Why didn't the BAFF founders join CAFFUK instead? That question has been asked from time to time.
One reason is that it would have been unfair to CAFFUK veterans to have their core pension grievance unavoidably submerged, in the many current issues involving service personnel in the 21st century -
- such as support for the wounded, single and family accommodation, compensation, manning control, pay and allowances, electoral participation, inquests and inquiries, and so much else.
CAFFUK had been formed to campaign for pensions for a group of veterans who had retired before April 1975 without completing a full career. Although CAFF subsequently widened their remit, in fairness we never saw much evidence either from their website, or from our own dealings with them, of much interest in issues affecting current personnel or recent veterans.
BAFF did offer to support CAFFUK's pre-1975 service pension campaign if they wanted, but CAFFUK responded by sending dire threats of legal action, which they also made public on their websites.
With hindsight, it is obvious that while willing in principle to support the pre-1975 pension campaign, BAFF could never have endorsed some of the claims and legal 'interpretations' put forward by CAFFUK.
At one stage during the ensuing trademark dispute, CAFFUK offered, for whatever reason, to merge BAFF's registered nonprofit Company Limited by Guarantee into their unincorporated club or association. We agreed to at least hear what they had to say.
CAFFUK proceeded to stress the importance of reserving all elected positions in any merged association to those 'of and below' the ranks of Lieutenant Commander (RN), Lieutenant Colonel (RM or Army) and Squadron Leader (RAF), as set out in the CAFFUK constitution.
Although no BAFF Executive Council member actually held a current or former service rank above those levels, the ranks quoted by CAFFUK aren’t equivalent across the services. Applying CAFFUK's rank restriction differently to different branches of the armed forces would have been patently unfair, and would also have appeared ignorant to future potential members.
But the CAFFUK correspondent continued to insist that the quoted ranks were equivalent – and that his information was MOD-sourced, which was obviously not the case.
It was clear from this, and from other examples of the same mindset, that the problem went deeper than a simple one-off misunderstanding of the service rank structure. The correspondence ended there.