“I have nothing to offer you except ‘blood, toil, sweat and tears’ ” promised Winston Churchill when he stepped in as Prime minster in 1940. Churchill warned that retaining freedom would come at a high and sacrificial price. The people heard, agreed and paid it.
“Brexit would be bad for my diocese because it might temporarily turn Kent into a lorry park” threatened the Archbishop of Canterbury this month. He was urging people to give up their freedom and repudiate Brexit for the sake of convenience. Kent is a beautiful place. It was a very worthy convenience, but still a convenience.
The Christmas cards we have recently taken down, proved to be a great test of friendship. Several very nearly ‘ex-friends’, of whom I was very fond, clearly had written their cards of good will between gritted teeth.
They were Remainers whose friendships had been tested to the point of destruction. They appeared to be profoundly shocked that someone who loved Europe as much as I did, spoke a couple of languages, and relished European culture, could possibly long for Brexit.
No matter that I had written back to each in the past saying that what mattered to me in Brexit was democratic freedom. For reasons I found hard to fathom they still saw me as a bigot and not a freedom fighter; a dork not a democrat.
What has surprised and shocked me on the other hand are the threats and fears a no deal outcome has had on people. When the Archbishop warned in his grim tones of the danger of his diocese being turned for a while into a lorry park I wanted to reply “but what price are you willing to pay for you and your church’s freedom”?
And there lies the weakness of democracy. At every election politicians bribe the people with the promise of further comforts and advantages if only they will vote for them; but it ought to be the other way round.
At times of election we ought to have politicians asking for our vote on the grounds that they are going to make life more difficult for us. More difficult because to achieve some valuable or noble goal.
It might be redistribution of income; it might be tightening our belts in the face of overspending. They could ask us to forego certain conveniences in order to protect the ecosystem.
And that’s where the weakness of democracy (the least worst system for government we have) lies. It an increasingly comfortable culture votes can only be bought for self-interest instead of won for virtue.
One of the most disturbing tropes that has come out of the arguments about Europe has been the one that the older Brexit voters are stealing younger remain voters’ future.
Leaving aside the hints of politically prompted euthanasia that lurks behind such a preferencing of youth over age, it ignores the possibility of wisdom, memory and experience.
Do the ‘young’ know or remember anything of the BSE crisis in 1996, where responding to European demands we killed and incinerated a million healthy cattle, only to find they still refused to lift an export ban on beef? Even the Euro-friendly Government of the day suspected this had turned into a secret attempt to wage economic warfare against a trade competitor rather than putting health issues first.
Have they read anything at all of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago where the historical realities of an anti-democratic modern, brutal and murderous Left wing regime was allowed free rein?
Freedom to travel without inconvience is placed the top of their political bucket list, but what are they prepared to pay to retain their democracy and freedom of speech and movement?
There doesn’t seem to be much awareness that freedom comes with a price.
Freedom to vote and to practice democracy and freedom of speech have come at the price of imprisonment in some places and torture and death in others.
It will be a pity of the price of passing our own laws, choosing our own values, guarding our own freedoms come at the slight inconvenience of filling in forms, or paying £10 for a visa to visit another country, but maybe that is one of the choices we face; inconvenience or acccountability?
During the last century the ambitious poltical Left and the ambitious political Right tried to crush democracy. The death toll in the 2nd world war, begun by resisting Fascism, the anti-democratic Right, was over 80 million.
R. J. Rummel in his ‘Death by Government ‘ (1994), claims about 110 million people were killed by Communist democide between 1900 to 1987; the cost in terms simply of internal repression exacted by the anti-democratic Left.
Have the realities of human and political nature changed just because the century has a different number? Have the young been bamboozled into believing that moral progress mirrors technological progress?
Freedom is not a steady state political privilege that once won can never be lost. It is fragile and unstable and kept only at a cost. The cost may be even more than inconvenience and interruptions to parking, shopping and travel.
‘Standard of living’ is an important social currency and we should be grateful for it; but never at the cost of the ‘standard of being’, which is the currency of freedom, integrity and responsibility; and it and has little to do with convenience.
Nothing good comes for free. The more we recognise it as good, the more it will cost.
Well put, Dr Ashenden. As an onlooker in the antipodes it is painful to see that nonsense and immaturity are not prerogatives of the former colonies.
