According to the BBC, Corporal Tomos Stringer, of the Royal Logistics Corps, was refused a room in a hotel when, on leave to recover from an injury sustained in Afghanistan, he was visiting a fellow soldier who had been injured.

The hotel in question, the Metro, apparently has had problems with rowdy soldiers in the past. My instinct is to say that where there are problems, the police should be called and, if necessary, taken up with the commanding officers of the people in question. Turning someone away because of an association with other people who happen to have the same job as them is unreasonably discriminatory. In this particular case, however, Cpl Stringer was on his own, not in uniform and, I surmise from the story, was clearly not going to cause any problems. Indeed, had he not used his Army ID to check in, the person at the desk would have had not idea that he was in the armed forces.

It might appear that this was a poor decision by a clerk who didn’t understand the reasoning behind the, frankly daft, rule introduced by the hotel; nevertheless, the existence of the rule itself is superfluous and its implementation arbitrary and unfair.

I’ve set up a petition on the Number Ten website; I will put the link here as soon as it’s ready.

xD.

Posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Categories: Armed forces.
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