THE lyrics of a certain song keep echoing around in my head right now. Maybe it’s because these past weeks the words “frontline”, “workers,” “heroes” and “sacrifice” have consistently been bandied around in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
Maybe, too, it’s because Britain today is celebrating Victory in Europe (VE) Day. But before anyone jumps to conclusions, can I just say that it’s not We’ll Meet Again by Vera Lynn that I keep hearing in my head right now, though I gather, surprise, surprise, a “nationwide singalong” of that particular ditty is scheduled as part of the UK’s commemorations later today.
It’s not that I think Vera Lynn’s classic doesn’t have its place in today’s VE Day remembrance.
On the contrary, for the few remaining survivors of that wartime generation, it understandably acts as an anthem of sorts for those lonely, uncertain years when great sacrifice endured in wartime.
Rather it’s another song that I can’t get out of my mind right now, one that also speaks of great sacrifice.
A sacrifice made not just during wartime but day in day out, good times or bad. It’s a song written by Ed Pickford, a singer-songwriter born of a Durham mining family, and is called Workers’ Song. Among many memorable renditions of Workers’ Song, perhaps the best known is by the Scottish singer Dick Gaughan, who featured it on his now iconic 1981 folk album Handful Of Earth.
Although the song’s lyrics might have been penned many years ago, today they have taken on a renewed resonance.
For in its verses it reflects on those ordinary people who in wartime or indeed peacetime have invariably carried the greatest of burdens,
a role summed up in the song’s final lines:
And all of these things the worker has done
From tilling the fields to carrying the gun
We’ve been yoked to the plough since time first began
And always expected to carry the can.
Carrying the can – see now what I mean about the song’s contemporary resonance? These are lines that could have been written for today’s “key workers”, that incredible army of ordinary folk who venture forth every day in the face of the coronavirus threat, often putting their own lives on the line in doing so.
Make no mistake about it, these are and always have been the sort of people that see us through the worst times of crisis. Not that most governments, and certainly not the current Tory one, would usually ever recognise such sacrifice. For as the words in the fourth verse of this great song also remind us about those same workers:
We’re the first ones to starve, we’re the first ones to die
The first ones in line for that pie in the sky
And we’re always the last when the cream is shared out
For the worker is working when the fat cat’s about.
Even as I write there is no shortage of fat cats cleaning up at the expense of others’ suffering under the impact of the pandemic.
You can bet, too, they will be doing exactly the same the moment it’s over, just as the UK Government that so catastrophically messed up in its emergency response to the pandemic will resort to type in its wake.
For the simple inescapable fact is that these key workers that the UK Government now lauds as heroes are by and large those same people Boris Johnson and his cabal could not have given a damn about prior to the coronavirus crisis.
In “normal times” before the pandemic descended, the Tories were happy enough to let those same workers bear the brunt of redundancies and the ravages of austerity policies, public spending cuts and reduction in the role of the welfare state.
Johnson can do all he likes to dress up today’s VE Day celebrations, attempting to tie the current crisis to Britain’s wartime past. The truth, though, is that this is nothing but smoke and mirrors, perverse Churchillian posturing harking back to another time when the “Blitz spirit” prevailed and Spitfires took to the skies.
Believe me when I say that as a correspondent who has covered conflicts for going on 40 years, I find something truly noisome in the way in which today’s wartime commemorations are being manipulated to help get Johnson and the Tories out of the mess they are in.
Such moves, far from helping Britain come together as a nation, only reinforce the divisions and revel in a kind of lurid “Englishness”, rather than being representative of the multicultural nation that the UK is and those individuals that comprise its workforce, not least in the NHS.
That Nazi Germany was defeated and victory in Europe was celebrated on May 8, 1945, is something to be proud of. That the same victory is being repackaged today as a “People’s Celebration” to help a Tory Government out of a shambolic mishandling that resulted from its own arrogance and lack of foresight is nothing short of a disgrace. As another verse in Workers’ Song aptly puts it:
But when the sky darkens and the prospect is war
Who’s given a gun and then pushed to the fore
And expected to die for the land of our birth
When we’ve never owned one handful of earth?
Just as in 1945, so today it has been ordinary working people who have carried the burden of an international crisis. Sure, the frontline in today’s battle against the coronavirus has been very different from that of those wartime years, but the resourcefulness and courage shown by people remains the same. We certainly don’t need a faux red, white and blue jamboree complete with bunting to remind us of that.
Yes, the sky of late has been dark again, but there is light at the end of the tunnel thanks to the courage of workers across the country.
As today’s VE Day celebrations unfold and here, like much of the world, we remain in lockdown and continuing the fight against the coronavirus, why not give Workers’ Song a listen? It just might help put a lot of things into perspective.
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