For the young soldiers - many of them conscripts on National Service - the Malaya campaign half a century ago was a frightening and brutal introduction to adult life. They were catapulted from drab, predictable 1950s Britain to inhospitable jungle territory on the other side of the world to risk their lives against communist insurgents: 519 British troops, 95 of them Scots, were killed. It took a decade of rotating troops involving almost all the British regiments, but the eventual success is now regarded as a textbook operation for winning a counter-insurgency campaign by gaining the support of the civilian population.

It is a measure of how strong that bond remains that the Malaysian government offered to honour the Commonwealth troops who defended its sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s with campaign medals. Veterans of the Malaya campaign in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji can now wear their Pingat Jasa Malaysia medals with pride, because their governments accepted them proudly and straightforwardly in the spirit of gratitude in which they were offered. Since a ruling by the Queen in 1968 that orders, decorations and medals conferred on UK citizens by Commonwealth countries could be worn "without restriction", that should have been the case here. Instead, the remaining 35,000 British veterans of the "emergency", now in their seventies and eighties, are precluded from wearing the PJM at Armistice Day services and on other suitable occasions.

Only in Britain could a committee spend two years debating the finer points of whether old soldiers can wear a medal from a foreign government "for events more than five years previously" and then break that rule for some sets of veterans - those of the Murmansk convoys and the Suez campaign - while upholding it for another. It is shameful that a generation marked for life by their experiences fighting on behalf of their country is subjected in old age to such petty bureaucracy. Not least because after their Malaya adventure they came home to put the values of their childhood and youth - the hard work, self-sufficiency and care for others which saw Britain through the Second World War - into their civilian lives. Grateful to return to normality and raise families, they largely forgave the fact that Malaya became our "forgotten war".

It does not come naturally to such people to sue their own government, nor do they tend to have recourse to the law for something which ought to be settled by common sense. As we trust that the civil servants are about to discover, however, when common sense is thrown to the wind and their wrath sufficiently aroused, there is no stopping them. Maladministration does not convey the disgraceful shabbiness of this shambles.