We failed the heroes of VE Day ... we cannot fail the heroes of Covid-19

Gus was there as a soldier at the invasion of Sicily. “We knew that we were doing something that would help every one us to live decently,” he said. “Without winning this war, we’d have no chance of living a better life – therefore this war had to be won.”

When he recalled VE Day, Gus said: “To feel that we’d come out as a victorious nation and that we could still see a great future in front of us, it was a wonderful feeling.”

Gus’s words weren’t triumphalist – they were simple words of hope. He, and millions of others, risked their lives in order to make this country a better place. That’s the simple story of what VE Day meant to those who fought and died.

It should shame us that we failed Gus and all those other men and women. We didn’t build on their sacrifice. We wasted it.

Lost legacy

OVER the weekend, if we really wanted to honour the heroes of VE Day, the Gus Bialicks, we’d have reflected soberly on how we let them down and threw away their legacy. Instead, we offered up Union Jack bunting, renditions of We’ll Meet Again, and cloying nostalgic sentimentality.

The men and women who won the war gifted us a world of opportunity and freedom which 75 years later we’ve squandered. They bled so we could inherit peace. Their struggle gave us the United Nations, the NHS, the welfare state. They forged for us the belief that the world was a meritocracy – that you didn’t have to stay poor, that life would get better as each generation progressed. They set us on the path to true personal freedom, where the individual decides what life they lead, not the church, state, family or society. They fought for tolerance, decency.

But nearly everything the Great Generation gifted us has been wasted. We’ve trashed the international community – the UN is a dark, useless joke. The NHS and welfare state have been crippled by years of neglect. The social mobility that the war generation began is a thing of the past. Instead of cherishing tolerance and difference of opinion, we’ve divided the world into politicised, cult-like camps of us and them – we sit in our confirmation bias bubbles hating anyone we disagree with.

Then there’s the Iraq War – that squalid episode disgraces the memory of the Great Generation. They went to war to defeat aggression. In 2003, Britain and America lied to launch a war of aggression. The Great Generation fought for human rights. Today, the West wears badges of shame called “Extraordinary Rendition” and “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” – kidnap and torture.

Our failure to live up to the promise of the new world the Great Generation fought to build is made all the more egregious by how we exploit their memory. We invoke their courage, while simultaneously undoing everything they strived for; we use wartime metaphors with little consideration of what struggle really means. This time of global pandemic has been littered with lazy language which seeks to steal the glory of VE Day veterans. Politicians mouth platitudes about “the Blitz spirit”, and invoke the ghost of Winston Churchill, like children playing toy soldiers.

Yet, while we deploy the language of wartime amid coronavirus – where are the remaining men and women who fought the war? Most are now in care homes – the graveyards of coronavirus, where the death toll soars. Could there be a more disgraceful way to fail the people we pretend to honour?

The tragic irony is that we’re at it again – repeating the same mistakes from the past. Today, we rightly recognise a new breed of hero – the NHS worker, shelf stacker, delivery driver, cleaner. The people keeping the world running and saving lives while risking their own safety, as we shelter in lockdown. We talk of building a better world after the pandemic, of honouring the sacrifices of the heroes of coronavirus. But will we? Or will we squander their sacrifices just as we squandered the sacrifices of the heroes of the Second World War?

Many of us went into the pandemic imagining society would come out the other side fairer, more decent. As the days wear on, though, and we see how it is the weakest suffering the most – the poor dying at twice the rate of the rich – and how the wealthy and powerful suffer least, it is hard to believe that there will be that much-needed great reformation of society once this is over.

Perhaps, 75 years from now, our grandchildren will be celebrating the nurses who kept us safe during coronavirus, and wondering why we – their grandparents – didn’t take 2020 as an opportunity to build the better world we promised.

Forgotten sacrifice

IT has become fashionable to sneer at remembrance – as if respecting those who fought in the war is somehow embracing the sins of empire, or an act of flag-wrapped xenophobia. It is not difficult, however, to reflect bitterly on empire, shun patriotic exceptionalism, loathe xenophobia, and still feel great respect for the sacrifices made by the Great Generation.

For folk my age, the sacrifices were tangible – they were made by our grandparents. For my children, the memory grows more distant – but I’ve tried to keep a flame of remembrance burning because I know the simple, decent reasons why my grandparents went to war. They wanted that same better world that Gus Bialick dreamed of.

All four of my grandparents played their part. One grandfather was a sailor, the other a solider; one grandmother an army nurse, the other a civilian firewoman during the London Blitz. All were ordinary folk, their sacrifices no greater, nor less, than those made by millions. Although each lost friends and family, all four survived – though my sailor grandfather eventually succumbed to his war wounds, dying too young.

I was closest to my maternal grandmother – the firewoman. Her family was poor. Some had even spent time in the poorhouse. She knew squalor and hardship long before 1939. She told me stories of the war when I was little and each story had the same moral: we went through hell, so you didn’t have to. The stories were never told with any demand for thanks or recognition – there was no superiority to her memories of suffering. It was simply a fact: people like her wanted the world to be a better place for future generations.

You could call such simplicity the purest form of love. I do.

And so, it saddens me to think of so many idealistic people today – folk who long for a better world – rejecting any remembrance or reverence toward the Great Generation. You can remember in your heart, without decorating your breast with a poppy. Nor does remembering and honouring glorify death or the atrocities of war. Remembering ordinary individuals who wanted to make the world better isn’t celebrating destruction and hatred.

