I’d be the first to admit I’m not a maths person. But I’ve often wondered if anyone has ever come up with a mathematical formula to calculate how much mayhem is created by various numbers of anti-social thugs. Based on my own experience at high school, it became clear that two nasty bits of work didn’t cause twice as much mayhem as one. I’d guess they made four or five times more trouble. And when they were joined by a third, we weren’t talking about three times as much violence and terror but something like 15 to 20 times as much. By the time the gang reached 20 members, they had the capability of placing hundreds in a state of fear. As the cops found, no-one, but no-one, would testify in court against these thugs. It was only when they were suspected of killing a cop that the hammer finally came down on them. I’d left town by then, but I’ve got a feeling that the methods used to collect evidence and the pressure on potential witnesses to testify were somewhat different than in previous investigations. 

Does anyone out there know anything about a strange little book called Tales of the RIC? It dates from the early 1920s and purports to be the memoirs of the Royal Irish Constabulary member based at a station in an area in which the Irish Republican Army was active. I say "purports" because I suspect it was one of the last kicks of can by the Black Propaganda department set up during the First World War by the British Government. It's mission was to circulate stories to the "neutral" media, in particular in the pre-1917 United States. The book has my spidey sense tingling because it's just too slickly written. And too much happens in just one station's area. It's almost as if someone has collected up all the IRA atrocity stories in circulation at the time and attributed them to one Irish county. I have little doubt that some of the stories are true. The British attempt to smother the Irish independence movement after the First World War involved a lot of brutality and viciousness from both sides. I've tried to find out more about this book, published by Blackwood, and its author. And all I've drawn is blanks. I'd love to hear from anyone who can fill in those blanks.

The fate of the Colours of the old King’s Own Scottish Borderers is the subject of debate and the future of the regimental museum in Berwick has been thrown into mix. The KOSB colours were retired earlier this year when the Queen presented the 1st Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, which was created in 2006 by merging the KOSB with the Royal Scots, with its own colours. The KOSB was raised in Edinburgh in 1689 and some argue the old colours should be preserved there. But the old regimental depot and museum is in Berwick and there are growing calls for the colours to be laid up at the historic Berwick Barracks. The problem may be that it’s feared English Heritage, who own the old barracks complex, want to turn it into luxury flats. The museum’s opening hours have already been cut in what many supporters regard as an attempt to cut visitor numbers down so much that its closure will be justified. It’s a good little museum and it would be a tragedy if is shut down.An online appeal has been launched to bring the Colours to Berwick -Berwick4borderers

The site also includes details of plans to save the museum and use the barracks complex to help injured ex-service personnel and their families.

I watched a documentary recently about the 1916 film The Battle of the Somme, possibly the most successful British movies of all time; 20 million tickets were sold for it in Britain alone. The documentary featured attempts to work out which bits of the film were real and which bits were recreations. It was a silent movie but men could be seen talking. A lip reader was brought in and revealed what the men had said. Fascinating. But the scary bit came when experts in facial recognition were brought in to help identify some of the soldiers who appeared in the film. Stills from the movie were compared with photographs of people reputed to have been in it. On at least two occasions, the experts announced they had a close match, only for military records to reveal the man in the photograph could not be in the man in the film. What scared me was that these experts regularly gave evidence in court linking bad guys captured on security tapes to the accused. The experts were the first to admit that the identifications of the men in the movie were not definite, they would only go as far as to say it was worth looking at their military records. But they gave every appearance of knowing what they were talking about and if I were on a jury I would have taken their evidence far more seriously than I obviously should of. Sadly, I suspect few of the criminals  fingered in court by "expert witnesses" of this kind had military records to back up their alibis.

I’ve often wondered about the “Leave No Man Behind” policy of western armies fighting in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. It seemed to me crazy to risk more lives to recover a dead body. Surely, it would be better to leave one dead body behind than lose five more men in a counter-attack to recover it. Of course, you can’t know for sure that someone’s dead until you take their pulse. And I’d like to think that if it was me lying there that someone would make to effort to rescue me. In the old days, rescuing the wounded used to voluntary. But now soldiers are ordered to go back in.
Then, I got it. Commendable though rescuing the wounded is, it’s not the point. What NATO commanders want to avoid is the bodies of their soldiers being used as propaganda. The last thing they can afford is a video on Al Jazeera of a British, Canadian, or American head being paraded through a village stuck on top of a pole. Hearts and Minds is a policy that applies as much to the Home Front as it does to the frontlines of an insurgent war.