REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY: NOVEMBER 8th: 2020
Today is ‘Remembrance Sunday’. It is a day when the nation pauses and reflects upon all the lives that matter, and especially those millions of lives who fought and died for the freedoms which until, March 2020, we all enjoyed. I dread to think what those courageous men and women would think if they could speak today? Might they conclude that they fought and died in vain, or that the men and women who survived them would so easily forget them? Would they hang their heads in shame at the nature of our current actions as a once-proud nation? Until November 2020, never has a ‘Remembrance Sunday’ not been remembered in the traditional manner that we have come to expect, and which accords the men and women in whose name it has been annually held, the respect they truly deserve for what they sacrificed during the nation’s time of greatest need. What we do to ‘The fallen’ today is tantamount to walking over their graves and stomping on their most cherished beliefs.
And what does this annual accolade break down into since 1919, after all the marches have been marched, after all the poppies have been publicly worn with pride, and after the diminishing band of brave surviving war veterans, aided by an array of dignitaries have laid their wreaths at the foot of cenotaphs across the nation? I’ll tell you what is left at the heart of this annual exercise when all the water has been drained from the cooking pot. It boils down to three minutes of national silence and prayer for the lives of all fallen soldiers since the commencement of the ‘First World War’. During this annual day of remembrance, the nation promises that ‘we shall not forget’ what they did, who they did it for, and why they did it!
For the very first time, and by government decree, this year’s ‘Remembrance Sunday’ runs the risk of being sadly remembered for all the wrong things. There will be no public celebration across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, of the type of which this nation has come to expect ‘because of Coronavirus and the nation’s four-week lockdown’.
This year, as well as wearing a poppy, support can be shown by using a digital poppy on social media sites, or by colouring in a downloadable poppy picture and displaying it. Downing Street has confirmed that remembrance services and events can be held (but not in churches), as long as there are strict social distancing measures and participants who are allowed to attend are masked. There will also be a small ceremony at the London Cenotaph. People are being encouraged to watch it on TV at home.
Was I not in the highest of vulnerable categories (by age and medical condition criteria), whatever the government restrictions dictated tomorrow, I would be at the local cenotaph at 11:00 am paying my profound respect to the men and women who died in our yesterdays so that we might enjoy their hard-fought freedoms in our tomorrows. As, for masking at my attendance, I would be following the spirit of the government’s advice but would be wearing a ‘World War 1’ gas mask!
What would the fallen of both world wars make of Covid Britain? What would they think about the mass suspension of basic freedoms and civil liberties which the British Government imposes at the will of our blonde-mopped Prime Minister? Our government has seized powers unto themselves today which has never previously been exercised by any previous peacetime government since the reign of Oliver Cromwell and the 17th-century civil wars. Boris changes his mind as often as Dominic Cummings changes his, and does what he wants to do without the scrutiny of any Parliamentary oversight or right to discuss, debate and if needs be, change, where parliamentary majority desires. I neither pitch my tent in the camp of the ‘conspiracy theorists’ nor that of the ‘Government’ where the location of truthful fact is supposed to reside. Wherever the truth of the matter lies, it does not bed down in either of these two opposing camps. What I do know for certain anymore, is not to take anything for certain whenever listening to the ‘truth’ of these two camps. I strongly suspect that I reside on more reasonable ground that is emotionally distanced from these two camps; a place where the vast majority of most rationally minded folk hang out!
None of the figures, information, or graphs which the Government and its Ministers present day after day can any longer be taken to reflect the accuracy of any situation it purports to exists. We have a government which tells us repeatedly that they follow the science but who seemingly chooses not to follow the scientist’s advice whenever it suits them! The only thing which the Government appears to be following at the moment is their own shadows as they twist and turn, and chase their tails around and around as they lead us down another rabbit hole into Alice’s wonderland where money trees are grown. The longer we remain trapped inside the government’s warren of wasted existence, the more austere becomes the economic climate above ground when we eventually re-emerge.
