Where is our inspiration when we most need it?

19 November 2008

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Bryan Forbes remembers listening to Churchill as a 14-year-old evacuee and now looks with envy at Obama’s capacity to galvanise hope. Where are his UK counterparts?

Last week the BBC launched its annual appeal for Children in Need, only days after our emotions were flayed by the revelation that a 17-month-old child was battered to death despite being visited 60 times by welfare workers in Haringey, the leader of whom is paid £100,000 a year supposedly to prevent such things happening, but sees no reason why she should apologise or resign. As much as the threat of terrorism, we should all fear the collapse of morality in public life. The blatant refusal of those in positions of power to accept responsibility — and instead hang in there for the golden handshakes persistently awarded for failure — is a damning indictment of a society that has lost its way.

In the same way that Obama must face and attempt to repair the wholesale collapse of financial institutions, we must admit to the collapse of our collective morality and the abolition of what we could once justly boast was our history of liberty. The danger of continued inertia, our reluctance to elect leaders who have knowledge of and respect for history means we will be condemned to have our lives ordered by the second rate.

I didn’t want to end up after four-score years a disillusioned, cynical observer, but the mendacity of so many of our career politicians has brought me to this point. That was not the way I thought I would spend the twilight of my years. I remember as a 14-year-old evacuee listening to Churchill hardening our resolve as I crouched beside an ancient wireless in a Cornish billet. Then I knew nothing of politics, but I recognised the voice of honesty that has long since been stilled. It has become fashionable to denigrate Churchill, to pick holes in his long career, but those who now find sport in reducing him to their own size in all probability would not be here if he had not existed.

At that moment in our destiny there was nobody else to bend the arc of history toward the hope of a better day. That was the very same vision Obama conjured for the poor and dispossessed who stood in line and, please God, he delivers. We need inspiration instead of the same old sterile rhetoric. We need all our strength to remember we once harboured the conviction that we stood on the brink of building a better, fairer society. We have yet to succeed, to annihilate the knife, drug and drink culture that rots the fabric of our once great country and to find again somebody who will inspire us.

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Austin Barry

November 20th, 2008 8:44am Report this comment

It is extraordinary that a country which can produce remarkable, inspirational figures in the arts, sciences and academia is governed at every level by second-rate, self-regarding, self-serving non-entities. Brown's gloomy landslide of a face epitomises all the venality and corruption of modern politics, and Jacqui Smith's its unattractive ignorant complacency. Our leaders are precisely described by the Irish term for preposterous dullards: gobshites.

Marc O'Polo

November 22nd, 2008 8:05am Report this comment

Brilliant article! Terrible shame that it's all so true.

Dodgy Geezer

November 24th, 2008 1:55am Report this comment

"It has become fashionable to denigrate Churchill, to pick holes in his long career, but those who now find sport in reducing him to their own size in all probability would not be here if he had not existed..."

Alas, probably not completely true. If Churchill had not existed, we would have had these hand-wringing types all over this island from the 1940s onward. Churchill, and his influence on later politicians, kept them out until the 1990s..

David Short

November 24th, 2008 3:31am Report this comment

I'm sure the Germans were as inspired by Hitler.

Churchill was a warmonger. If we had not fought the Second World War, we would be immmeasurably richer.

Ben

November 24th, 2008 1:58pm Report this comment

My thoughts exactly this cold weekend just gone.

As if the vomit-encrusted, litter-strewn pavements of South West London weren't enough to make you yearn for another time and place, I'd just been to the cinema to see the truly execrable Bond fiasco. Or Quantum of B******s as Kelvin McKenzie so rightly describes it.

When even our own fictious national icon is being trashed you know we're in trouble! Is nothing sacred?

John Thomas

November 24th, 2008 3:46pm Report this comment

What David Short clearly fails to realise is that Hitler had decided on aggression some while before Churchill cam to power, and that if, in the mid/later-30s, he had been firmly resisted (instead of being appeased, by pacifists, etc.)there would have been hardly any war. If Churchill had had power from say 1935, he would have firmly resisted Hitler (who is on record as saying that he would have backed down, if this had happened), and few would have died (no Americans) and there would have been no Holacaust. It was the appeasers who made the war what it became, not Churchill.

David Short

November 25th, 2008 6:10am Report this comment

I'm sorry but I can only reply as a retort to a John Thomas who not only presumes to know how I think ('realise' is the wrong word), but who is also illiterate or careless, or both.

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