God bless Alec Penstone - he fought for us in WW2 and he's still fighting for us now

Remembrance Sunday this year took place eighty years since the end of WW2. The numbers of veterans who took part in those hostilities have dwindled to the point where very few of them remain amongst us. ITV's Good Morning Britain on Friday saw a splendid D Day veteran, Alec Penstone, tell stunned presenters Kate Garraway and Adil Ray... "that the sacrifice of the lost men of his generation 'wasn't worth' what the country has become".

Mr Penstone added: "What we fought for was our freedom, now it's a darn sight worse than when I fought for it." This dear old man is a treasure who provides a glimpse of what it once meant to be British. It is of course a sad inevitability of the passing years that fewer amongst successive generations know much about the war years, or about the sheer scale of the brutality.

For this reason, it is essential that we must never forget what brave men like Mr Penstone did for all of us with the sacrifices they made. Hundreds of thousands never came back, far too many remain missing and unaccounted for leaving grieving families without the closure they so desperately deserve.

Spending much of my time in Southeast Asia generally, and Thailand in particular from time to time, I have ventured to the west of the country on several occasions. Nearing the Burmese (Myanmar) border is the town of Kanchanaburi situated at the confluence of the Khwae Yai and the Khwae Noi rivers.

The Khwae Yai river is the location of the famous "Bridge over the River Kwai", over which passes the infamous "Death Railway" constructed by thousands of allied POWs under slave labour.

Kanchanaburi is also the final resting place of many of those thousands of POWs who succumbed to the sheer horror of their brutal existence under Imperial Japanese forces occupying Thailand (Siam) at the time.

The Thai government and the ANZACs maintain these cemeteries in peaceful tranquillity as befits the memory of those who died. We must always remember the hundreds of thousands of Mr Penstone's contemporaries, especially his friends who laid down their lives to secure our future freedom from oppression.

And if you want an indelible reminder then you find that closer to home by taking a trip to the Normandy beaches and the beautiful final resting places of the fallen allied service members, British and American alike.

See for yourself the peaceful beauty alongside the pock marked ground where thousands of allied shells landed during the pre-invasion naval barrage.

Mr Penstone's generation have every right, perhaps more than most, to feel aggrieved at a country descended into mediocrity and worse. A country so dysfunctional as to be beyond a joke with a government so inept it defies belief.

Where to begin? Perhaps the best place would be with the shocking treatment of UK pensioners, of which Mr Penstone is one. Does he have his winter fuel payment? Having worked all his life and to this day Mr Penstone remains the biggest seller of remembrance poppies in the country, why should he be at risk of having his pension taxed at the looming budget?

Why should have to suffer the indignity of having his tax contributions paid all his life squandered on housing and maintaining illegal invaders to the country?

The Britain of today is not worthy of the sacrifice of men like Alec Penstone, who fought and in so many cases died and all for what? Did they do this so horrible little weasels like Sadiq Khan and Two-Tier-Free-Gear amongst a host of other Labour Party detritus can plant their noses in the trough and gorge themselves silly?

British values and British culture are being sacrificed at the altar of political correctness to pander to minority elements of UK society. The most egregious face of modern-day Britian is the appalling anti-Semitism sweeping the country presently signalling a propaganda victory for malignant and radical Islamists funded by Tehran!

There are very few of them left alive now but ask any surviving veteran about liberating places like Bergen Belsen, or Auschwitz Birkenau, or Dachau what that was like.

What was it like to open railway trucks and to witness the cascade of decaying corpses? How did it feel to go into crematoriums and see the piles of half burnt bodies or the ashes of the deceased in the ovens?

Bless his heart, but Alec Penstone fought against that with his brothers in arms, so many never tasting the fruits of the freedom they fought so hard to obtain.

It is truly a shocking indictment of this prime minister and this government to have presided over the accelerated demise of a once great and proud country.

God Bless you, Alec Penstone, with thanks to you and all your mates for your service.