Meanwhile, we cannot even watch our children being born, we cannot have them schooled with regularity from term to term, we are unable to mix with our family and friends, we cannot marry and have the number of guests we would like, we cannot visit our sick in the hospital, we cannot be at their bedside to hold their hand as they die, we cannot visit our parents in their Care Homes, and we cannot even bury our dead with the dignity they deserve? As for giving a friendly handshake, a cuddle a hug or a kiss, forget it! And why you may ask? Just so we can save infinitely fewer lives of people who have contracted Covid-19’ than the hospitals could have saved overall were non-Covid-19 patients provided with similar hospital access and operated on for their illnesses, instead of currently having their elective operations cancelled in preference to having only Covid-19 patients treated instead.
As a person in the highest category of vulnerability, and someone who loves his life dearly, I say that my life is no more important than the life of you or your neighbours, your families, or your friends. I say that I should be able to take my own risks and protect myself in my own ways, without the diktat or restrictive lockdown of any government, while the remainder of society should be unshackled from the restrictive yoke it has had placed around its neck, and be allowed to carry on with their lives as normally as is humanely possible. This way, individuals would be able to assess their own risks and the risks to their loved ones, and decide for themselves whether their quality of life is ‘as important’ or ‘more important’ a factor as is the longevity of life! We do this anyway with what we choose to eat, drink, smoke, inject; what makes contracting Covid-19 any more dangerous? This course of action would enable society to continue to earn their living and to keep their jobs, preserve their sanity and protect their homes from the bailiffs.
There will be too high a price to pay for the current policies of all governments across the world during this pandemic virus. During the first world war over 800,000 British soldiers, personnel and civilians were killed in a four-year period. Let us remind ourselves why 800,00O men, women and children were prepared to die? They were prepared to sacrifice their lives for the very freedoms we have given up for fewer than 49,000 deaths of people who have died ‘with’ Covid-19 (Not necessarily ‘from’ Covid-19) since March 2020. On any projection of the Covid-19 death rate in Great Britain before a vaccine enables us to better control the virus and greatly diminish its deadly impact on the population, there is no way we shall ever reach a sizable fraction of the 800,000 deaths (the number of British deaths in the whole of ‘World War I’), and none of that even starts to take into account the number of excess non-Covid-19 deaths caused by the hospital suspension of elective operations. Take it from me, as a constant user of hospital resources over the past seven years since I contracted a blood cancer because I have had seven cancer life-saving operations during the past two years and forty sessions of radiotherapy, my last two cancer operations involved me squeezing through the hospital doors before they shut again to non-Covid-19 patients.
As to the economic cost to the country, we will experience a longer winter than the ‘Ice Age’ brought in and which none of the ‘Game of Thrones’ cast could ever have imagined in their wildest dreams. I suspect that our grandchildren will be still paying the debt we are running up now during the whole of their working lives, should ever regular work return to the masses. As to the tremendous degree of pain, worry, stress and deteriorating mental health the government’s see-saw policies have resulted in, there is no amount of justification or measure of ‘r’ number which can alleviate the hurt caused to so many by so few. In short, our government has managed to make the illness worse than the cure!
Just imagine what the nation could have achieved with the trillions of pound notes we have spent on government policies. Imagine the number of hospitals we could have built, staffed, and stocked with the best equipment money can buy. Imagine how many more doctors, nurses, health workers, carers we could have trained instead of enticing them from other countries who need them more than we do. Imagine the massive housebuilding programme we could have engaged in, the many infrastructure programmes of roads, the upgrading of transport systems that connect all four corners of our small island, the reduction in household poverty, the massive increase in apprenticeship courses for anyone who is unemployed; not to mention the electrification of all motorised engine, the planting of new forests, the filling of a million potholes in the roads, and the cleansing of the air we breathe in. And if you think that this pandemic is as big a crisis as we can have, you ain't seen nothing yet. During the immediate years ahead, climate change will change the lives of all people on the planet as the weather patterns change with a ferocity that only the forces of nature can command. Homes will need to take account of flood plains or get washed away. We could have achieved all of the above and have employed every man, woman and child in the country with a well- paid job in the process with the trillions of pound notes Boris has spent on Covid-19 already! Which policy would you have preferred?
