Sorry, we’ve given up the Dam ghost
WHEN I heard the music from the Dambusters film recently it reminded me of a visit I had paid to a pub near their base where legend has it that you can hear the ghosts of the squadron laughing after hours when all is silent and deserted. I no more believe in Guy Gibson’s ghost than I do in Martians landing in my garden but if I did meet it this is what I should say: Thank you for all you did to keep this country free.
It is entirely due to the courage of people like you and your colleagues that I did not grow up with London draped in swastikas and concentration camps in the counties. You died to preserve our liberty but I am afraid we have squandered that precious legacy.
We are not free to express our opinions, a right we would once have taken for granted. Britain is now a place where people can lose livelihoods and be vilified just for disagreeing with prevailing state orthodoxy or with the views of a vocal and vindictive minority. Indeed, the police have appeared on doorsteps to “check the thinking” of citizens who dissent. Isn’t that what you were fighting against?
AFTER the war we set up a rather wonderful thing called the National Health Service. But now it has gone quite barmy along with the rest of our institutions and in all seriousness asks men if they are pregnant. Even our politicians say they cannot define what a woman is.And they run the country!
You remember the kindertransport? Well, we are still just as kind-hearted and recently 100,000 Brits volunteered to take in Ukrainian refugees but we are now so ruled by bureaucracy and there are so many forms to fill in that most of the poor souls are still waiting for clearance.
It was the same when we had a rather nasty plague recently and former NHS workers volunteered to help: they faced a myriad of forms asking about their training in diversity. Behold what we have done with your sacrifice. Sorry, Guy Gibson.