Britain deserves huge credit for challenging Hitler’s might in dark days of 1940
Joyce Mcmillan suggests, implausibly (Perspective, 8 May), that the future “the wartime generation” hoped for was to join the EU and that leaving it was “betrayal”. In fact, any survivors of the Second World War I have known were intensely proud to be British.
She fulminates against Britain’s victory because it was the victory of the Allies. True. However, there would have been no war to win if Britain, alone in Europe, had not held out against Germany in 1940 and thereafter, being the only nation to have survived the whole war unconquered.
She should not let her nationalist politics blind her to the fact that the international institutions she praises were founded in great measure by the United Kingdom: the UN, which has attempted to make the world a better place since its founding and, especially, Nato, which has kept peace in Europe since its founding in 1949.
She claims that leaving the sclerotic, dysfunctional EU super-state is due to “false patriotism”, but would that not count equally for those advocating Scotland leaving the UK? Presumably, belief in a vast, corrupt bureaucracy like the EU is “true patriotism”, except, of course, that it is not a country. It was because the UK was and is a democracy and a decent country with compassion that so many people have come here since the end of the war; millions of them, because their own countries are not democratic, decent and compassionate – or has she not looked at the people in the street recently?
ANDREW HN GRAY Craiglea Drive, Edinburgh
Joyce Mcmillan brings out the old quote from Dr Johnson about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel; of course, in the world of Joyce, this only applies to British patriotism – not the Scottish
patriotism that she shares.
Grasp this Joyce, and you will begin to understand why many of us are suspicious of the Scottish variety! WILLIAM BALLANTINE
Dean Road Bo’ness, West Lothian
The “herd immunity” to which Joyce Mcmillan sneeringly refers is not a right wing concept. The term is actually a universally accepted concept and is indeed the only effective long term measure of dealing with a pandemic for which there is no vaccine or cure.
Lockdown is simply a way of slowing down transmission (and hence that development of herd immunity ) in order not to overwhelm health services. In the UK such services have from the beginning been far from overwhelmed, so her claim that not starting earlier would have saved tens of thousands of British lives is just rubbish. How does she then explain the lower death rate in Sweden which decided against lockdown?
Lockdown itself, as we are becoming increasingly aware, has for most people serious consequences financially and on mental and other health aspects.
The big long-term problem is that the majority of the population has not developed immunity, so coming into contact with a carrier is just as dangerous as ever; therefore avoiding such, especially for those most likely to have a bad outcome including death, will be necessary for a long time yet.
Easing enforced restrictions must come to an end much sooner but it must be left to the individual to decide which is the lesser of the two evils, death risk or the problems of enforced lock-down.
The latter may, of course, worsen if voluntary lockdown means loss of financial support.