By the way, Churchill actually said “blood, toil, tears and sweat”, with emphasis on “sweat”. The emphasis was there at least on the recorded version that Winston later did for posterity.
Yes, if we in the UK don’t see leaving the EU in terms of the freedom which the aspiration to stand on our own two feet can deliver, then we are doomed to choose domination for the sake of convenience.
Although the Vote Leave campaigners scraped a victory in the referendum, they never clearly made this point (which I think would have been well received) and thus they built a basic flaw into the continuing impetus for proceeding with Brexit. Unless the people possessed the overriding vision of ‘freedom despite the cost’, those whose strategy was relentless ‘Project Fear’ had an open goal. And so (under a hapless and Remainer Prime Minister) it has been. And our country has sunk lower than we could ever have imagined. We are now in deep crisis, humiliated and disastrously led.
Surely it’s the sternest lesson that if you don’t build your house on a sure foundation it will collapse. That means thinking things through from first principles and being honest about hard truths – sadly, we’re unlikely to get any help with that from Justin Welby.
The worse thing is that these people are somehow averse to standing on their own two feet, happy to sell off any responsibility, for the sake of comfort. This is materialism gone awry.. Give it a few more generations and we will (well, not me, I will be well gone) have our descendants looking at Wall E as some prophetic visual tome!
Here in the US we are in grave danger of losing our right to self-governance in the individual states. The UK, if it does not withdraw from the EU, will sacrifice its right to self-governance and be helpless subjects of an unelected bureaucracy across the water. Stick to it! If there is no “deal,” then just do it and deal with the details as they come.
My opinion is that the Common Market was a good idea, but not the European Union.
Katherine, the Common Market was simply a first step in a long term plan towards forging a European superstate. It was of course presented as purely a trading agreement but even at that early stage the UK had to give up its own fishing rights in order to join. So handing over a part of your sovereignty was already part of the deal, and of course they’ve seized more and more over the years, during which UK citizens never gave their assent.
So you really have to look at gaining membership of the Common Market as bait to lure in independent nations which then were gradually sucked ever tighter into an ever more powerful, centrally directed EU. And now you can see the forces ranged within and outside of any member country which dares to try and leave!
Thank you for that clarification. You’d be better off, then, negotiating agreements with individual countries. We’re available!
Our Constitution was set up in USA to provide protections from the tyranny of the majority (see Venezuela). We find our selves in dire need for a good purging of our justice system, FBI, CIA, NSA, Federal Courts, state courts, Federal Reserve, etc. Judge shopping for a desired outcome is now open and rampant. The mythical 4th Estate and its mission to safe guard liberty is a laughable hoax. Atheism is now the de facto and only acceptable religion. Some Globalists are openly pushing hard for a civil war. Groups like SDS tried back in the ’70s to do revolution and take over ala Russia and Cuba with a small group. Our last civil war wasn’t pretty with +400k dead plus the living maimed. Lord forbid. Maybe it is the only way to clean the rot or die trying. Like Santa it might be time to make a list of who is naughty and who is nice.
Thumbs up, ReebHerb. Many of our ‘minders’ in government alphabet agencies (CIA, FBI, IRS…) think that they know better than we do what’s best for us, and that sometimes what’s best for us lies outside the boundaries of the law and transparency.
When they lie to us, or obscure the truth so that we can’t find out exactly what they did, they have violated the Constitution at a fundamental level.
I’m not talking about military secrets governed by security clearances. I held a ‘top secret’ clearance myself for years, and understood it. There was still a LOT that was classified at TS that I didn’t get a chance to know because I didn’t “need to know”.
No, I’m talking about Freedom Of Information Act material, I’m talking about what our ‘minders’ did, how did they do it, why did they do it. When the FBI redacts a LOT of information that, it turns out, has NOTHING to do with ‘sources and methods’, much of which was done to avoid embarrassment to the FBI, that is unforgivable. And we’re talking about what is arguably the world’s premier law enforcement agency.
So lately the mayor of Boston wants to make his city a Sanctuary City. This means he wants to disobey federal law on immigration. Progressives, here’s my question: If the people who are in a position to enforce laws upon me give themselves permission to disobey laws they don’t like, why should I have to obey laws I don’t like.
All of this the Constitution was designed to address. We ignore it at our peril. Very much like Holy Scripture addresses LIFE, and we ignore it at our peril…