Promises Promises

As the USA recovers from the last few minutes of the Super Bowl football final; the New England Patriots winning by a whisker, we in the UK are still locked into the last deadline day of the soccer transfer market.

We worry whether that one with the funny hair cut who is always being sent off will appear for another English side or mercifully be packed off to Europe.

Our first election declaration dropped this morning, that of the Tories, from our lovely MP who is making us offers we cannot possibly refuse.  But wait!  Gordon Brown, our former Labour Prime Minister has a better one on benefits.  The Lib Dem's tell us we will all get more from Europe, UKIP says we will be all the richer without it.

Meanwhile at the tail end of the news, or rather folk tales and nursery rhymes of the BBC, corking gels are telling us that we are in for a bit of real winter and to forget about global warming for a few weeks.  If we should be so lucky.  I remember '47 it was quite fun in its way unless you had to work or do much.

The head spins, not helped by having to fiddle about sorting out a bad download on the machine that dumped unwanted rubbish into the system.  But this is how it is, we are enduring an unending torrent of rubbish politics, rubbish government, rubbish consumerism and rubbish media.

A jolt to the memory has been the marking of the fifty years since Churchill had his state funeral.  There has been enough comment and analysis on this elsewhere.  But it is worth thinking about what might have happened if Lord Halifax had taken his chance at the critical moment in 1940.

Churchill promises at the time were brutally clear, blood toil tears and sweat, Halifax could and probably would not have made any others much different.  But whether he may have looked in other directions is now simply speculation.

The nearest I ever got to Churchill was playing rugger against the 4th Hussars when he was both Prime Minister and Colonel in Chief of the Regiment.  Blood, toil, tears and sweat were the order of the day, it was not entirely a sporting encounter.  Like Churchill the Regiment could play it rough at times.

With the baby boomers now largely in charge of the media and many of its thought processes we are being told that the end of Churchill was the end of Britain as it was.  But it wasn't and I am not going to claim it was my age cohort who were previous who began the changes.

They really began with all the rapid developments late in the 19th Century but mainly the early 20th, which culminated in the rapidity of change in the 20's and 30's.  World War 2 created both a hiatus and a major setback for some little time but then in the late 1940's it did resume.

Because so many people saw Churchill as someone from the past, who by the chances of history made a decent fist of the job of war leader, was not the one to vote for in 1945 in what was the already a new Britain is enough.  After that War there could be no going back only a different future.

Which is the problem now with our politicians.  They are promising what we may have liked or wanted in the past.  We are not going to get it and they cannot deliver it.

We are going into an unknown future.