We’ll break our hearts, bury dead… but survive
IN A LONG lifetime I have never seen our old country in such a comprehensive mess. Health issues apart, our entire economy is being systematically dismantled.The damage being done will take a minimum 10 years to repair and parts of it will never return.
It is all very well our Chancellor handing out hundreds of billions in compensation but one day all that will have to be repaid. Our children and possibly grandchildren will be paying for life. Even if coronavirus was conquered tomorrow hundreds of thousands of small businesses will never reopen and a millionplus redundant employees will have to start all over again.
And yes, there will be huge numbers departing from this life before their time and at 81, that could easily include me. Harsh? Yes but unavoidable. It is too late to regret.
And yet, and yet… despite all the above I refuse to believe that the literally Great Britain is finished for ever. So long only as we recall one salient historical tradition. We British take our losses, grieve, bury our dead and keep our heads. But we do not panic.
In wide travels I have seen panic. It is deadly beyond anything that weapons or disease can inflict. It defies reason, facts, logic, appeal. It kills and destroys. It is totally counter-productive.
So as to the scariest of forecasts, some of them official, I do not believe them. Blind optimism? No, there is evidence – but from the past.
Since time began man has sought to foresee the future and he has always failed. He started with scattered chicken entrails, passed through crystal balls, tarot cards, palms of hands and tea leaves. All bunkum.The only hint to the future
IF geriatrics have to go into isolation, the House of Lords will be able to convene and debate in a phone booth.
is to scan our history. On the first day of the Somme we lost 20,000 – all young men. In the whole of the First World War, a million. In the Second World War many thousands died in the Blitz – men, women and children. In 1940 all seemed lost but we stuck together, fought back and we won.
It took sacrifices that make today’s crisis look like a tea party. But we survived, we came back, we won – and we can do it again.
The forecasts of officialdom have an appalling record. We were told horrendous losses would occur from Asian flu, bird flu, Mers, Sars – now mere memories. Before
Brexit we were told by the high economic panjandrums at the Treasury, the Bank of England, the Confederation of British Industry and the Financial Times that ghastly damage would be inflicted. Utter rubbish.The reverse occurred.
EVERY year we experience seasonal winter flu. Records show up to 15,000 succumb but the vast majority have already had a preexisting constitution weakening condition.
There will one day, perhaps sooner than our officials think, be a vaccine as there was with Salk, which destroyed poliomyelitis, the scourge of my boyhood.
However, before that arrives there will be deaths, but mostly the victims will be the afflicted – those with emphysema, chronic bronchitis and cardiac problems – and the three self-inflicted… alcoholics, the morbidly obese and chain smokers.
But as a country we will not die, nor will we even collapse. We will grieve the lost loved ones, survive, carry on and fully recover.
So if you have a Union Jack in the cupboard, run it up the flagpole and show the world.
We Brits are not going anywhere.