I am no longer young which is quite important when I say that for just about all of my life I’ve been proud to be British. Whatever their political persuasion I have generally trusted our leaders. I may not have agreed with them, but I believed they were doing things for what they believed were the right reasons.
At the same time I hold in high regard those who have protested. The women of Greenham common, the CND protesters, the miners, the Northern Ireland demonstrators, those who marched against the war in Iraq.
Sadly, I trust fewer and fewer people nowadays. I think my distrust began when Boris Johnson supported Brexit. I still believe that he thought it would raise his profile in the party while not holding out any hope of success.
Well maybe his vanity came back to bite him. The Brexiteers won, without having any plan or policies to implement. Cameron resigned, Teresa May suffered the back stabbing of her party and Boris ended up carrying the can. A series of events contrived to inspire our trust?
Then we do the very unBritish thing of abandoning a legal agreement. It would be marginally understandable if someone else had negotiated that agreement, but Boris is breaking a deal he signed.
Now we are coming up with hare brained schemes to repel asylum seekers arriving in inflatable dinghies. We will hold them back Canute like with water jets or a floating barrier. If they do get through we will ship them to the South Atlantic or an island off Scotland. Or the rotting hulls of old ferries – quite Dickensian.
And those episodes are going on while we muddle our way through a pandemic with its attendant trust and mistrust.
Trust the science! Well the science says that young children don’t appear to transmit the virus. So send them back to school where they can be managed by teachers and parents. It also said that young adults do transmit the virus, so we distributed two million to universities all over the country, into and out of hotspots, into packed student accommodation.
Trust our leaders! Well they, their families and advisors have proved they can’t be trusted.
Why should we trust our leaders? Let’s put this into context. In World war II 67,000 civilians died. The war lasted five years. We have lost over 40,000 in six months, perhaps as many as 60,000 depending whose figures you believe. This is a war and we should all take responsibility for it with leadership we can trust.
In the 1940s no one complained about the effect it was having on their mental health spending the nights in an air raid shelter, or the detrimental effect it was having on their child’s education by being shipped out into the countryside. But no. We can’t survive without going to the pub or having a meal out. It’s an odd and sad coincidence that over 1400 people died on the worst day of the blitz and over 1400 died on the worst day of the pandemic, so far.