Lay aside the quibbles about our soldiers' allowances (on which, unlike US troops, they pay tax) and subsidised housing (often disgusting). General Sir Richard Dannatt's blast against low pay is as much about culture as detail. The hard fact is that politicians know there are few votes in giving priority to soldiers. There are votes in military hardware, as long as it safeguards industrial jobs in marginal constituencies. There is general approval for treating police and NHS staff reasonably well, because we feel threatened by lawlessness and ill health. But the poor bloody infantry? Forget it. The welfare and dignity of squaddies is almost as unpopular a cause as the welfare of prisoners. And when push comes to shove in Treasury priorities, politicians know that.

To see why, you have to go back half a century. Britain fought two hard and total wars in quick succession, and was — certainly in the second one — willing to do so. “Our Boys” were a source of pride; most extended families had one or two. What the Victorian Kipling called “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep” was a rarer sport by 1945. But as the 1950s and 1960s progressed, an understandable revulsion against the horror of war grew, together with a sense that sleeping was safe again. With these feelings came an increasing willingness to mock. Think of the Monty Python idiot officers and mincing marchers, or the rise of gags about the wizard-prang saloon bore with his handlebar moustache. What you can mock you can ignore; and as the Army and Navy dwindled in size, that became easier. Easier still through the weird conviction of the Cold War years that any future conflict would be nuclear and total: I remember all too well as a young reporter being told by disdainful ministers that “conventional forces” had had their day.

Easy to forget, to belittle, to sideline the human beings — “wetware”, in the horrid phrase. Easy, too, to conflate your general self-approving peacenik attitude with carelessness for soldiers' welfare, status and dignity. Moreover, it is the squeaky wheel that gets most oil, and Service culture necessarily looks inwards with tight teams and bonded comradeship, taking an almost perverse pride in “delivering” without complaint, whether asked to fight, burn dead cow carcasses or operate clapped-out Green Goddesses in a firefighters' strike.

But things have changed. Tony Blair's reckless determination to “do what's right and somehow or other we'll sort it out” was chronicled in his wife's account of their family finances. It applies equally to his willingness to commit troops, most disastrously in Iraq and Afghanistan. That they were too few, under-equipped and suffering increasingly low morale was something he overlooked, or put under the heading of “somehow or other we'll sort it out”.

Now he is gone and others have to do just that. If we are going to have wars, we should look after those we send to them. The defence budget has to go up. But it seems unlikely that the electorate has completely got over its tendency not to care about Forces' pay and conditions, especially given the widespread indignation at the wars themselves. Of course in justice, public disaffection about the Iraq blunder should not be taken out on the poor bloody infantry. In practice, even keen tax-and-spend enthusiasts are likely to resent paying more tax to fund people fighting miserable campaigns in distant lands. Mr Blair got his successor into this mess, and then swanned off to be a “peace envoy”. I doubt that Gordon Brown feels at all grateful.

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