Live for now instead of rewriting history

IT is all too easy to look at history, and the individuals involved, through modern eyes and to use selective memories to target individuals from a political viewpoint. It is unlikely that characters from the past were all good or all bad and I think Sir Winston Churchill suffers in that regard being an alleged colonialist.

I have never voted Tory and I am not a royalist, but when I consider individuals who offered inspiration when the British people needed it in the dark days of the Second World War three names that come to my mind are Winston Churchill, Queen Mary and King George VI. A Nazi occupation would not have permitted “activism” and the idea of a Black Lives Matter protest is laughable.

The anti-colonial activists do give me a crumb of comfort as surely they are all Brexit supporters because look at the EU. Spain was a major colonial power which tried to invade Britain but was turned back by the forces of Good Queen Bess. Denmark, Italy and France were colonial powers that did invade Britain so do we rename the Jorvik Centre or Hadrian’s Wall and pull down all our Norman churches?

Belgium, Holland and Portugal were also colonial powers and then there is Germany. The country that controls the EU invaded much of it on its way to the Channel. We must also not forget China whose colonial intentions are self-evident in Tibet, India and the South China Seas.

When China is not using military might, its tentacles spread across the globe through cyberspace and in the UK from the money it pumps into our universities in pursuit of power and influence. I regard academia as masters of hypocrisy but there is not a squeak from the anti-colonialists.

We cannot re-write history but we can act in the present.

Richard Massey, Holbrook