This isn’t to sentimentalise the Great Generation. Theirs was a generation with as many faults as any other. Nor should we forget the darkest side of the allied victory – Dresden, Nagasaki. But their sacrifice far outweighs their sins – the same cannot be said for any other generation, I believe.

Everyone of us has a forebear who fought and in many cases died. Admiration for the Great Generation shouldn’t be a political act. When it comes to the exhausted phrase “we’re all in it together”, the Great Generation were the last people to really know what that means.

Litany of betrayal

LET’S consider some of the many ways the legacy of the Great Generation has been squandered or abused – how we’ve failed our own ancestors who bequeathed us so much.

For a start, we should consider something few of us even think of when we count the gifts the wartime generation gave us: liberal values. In a time of mass death, if you’re in love and want to be together, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re married or not. War began to erode conservative attitudes. In my family, there were more than a few illegitimate children born because of the war.

Young people had risked their lives for six years come VE Day, and although Britain was still a conservative, religious country, change was starting. It would come to completion in the 60s and 70s with the pill, the abolition of the death penalty, legalisation of abortion and homosexuality, the Equal Pay Act, and the Racial Discrimination Act. We think it is the baby boomers who enacted these changes. It wasn’t – it was their parents, the Great Generation. They were the ones voting, running the country, setting the tone of debate as society gradually liberalised.

Liberal values are one of the few gifts from the Great Generation that we haven’t yet squandered – they persist. The bitter irony is, we don’t even acknowledge the debt. We credit their children – the ones who began the dissolution of the work of the Great Generation, ushering in the conservative backlash of the 1980s.

Social mobility and income equality rose steadily after the war as Britain became a more financially fairer place. My own family, like millions of others, felt that first hand. We went from slums to universities in one generational leap. Then it stopped. Britain – and America – turned its back on the industrial working class. Reaganomics and Thatcherism saw inequality rapidly accelerate and social mobility stagnate. Today, we’re at a point where my children can expect a life worse off than mine. If that’s not failing a generation who died so we could live better lives, then I don’t know what is.

The Beveridge Report – the foundation stone of the post-war welfare state and NHS – named five giant social evils to be eradicated: want, ignorance, squalor, idleness and disease. Bit by bit that dream has been dismantled over the last 75 years. Today, we live in an era of foodbanks, declining schools and student debt, mass poverty, low wages, zero-hour contracts, intergenerational unemployment, and a gulf in life expectancy between the rich and the poor.

I’m no Christian, but who could disagree with the then Archbishop of Canterbury, who said the Beveridge Report was “the first time anyone had set out to embody the whole spirit of the Christian ethic in an Act of Parliament”. We had heaven in our hands and let it slip through our fingers.

Welfare – from schooling to income support to university to healthcare – was to be comprehensive, universal. It wasn’t meant to be an act of humiliation for the recipient no matter what their circumstances – there would be no return to the poorhouse. Today, we make a sport of mocking “benefits scroungers". Claiming financial assistance, even for the disabled, is demeaning, dehumanising – sometimes it even kills.

The policy of full employment was cast aside as utopian – it didn’t pay investors and speculators enough as voodoo economics took hold. The idea of a fair playing field – a simple metaphor at the heart of the Great Generation’s view of the world – was for losers. Greed was good.

While the work at home of the Great Generation was gradually dismantled, so too were the changes they wrought on the world’s stage. The governments of Bush and Blair, with their push for preemptive war in Iraq, neutered the United Nations – set up post-war to rein in aggressors.

Today, we live in a world where democracy – the very essence of what the Great Generation fought for – is under threat, often at the hands of democratically elected politicians. The Great Generation denazified Europe – now the Nazis are back. Belief in democracy is crumbling.

The Great Generation gave us three decades of the “post-war consensus": there would be active, positive state involvement in society, a mixed economy including nationalisation, strong trade unions, rigorous regulation, fair taxation, and a decent welfare state. Now that’s withered on the vine. Reagan and Thatcher put a stake through the heart of those dreams. Social democracy limps on, badly wounded.

Our grandparents cared about the world around them, not just their own pocket. Their horror and outrage gave us the word “genocide" in 1944 – yet genocide goes on from Rwanda to Burma, while we watch on TV. Their decency saw them care tirelessly for Europe’s refugees post-war, rebuilding shattered lives, finding orphans new families. Now we tweet our “thoughts and prayers” about dead refugee children on Mediterranean beaches, and then pull up the drawbridge.

The Great Generation replaced empire with Europe. The wind of change blew and they knew how to adapt to Britain’s new place in the world. Then their children voted Brexit, and had the audacity to invoke the war as they did so. Now, we’ve thrown Europe away – the continent the Great Generation brought peace to – and so we’re back as we were in the 1930s, a little country on its own, minus an empire.

As the years wore on, we put this Great Generation in care homes. We gave up on the people who saved us and strived to make our lives better than theirs. We locked them away, and we stole their language – we took words like “blitz spirit” and we rendered them meaningless. We reduced their struggle to a meme: “Keep calm and carry on”.

We may have failed them but we’ve a new generation of heroes sacrificing themselves today – our essential workers from hospitals to supermarkets. They want a better world too – just like the Great Generation. They don’t need bunting or patriotic songs. They need – they want, they deserve – change which makes society a better, fairer place. We can’t fail them. If we do, we just fail ourselves once again.