Just in case anyone thinks that I am socialist by political inclination, let me tell you that I am not. Whatever part of me remains Conservative, allow me to honestly express my current feelings, that the sooner our present ‘Chancellor of the Exchequer’ becomes the next Tory leader, the sooner sunnier times will return. While my politics have changed throughout my life, any historical knowledge I have acquired has grown as the study of ‘History’ is one of my greatest past-times.
The life of the Thracian gladiator, Spartacus, and his major slave uprising against the Roman Republic witnessed millions of slaves who refused to be subjugated under Roman rule and were prepared to die in order to exercise their ‘freedom’. And so it also was with the Scottish knight, Sir William Wallace, who became one of the main leaders during the ‘First War of Scottish Independence’. Along with Andrew Moray, Wallace defeated an English army at the ‘Battle of Stirling Bridge’ in September 1297 and was appointed ‘Guardian of Scotland’; a position he served until his defeat at the ‘Battle of Falkirk’ in July 1298. In August 1305, Wallace was captured in Robroyston, near Glasgow, and handed over to ‘King Edward 1st of England’ who had him hanged. drawn and quartered for high treason, and crimes against English civilians. William Wallace and the men who went to war with him valued their freedom more than their life.
And that is the central message of my post today, life without freedom is not worth living with, but it is worth dying for! That is what the men, women and children during the ‘First World War’, the ‘Second World War’ and any subsequent wars Great Britain has fought in have been prepared to die for; the freedom of others!’ We must do whatever we can to regain our freedoms again at the earliest opportunity because another thing history teaches us is that once any governing body assumes a degree of power it never exercised previously, it is always reluctant to hand back that power without strong political persuasion or civil unrest and outright resistance.
I conclude my post today with one verse from the poem ‘For the Fallen’ by Laurence Binyon:
‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.’
Love and peace Bill xxx
Today is ‘Remembrance Sunday’. It is a day when the nation pauses and reflects upon all the lives that matter, and especially those millions of lives who fought and died for the freedoms which until, March 2020, we all enjoyed. I dread to think what those courageous men and women would think if they could speak today? Might they conclude that they fought and died in vain, or that the men and women who survived them would so easily forget them? Would they hang their heads in shame at the nature of our current actions as a once-proud nation? Until November 2020, never has a ‘Remembrance Sunday’ not been remembered in the traditional manner that we have come to expect, and which accords the men and women in whose name it has been annually held, the respect they truly deserve for what they sacrificed during the nation’s time of greatest need. What we do to ‘The fallen’ today is tantamount to walking over their graves and stomping on their most cherished beliefs.
And what does this annual accolade break down into since 1919, after all the marches have been marched, after all the poppies have been publicly worn with pride, and after the diminishing band of brave surviving war veterans, aided by an array of dignitaries have laid their wreaths at the foot of cenotaphs across the nation? I’ll tell you what is left at the heart of this annual exercise when all the water has been drained from the cooking pot. It boils down to three minutes of national silence and prayer for the lives of all fallen soldiers since the commencement of the ‘First World War’. During this annual day of remembrance, the nation promises that ‘we shall not forget’ what they did, who they did it for, and why they did it!
For the very first time, and by government decree, this year’s ‘Remembrance Sunday’ runs the risk of being sadly remembered for all the wrong things. There will be no public celebration across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, of the type of which this nation has come to expect ‘because of Coronavirus and the nation’s four-week lockdown’.
This year, as well as wearing a poppy, support can be shown by using a digital poppy on social media sites, or by colouring in a downloadable poppy picture and displaying it. Downing Street has confirmed that remembrance services and events can be held (but not in churches), as long as there are strict social distancing measures and participants who are allowed to attend are masked. There will also be a small ceremony at the London Cenotaph. People are being encouraged to watch it on TV at home.
