Maybe it’s the effect of the poppies but this
government seems to have severe, selective amnesia.
Just last week I was aghast listening to a story of
a London organisation that vacuums up single homeless men and puts them in
homes fit for rats. It does this in order to make a profit by cashing in on
housing benefit. As we all know, ex-servicemen are disproportionately
represented among the homeless. This is immoral but not, apparently, illegal. All
while the government are making a crusade out of cutting benefits to the
vulnerable.
Despite their significance from 1915, it was not until
the 1920s that the Flanders poppy became an established remembrance symbol of
the unimaginable suffering and loss of WWI. But an idea that took on more
immediacy was that of homes fit for
heroes. One wonders what Lloyd George would have made of the above scenario
or the bedroom tax or the attempted cuts in tax credit that currently keep many
working families in the UK just above the bread line.
Move to WWII and yet again the idea of a better life
for those who sacrificed so much was the order of the day. Of the 1m houses
built by Attlee’s post war Labour government 80% were council houses and many
built to replace those destroyed by Hitler. The selloff of those properties by
Margaret Thatcher – a policy endorsed by the current administration – has done
more than any other to put the low paid at the mercy of the worst elements of
the private rented sector and exacerbate the problems of homelessness.
An NHS free at the point of use was another Attlee
vision, not one that has become an underfunded postcode lottery with many
sections made vulnerable to profiteering.
The working classes were to be offered a decent
education; one that would give them a chance to compete with the well-heeled. In
2015 in the UK we know that a child’s circumstances at birth will influence its
life chances more than any other single factor. The time when those at the
bottom could rise according to their abilities was a brief flowering of
egalitarianism, quickly stamped out by the establishment. The introduction of
tuition fees is part of the same pattern and a recent announcement stated that
even the grants made to the very worst off students are now to be converted
into loans - debt.
As I battled on Sunday through the Remembrance Day
crowds in Edinburgh to a service at my own church I was chilled by more than
just the rain and the wind. Just what has happened to our hopes and dreams of a
fairer society since the guns fell silent on the Western Front in WWI? Woodrow Wilson called it a war to end all wars
but 1939 saw the dawn of a second ‘great’ war. At the end of each, the hope for
a fairer, more peaceful world was great.
But in this country the gap between the haves and
the have-nots has grown exponentially since the 90s into a vast chasm.
Instead of a fighting force engaged in security
measures we are enmeshed in the global aftermath of one of the most stupid,
testosterone fuelled bits of international madness any government ever engaged
in to the point where we are morally constipated. We make embarrassing
overtures to the Egyptian leader in the hope that he will help sit on ISIS while
ignoring any number of human rights abuses in the attempt to make the sticking
plaster of risible international diplomacy stick. (I already covered our embarrassing
slavering to the Chinese a couple of weeks ago).
We managed D-day but couldn’t repatriate a few
hundred holiday makers from sharm-el-sheikh. In WWII we (belatedly) took in
Jewish refugees without complaining about school places or benefits. However, having
failed to stop Assad’s apocalypse we bellyache about taking in Syrian refugees.
People had so much less then. Is that maybe why they were more willing to
share?
We defeated Hitler and Mussolini but there was an
embracing of Farage and his watery nastiness at all levels that made good
people nauseous.
Why do we remember the lessons of the two great wars
for just one day a year?
Give us an administration that cares all year and
remembers the hopes and dreams of those who survived the horrors. We’ve no use
for a poppy-one-day-a-year government, shafting ordinary people the other 364
days.
If this government want to truly honour the war dead
and the sacrifices they made for freedom and a better life, let’s see more
fairness. Let’s see better schools, better health care and let’s see the very
comfortably off (and eye-wateringly wealthy) friends of those in power paying
their bloody taxes.