Have you any idea who Bill Rammell is? Neither did I until his appearance on TV warned me that I face a senility swearing at mendacious, weasly politicians who go on the news to explain away mass murder. Rammell is the British Minister of State for Armed Forces and he rolled up to Channel 4 news to say that he was absolutely sure that the British army had not murdered more than 113 Afghan civilians in the last 18 months. Yes it was 113 but it was not any more than that. Rammell explained that this would be politically foolish and not the right thing to do. Anyway no one else in Afghanistan minds the British, Americans et al opening up on villages with heavy machine guns and using high explosives on mud houses. That was the gist if you allow for paraphrase.

Channel 4 had used freedom of information legislation to get hold of the details of compensation payouts to Afghan civilians. It’s almost worth getting a few family members killed so generous is British largesse. One man got $210 for his dead wife while some lucky blighter’s six dead donkeys earned him $960. One wife equals four and a bit donkeys. A similar system was used in feudal Europe. The higher your social status the more a wrongdoer had to pay in compensation for killing you. You can download the spreadsheets with the payouts and what you notice is how many of the claims for fatalities the British reject. Their get out clause is an insistence on a level of documentary proof of death that would be beyond the infrastructure of an Afghan village in normal times and is an insurmountable obstacle to a family that has just been bombed by the RAF. On the other hand they don’t seem to mind so much paying out for property damage. This is partly because it’s easier to prove that you’ve had your roof blown off than you’ve had a child killed and because there will be a big political pressure to keep the real death toll as obscure as possible.

Things are rather better for the British bereaved. Elizabeth Windsor has in the Sun’s words, decided to “recognise the loss suffered by the families of Our Boys killed in action with the award of an honour in her name”.  The Elizabeth Cross will be given to the families of members of British forces killed in action in someone else’s country while trying to kill the locals since 1945. Or, more accurately, every blood soaked colonial adventure in recent British imperial history. Be that as it may, there are few things  more consoling after the death of a close relative, particularly a son or daughter, than a shiny trinket. To make things even better it comes with a parchment scroll which you can frame and put on the mantelpiece.

Can we call this a racist double standard? Without a doubt! The Ministry of Defence’s own statement that “compensation claims brought against British forces are considered on the basis of whether the MOD has a legal liability to pay compensation” makes the point explicitly. Compensation does not depend on whether a British soldier killed a member of your family. It depends on whether or not it feels that it is liable and any organisation that feels a dead woman Afghan woman’s life is worth $210 has an utter contempt for dead civilians.

Even in a state with a strong legal system and occasionally inquisitive press in the north of Ireland British soldiers were able to murder civilians without any significant sanction. They would generally get promoted once the initial furore had died down. If the Rammels of this world can appear in public and claim that their troops are not murdering civilians with impunity in Afghanistan they are either fools or liar and one does not exclude the other.