Commonwealth soldiers do not have to got through immigration controls, and in time may "apply for citizenship". It would be interesting to know exactly how many have achieved a British passport in, say, the last eight years when the number of Commonwealth troops has shot up from about 450 to the present number.

Behind this run the grumbling problems of pay and conditions. Junior ranks recently won a nine per cent pay hike. This looks generous on the surface. But it had to be for young soldiers fighting for longer periods of continuous engagement with the enemy in Afghanistan than most infantry units on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, at an hourly rate below the national minimum wage.

Housing conditions are still pretty scandalous - as Sir Jock Stirrup said this week only about 50 per cent of

Young soldiers are fighting for longer periods than most First World War infantry units

service family houses are fully modernised and up to standard.

Worse is the scandal over which there is a government and media omerta - the treatment and care of the injured from battle in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Birmingham hospitals, Selly Oak in particular.

Officially this is now "being sorted out". Unofficially, everything I hear from commanders and families says not much has changed there. Robert Gates, the new US Defense Secretary, has just fired senior staff including a general and the Army Secretary, for neglect at the Walter Reed Hospital for the injured. The shame is that nobody in politics, and not one of my defence colleagues in the mainstream British media has bothered to make comparison between the Walter Reed patients and the wounded lying in Selly Oak - whose conditions, according to my sources, are as bad, if not worse.