Archive for December, 2006

UK war debt to US paid in full on New Year’s Eve


On New Year’s Eve, the UK will make its final repayment of £45m on debts owed to the US dating back to World War Two.

Under the lend-lease programme which began in March 1941, the (then neutral) US could provide countries fighting Hitler with war material. The US joined the war soon afterwards when Pearl Harbour was attacked, and the programme ended in 1945.

Old soldiers will continue, of course, to suffer the indignities of poverty and long NHS waiting lists. Fuel companies will still cut off our war heroes if they can’t pay their astronomical heating and electricity bills. In many cases the porky overpaid executives whose closest experience of war was achieved through watching old films on TV won’t have to actually get their minions to flick the switch and add to our war dead, simply because thousands of those men and women who worked to save this country from Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese won’t actually dare to turn on lights and gas taps, thus ending their own lives under frost-encrusted blankets

Read the full article.

Friday, December 29th, 2006