From Tony Beswick Sir: Can Britain now win an empire
in Europe? France is reported to be losing her enthusiasm for the European project and the recent EU enlargement has brought in many countries more sympathetic to both Britain and the US. Why don't we stay in Europe and really start to fight for the same territory that our fathers bled and died for on D-Day? The least we can do is to go out and vote after this week's 60th anniversary. They died for our freedom to choose. A low turnout would be insulting to their sacrifice.
What is it about Europe that scares us so much now, but which we didn't fear then? Sixty years ago we stood up to Hitler on our own, while every other country that we now seem so keen to run away from had totally collapsed. On D-Day our fathers' and grandfathers' generation began to grind the largest economy on the continent into dust. We retain by far the best armed forces in Europe, so why the frenzy to retreat?
We might win ourselves another empire out there if we really wanted to. We've started to dig the Americans out of a mess in Iraq and if they now seem to be like Britain 100 years ago, then, sadly, America has only one way left to go. If we can organise Europe efficiently before the predicted rise of China, then the world could again be our oyster. At the very least we could play the role of honest broker, managing an orderly global transition between rising and falling hyperpowers in the 21st century.
Our country still has more experience than any other of running the world over seas. They need us as they needed us in the past. The BBC's anniversary coverage features a line from an unfinished poem about D-Day by the late Captain Keith Douglas. He described his comrades in arms as 'Actors waiting in the wings of Europe'. As Churchill might have remarked, Some theatre! Some play! But any 'stage fright' our generation may retain bears scant comparison to theirs that day.
Almost half a century has now passed in unaccustomed self-indulgence and uncharacteristic reflection, but now the time has finally come to put aside the humiliation of Suez. As a nation and a people we can no longer morally justify the secret incubation of what Churchill again once ruefully described as the craven fear of being great'.
Tony Beswick
Warley, West Midlands
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