Patrick Christys: Give Dennis Hutchings a full military funeral

We’re going to hear a lot in the news about Cop26, the totally futile attempt to lower the world’s temperature at massive cost to the taxpayer a cost that, last time I checked, we never consented to.

We’ll keep hearing a lot about the Covid crisis as well, cases going up, etc, etc.. But I wanted to use this platform to talk about another crisis, and that is the one involving our armed forces and our veterans.

Our armed forces do the best and worst job in the world. We owe our very existence as a nation, my ability to sit here and speak freely, to the bravery, courage and valour of our military heroes.

When we parachute people into some far flung corner of the world and ask them to run towards the bullets, it’s done with the understanding that they will have the backing of the British government.

I was walking down the street on Friday and I saw my first poppy-seller, and then I went for a coffee and checked the news on my phone and I saw the story that veteran Dennis Hutchings was being denied the right to have people in military uniform carry his coffin at his funeral.

If you’re not familiar with Dennis Hutchings, he served in the Life Guards and, specifically, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He was put before a court no less than three times for allegedly murdering a chap called John Pat Cunningham, who was shot in the back as he ran away in 1974.

He was acquitted twice but then, when he was in his late seventies, he got a knock on the door and told he was being put on trial again. He then spent the next six-and-a-half years trying to clear his name, by which point he was being kept alive by a dialysis machine, told he could have a heart attack at any moment.

He had to keep nipping off to hospital during his trial, and then he contracted Covid and died. I personally don’t think Covid killed him, I think the government did – they hounded an old military hero to death.

When he was in hospital in his final moments, he was alone, his family weren’t allowed to see him, and we refused requests to fly him back to Blighty. He was even denied the right to wear his beloved military uniform in court.

We stripped him of his dignity, his identity, but really, this whole process has shown that our country had stripped itself of its decency.

And now the final indignity – Dennis Hutchings family requested that soldiers in uniform carry his coffin. That request was turned down – they said it’s only for serving military personnel. Well, neither was the most prolific sex offender this country has ever seen, Jimmy Saville, but he had 7 royal marines carry his coffin.

Just compare the way we treat our veterans with the way we treat the IRA. They have signed, legal agreements with our government that if they’re on the run and wanted for terror offences, then they won’t be prosecuted.

So we offer more protection to the IRA than we do to our own troops. And it doesn’t end here does it. We have roughly 7,000 homeless military veterans.

This is despite the fact there’s a form called the Military Covenant that’s supposed to grant them priority housing and mental health care when they retire – but this literally doesn’t happen.

In fact, if you’re a homeless veteran, you’d have more chance of being given a roof over your head if you got in a dinghy in Calais and landed on a beach in Kent.

We have enough hotel rooms, paid for by the taxpayer, to house illegal immigrants, but not people who fought for this nation. Now, if we had a referendum on this, I suspect the public would rather spend their hard earned tax money on housing a veteran than housing an illegal migrant.

So we’re not treating our veterans well in life, or in death. I want to call now for this government to do the right thing, and you can all write to Boris Johnson and urge him to do the decent thing – give Dennis Hutchings a full military funeral.