn’t exist, is it?
Lembit’s a publicity creeping pratt
cuUwYV I want to say – thank you for this!
all good things