Was I not in the highest of vulnerable categories (by age and medical condition criteria), whatever the government restrictions dictated tomorrow, I would be at the local cenotaph at 11:00 am paying my profound respect to the men and women who died in our yesterdays so that we might enjoy their hard-fought freedoms in our tomorrows. As, for masking at my attendance, I would be following the spirit of the government’s advice but would be wearing a ‘World War 1’ gas mask!
What would the fallen of both world wars make of Covid Britain? What would they think about the mass suspension of basic freedoms and civil liberties which the British Government imposes at the will of our blonde-mopped Prime Minister? Our government has seized powers unto themselves today which has never previously been exercised by any previous peacetime government since the reign of Oliver Cromwell and the 17th-century civil wars. Boris changes his mind as often as Dominic Cummings changes his, and does what he wants to do without the scrutiny of any Parliamentary oversight or right to discuss, debate and if needs be, change, where parliamentary majority desires. I neither pitch my tent in the camp of the ‘conspiracy theorists’ nor that of the ‘Government’ where the location of truthful fact is supposed to reside. Wherever the truth of the matter lies, it does not bed down in either of these two opposing camps. What I do know for certain anymore, is not to take anything for certain whenever listening to the ‘truth’ of these two camps. I strongly suspect that I reside on more reasonable ground that is emotionally distanced from these two camps; a place where the vast majority of most rationally minded folk hang out!
None of the figures, information, or graphs which the Government and its Ministers present day after day can any longer be taken to reflect the accuracy of any situation it purports to exists. We have a government which tells us repeatedly that they follow the science but who seemingly chooses not to follow the scientist’s advice whenever it suits them! The only thing which the Government appears to be following at the moment is their own shadows as they twist and turn, and chase their tails around and around as they lead us down another rabbit hole into Alice’s wonderland where money trees are grown. The longer we remain trapped inside the government’s warren of wasted existence, the more austere becomes the economic climate above ground when we eventually re-emerge.
Meanwhile, we cannot even watch our children being born, we cannot have them schooled with regularity from term to term, we are unable to mix with our family and friends, we cannot marry and have the number of guests we would like, we cannot visit our sick in the hospital, we cannot be at their bedside to hold their hand as they die, we cannot visit our parents in their Care Homes, and we cannot even bury our dead with the dignity they deserve? As for giving a friendly handshake, a cuddle a hug or a kiss, forget it! And why you may ask? Just so we can save infinitely fewer lives of people who have contracted Covid-19’ than the hospitals could have saved overall were non-Covid-19 patients provided with similar hospital access and operated on for their illnesses, instead of currently having their elective operations cancelled in preference to having only Covid-19 patients treated instead.
As a person in the highest category of vulnerability, and someone who loves his life dearly, I say that my life is no more important than the life of you or your neighbours, your families, or your friends. I say that I should be able to take my own risks and protect myself in my own ways, without the diktat or restrictive lockdown of any government, while the remainder of society should be unshackled from the restrictive yoke it has had placed around its neck, and be allowed to carry on with their lives as normally as is humanely possible. This way, individuals would be able to assess their own risks and the risks to their loved ones, and decide for themselves whether their quality of life is ‘as important’ or ‘more important’ a factor as is the longevity of life! We do this anyway with what we choose to eat, drink, smoke, inject; what makes contracting Covid-19 any more dangerous? This course of action would enable society to continue to earn their living and to keep their jobs, preserve their sanity and protect their homes from the bailiffs.
There will be too high a price to pay for the current policies of all governments across the world during this pandemic virus. During the first world war over 800,000 British soldiers, personnel and civilians were killed in a four-year period. Let us remind ourselves why 800,00O men, women and children were prepared to die? They were prepared to sacrifice their lives for the very freedoms we have given up for fewer than 49,000 deaths of people who have died ‘with’ Covid-19 (Not necessarily ‘from’ Covid-19) since March 2020. On any projection of the Covid-19 death rate in Great Britain before a vaccine enables us to better control the virus and greatly diminish its deadly impact on the population, there is no way we shall ever reach a sizable fraction of the 800,000 deaths (the number of British deaths in the whole of ‘World War I’), and none of that even starts to take into account the number of excess non-Covid-19 deaths caused by the hospital suspension of elective operations. Take it from me, as a constant user of hospital resources over the past seven years since I contracted a blood cancer because I have had seven cancer life-saving operations during the past two years and forty sessions of radiotherapy, my last two cancer operations involved me squeezing through the hospital doors before they shut again to non-Covid-19 patients.
