Where is our inspiration when we most need it?
Bryan Forbes remembers listening to Churchill as a 14-yearold evacuee and now looks with envy at Obama’s capacity to galvanise hope. Where are his UK counterparts?
All across America, galvanised by an inspirational candidate, people stood in line for up to four hours in order to vote, many for the first time in their lives, and oh how I longed for an iota of that fervour and commitment to infect our own political scene. Instead, on our side of the pond, in our own hour of need, we were subjected to the same tired rhetoric that has long since been unfit for purpose. In this month of remembrance is there anybody at Westminster capable of inspiring us to rise out of the trenches with an Obama exhortation to ‘put your hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day’? In the unlikely event of such a wake-up call ever being made, would we be prepared to attack recession’s no-man’s land at the behest of Jack Straw, Harriet Harman, David Miliband, Geoff Hoon or indeed anybody in Gordon Brown’s rag-tag army of tired contemptibles?
The answer, sadly, has to be no. It is impossible to recall anything uplifting that Brown has uttered since the current crisis began; the only difference about him one can discern is an increase in smugness accompanied by the false smile and the fact that he has now condescended to wear a white tie at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet instead of his erstwhile lounge suit. Endlessly reciting the mantra that all our troubles are exclusively the result of global mistakes, he cannot bring himself to admit that the root cause of our new era of blood, toil, tears and sweat was his decade-long plunder of the family silver, to say nothing of the family gold. The only hope we can cling to is the thought that all politicians die at last of swallowing their own lies.
Although we wish him well, at this moment in time nobody can predict whether Obama will succeed in shaping a new America which, in turn, will shape the future destiny of the Western world. The multitude of problems he will inherit fill to the brim a poisoned chalice that no president since Franklin D. has ever had to drink from. It used to be said that ‘what’s good for General Motors is good for America’, but as his bullet-proof limousine eventually takes him to the White House he will be aware that the great powerhouse of American industrial might for so many years is no longer a major player, but teeters on the abyss, begging bowl in hand. The rest of the world can but touch wood that the energy and resolve that have taken him thus far will not falter and that his ‘novice’ status will triumph where so many experts have notably failed.
It is a sad fact of life that children the world over face a future in which they are still paying for the grievous misjudgments of post-second world war leaders. In our own time and in our own country, Blair and Brown, granted an unassailable majority for their first and subsequent terms, squan dered so many opportunities to rid our society of imbedded and divisive class hatreds, and instead perpetuated all the old, negative attitudes that so emasculate real social progress. No matter how they massage the figures, no matter how they prevaricate and call for yet another enquiry to rectify their blunders, they have not eradicated poverty, they have not bulldozed out of existence the inner-city slums, and instead of combating crime with old-fashioned policing, they have put their faith in panda cars and CTTV cameras.
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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