Between Christmas and New Year, the 70th anniversary of an event, which in no small way helped change the course of history, passed almost unnoticed. On December 26, 1941, less than three weeks after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill addressed both branches of Congress in the United States. The prime minister, who was in Washington to agree military strategy with President Roosevelt, used the invitation from Senators and Representatives to excoriate the Axis powers and pose a simple question: “What kind of people do they think we are?”
This wasn’t Churchill’s finest oratorical effort, but it was clever. As well as denouncing the forces of darkness and the enormity of their aggression, it was an invitation to ordinary Britons, suffering the horrors of war at home, to reflect on the challenge ahead. He was, in effect, asking fellow citizens: “Of what are we made?”
Seven decades later, one wonders how the great man would view the kind of people the British have become. What has happened to the freedoms and independence for which he urged us to fight? It’s hard to imagine our wartime chieftain being anything other than dismayed by the erosion of sovereignty, capitulation to the “equalities industry” and enslavement by debt. We have lost control of domestic borders, ceded legal primacy to Europe and allowed the Storm Troopers of political correctness to stamp their corrosive version of right and wrong on British law.
For evidence of our self-inflicted abasement, look no further than this month’s ruling from Europe’s Court of Human Rights that Abu Qatada, a radical Islamist preacher, regarded as one of al-Qaeda’s main inspirational leaders in Europe, cannot be deported from Britain to his native Jordan because his trial there might have contained evidence obtained by torture. » | Jeff Randall | Monday, January 30, 2012
