Meantime, several thousand miles away from the comfortable offices of the Mail on Sunday, the men of the Black Watch were taking in the news that they would soon be moving north to Baghdad from their posting in southern Iraq.

The move, which exposes these soldiers to the prospect of heavy casualties, was requested by the American military and comes shortly before a US presidential election in which the incumbent is looking to client states like the UK to demonstrate continued support for the doomed Iraq project by putting their own men more clearly in the firing line.

Ultimate command of the Black Watch remains with a British officer, but because the area around Baghdad is a US ‘zone’, day to day operational orders for these troops will come from the Americans. British command is token.

The Black Watch are in Iraq, as are other British military personnel, because a client British government was required to take part in a profiteering American war of conquest or suffer the (very real) consequences of abandoning the special relationship (the US, in fact, has many such special relationships).

So we come back to the ‘death of Britannia’, the abandonment of sovereignty and betrayal. As the men of the Black Watch put their lives on the line for a war their people don’t support and which the world knows to be an exercise in pillage, betrayal comes from the so-called patriots in the British press who bleat about sovereignty being ceded to Europe as they cover-up for the naked abandonment of British sovereignty to the interests of American foreign policy. How many of our soldiers must die before we acknowledge our less than glorious role as a pawn in the grand imperial project of US-led corporate globalisation? Because acknowledge it we must.