JournalKenneth WebbSeptember 13, 2025QCS, KCS, The KCS RAFComment

A Step Too Far

JournalKenneth WebbSeptember 13, 2025QCS, KCS, The KCS RAFComment

JOURNAL

A Step Too Far

September 2025

The King’s Colour Squadron parading for the first time in honour of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and which throughout my life and long service in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, I only ever knew as the Queen’s Colour Squadron. It brought immediately to mind the impact of that phrase that marks the transition in less than a heartbeat, *The Queen is Dead. Long Live the King.*

In the United Kingdom we have always been circumspect as regards our National Flag.

I’m used to rules and regulations or, as my commissioning scroll reminds me according to the rules and discipline of war.

It does not seem right to carry our National Flag in the fashion we now see. There is a very thin, almost unseeable, dividing line between patriotism and the playground bully.I wonder many will rally to the Colours not long from now when Russia makes its move to outflank NATO Forces?

The belligerent always tests and prods. Poland, now Romania, and our own sea and air defences on a regular basis.

Will protesters rally to the Colours as Ukraine has rallied to the Nation’s Colours?

The evidence suggests not. Whilst the desire might be there, most protesters I see are the wrong age, advancing in years, and those who might make it age-wise, will be tripped up by their over-indulgence in eating and drinking.

In the Twentieth Century, the British tended not to brandish flags, certainly not the Union Flag.

But the checks and balances of the Greatest Generation have gone. In America it is seen as an act of disrepect to not have the national flag prominently displayed on private property, on front doorsteps. In my service that was never required. Nor did we refer to the Flag. We referred to the Colour and to the Colours.

Our regulations are detailed. The Union Flag flies from official buildings between sunrise and sunset. If the people who are parading around with flags walked onto any military base they would be taken aback by the withering looks.

You have no right to carry that. You dishonour the Nation, you dishonour all four kingdoms within these islands. You have relegated the Colours to the status of a team shirt on an away game.

You would be taken aback still more with the preciseness and care the Colour is lowered and folded with absolute precision. And under armed guard.

In the 1930s people like me cowered when we heard the chants, the mobs, the terror. We hid behind walls, retreated into the smallest hide-hole, often the toilet, in the hope that the mob outside baying for our blood might somehow pass by. Alas, for several million, they did not pass by. For those who are pondering, I am not talking of the six million. By no means.

I understand fully both sides of the argument. I have sympathy with both sides. I then consider the families cowering. Why?

Because I know that the rioters are out for blood. When I first released this 12 hours ago I had not seen the news. At just after midnight I turned the news on. Elon Musk. That says it all. My hope is that that man’s president, a man elected by the people with no regard to capacity to hold the highest office, is given a pleasant, brief and - in diplomatic language - a state visit that leaves the honuured personages decidedly unsure, discomfited, dispirited as they return across that very, very wide Atlantic Ocean. A feeling they wish not to express out loud, but which reaches deep into their bowels…

What did we do wrong Honey?
I never want to go through that again
I’m beginning to wonder,
Is he right?
And I’m wrong?

And then I am thoroughly ashamed that you have made me ashamed that I ever held the Queen’s Commission, that I ever held the office of Constable. You have shattered a century, and I will never forgive you people for doing this. It is only because of that last century’s sacrfices that you are now free to express yourselves.

To you who attend the protests. It is our right to do so. Our right by unwritten Constitution to do so.

See now the flip side of my earlier recall. I know what it is like to be that thin blue line in a full blown riot. I have seen protesters change from the respectable citizens I know them as by day, to brutes intent on savagery, who, the following days and weeks will not look me in the face when peace has been restored. Myown experience is small. The vicious bread riots in Tewkesbury in the late 1970s. Men intent on turning over coaches of those others who dared to break the picket line.

That is my measure of the “I’m merely peacefully protesting… that’s why I’m here” brigade. These are the very same people who will vanish into thin air when this Country is threatened with invasion. These are the people incapable of measuring up to the People of Ukraine who rightfully stand shoulder to shoulder with the British People of 1940, now long departed.

This lot? Forget it.

Americans? You’ve brought upon the world a calamity in the making that is only just unfolding.

All of you should be ashamed regardless of what side of the aisle you stand.

It is Mr Musk’s right to voice his opinion. It is not his right to incite a foreign country to overthrow its elected Government.

He and is government are proof that the so-called eighty-year peace dividend has been a chain around ankles and wrists.

I am aware of the commitment and sacrifice that America’s own greatest generation made. However, that does not require me to maintain articles written about and of the Amercan Armed Forces who served in 1942-1945 and the several who also volunteered in 1940 and fought with in the ranks of the Royal Air Force at the height of the Battle of Britain.

The articles are now safely archived. we live in the here and now. And that is the most fearful thought of all.