As to the economic cost to the country, we will experience a longer winter than the ‘Ice Age’ brought in and which none of the ‘Game of Thrones’ cast could ever have imagined in their wildest dreams. I suspect that our grandchildren will be still paying the debt we are running up now during the whole of their working lives, should ever regular work return to the masses. As to the tremendous degree of pain, worry, stress and deteriorating mental health the government’s see-saw policies have resulted in, there is no amount of justification or measure of ‘r’ number which can alleviate the hurt caused to so many by so few. In short, our government has managed to make the illness worse than the cure!
Just imagine what the nation could have achieved with the trillions of pound notes we have spent on government policies. Imagine the number of hospitals we could have built, staffed, and stocked with the best equipment money can buy. Imagine how many more doctors, nurses, health workers, carers we could have trained instead of enticing them from other countries who need them more than we do. Imagine the massive housebuilding programme we could have engaged in, the many infrastructure programmes of roads, the upgrading of transport systems that connect all four corners of our small island, the reduction in household poverty, the massive increase in apprenticeship courses for anyone who is unemployed; not to mention the electrification of all motorised engine, the planting of new forests, the filling of a million potholes in the roads, and the cleansing of the air we breathe in. And if you think that this pandemic is as big a crisis as we can have, you ain't seen nothing yet. During the immediate years ahead, climate change will change the lives of all people on the planet as the weather patterns change with a ferocity that only the forces of nature can command. Homes will need to take account of flood plains or get washed away. We could have achieved all of the above and have employed every man, woman and child in the country with a well- paid job in the process with the trillions of pound notes Boris has spent on Covid-19 already! Which policy would you have preferred?
Just in case anyone thinks that I am socialist by political inclination, let me tell you that I am not. Whatever part of me remains Conservative, allow me to honestly express my current feelings, that the sooner our present ‘Chancellor of the Exchequer’ becomes the next Tory leader, the sooner sunnier times will return. While my politics have changed throughout my life, any historical knowledge I have acquired has grown as the study of ‘History’ is one of my greatest past-times.
The life of the Thracian gladiator, Spartacus, and his major slave uprising against the Roman Republic witnessed millions of slaves who refused to be subjugated under Roman rule and were prepared to die in order to exercise their ‘freedom’. And so it also was with the Scottish knight, Sir William Wallace, who became one of the main leaders during the ‘First War of Scottish Independence’. Along with Andrew Moray, Wallace defeated an English army at the ‘Battle of Stirling Bridge’ in September 1297 and was appointed ‘Guardian of Scotland’; a position he served until his defeat at the ‘Battle of Falkirk’ in July 1298. In August 1305, Wallace was captured in Robroyston, near Glasgow, and handed over to ‘King Edward 1st of England’ who had him hanged. drawn and quartered for high treason, and crimes against English civilians. William Wallace and the men who went to war with him valued their freedom more than their life.
And that is the central message of my post today, life without freedom is not worth living with, but it is worth dying for! That is what the men, women and children during the ‘First World War’, the ‘Second World War’ and any subsequent wars Great Britain has fought in have been prepared to die for; the freedom of others!’ We must do whatever we can to regain our freedoms again at the earliest opportunity because another thing history teaches us is that once any governing body assumes a degree of power it never exercised previously, it is always reluctant to hand back that power without strong political persuasion or civil unrest and outright resistance.
I conclude my post today with one verse from the poem ‘For the Fallen’ by Laurence Binyon:
‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.’
Love and peace Bill xxx
