Thanks for your comments. I believe there are training issues and equipment issues with the British Army. But the main issue is the deployment. Yesterday we had Lord Garden spouting on the Guardian letters' page about Iraq ... but this Lib Dem defence spokesman only opposed the war at the time BECAUSE HE SAID WE SHOULD HAVE ATTACKED OTHER COUNTRIES (IRAN AND SYRIA) FIRST!!!!
In this case the Sgt was underequipped as it turned out but not particularly obviously the case at the time as he was facing stone throwers in a tank. His colleague was arguably OVER-equipped with a machine gun he was not competent with. And there is a question too over who this man was TRYING to shoot and what would have happened if he had killed say five Iraqis instead of his sergeant?
But all this is by the by. Willie Rennie MP was first outed as an account director of this PR firm by The Daily Record at the start of June 2006. By then he had already visited his firm's client Raytheon in his MP rather than PR capacity. Menzies Campbell has now had seven months to reshuffle ooor Willie but hasn't been bothered. He had a limited reshuffle of his deck of cards (with more than two jokers) in December but didn't deal with this hypocrisy. He must - like Leech - think this is fine. Raytheon remain the FOURTH LARGEST arms manufacturer in the world and a major supplier of cluster bomnbs. Rennie still has the PR firm on his CV and they have him in their own PR. Rennie hasn't bothered to distance himself from his firm's client and local employer in any shape or form.
Willie has asked three written questions, one PMQ, and backed one EDM on the subject. For the last written question John Leech joined Wille with a verbatim copy of WR's question. Leech must surely have known about Rennie's hypocrisy as a PR man and factory visitor at Raytheon Scotland Limited?
Leech has led his miserable South Manchester Reporter columnthis week with his opposition to Cluster Bombs. All very well. But Rennie's involvement is an embarrassment and Leech should leave well alone and certainly not take questions off this dipstick. This seems to show his lack of discrimination which has been a case with his EDMs too. Fortunately there are no arms factories in South Manchester or we would have very likely seen Leech visiting and congratulating them.
On the subject of Leech dealing with my email ... he rarely if ever deals with substantive issues. Usually there is mild abuse and self justification on other matters (e.g. Christie hoax) but not answers to those substantive questions.
