By any standards of the UK’s collective diary, Monday of this week was a day worthy of popular attention-and reflection.
Three events between them seemed to define the noble and the less worthy of the UK nation, and humanity generally.
It began with news that young victims from Syria and other conflict zones stranded in Calais were to be reunited with their families across the Chanell. It developed with live coverage of the celebration of the team GB Olympic and Paralympic teams. By day’s end millions of football fans were glued to their TV’s watching the Premier League clash between Liverpool and Manchester United.
The first event was a necessary antidote to the creeping sense of insularity, not to say xenophobia that has affected the minds of hard Brexiteer elements of the Conservative Party and those in UKIP who have joined it.
The acceptance of the Calais children draws on Britain’s proud history of providing a safe haven to the unjustly persecuted or displaced and serves as a reminder of our responsibility to make amends for the consequences of wars for which the west must assume moral responsibility on account of its omission if not complicity.
It was a welcome if belated humanitarian act after the bombing of Aleppo had drawn comparisons with Guernica while exposing UK hypocrisy given its arming of its ally Saudi Arabia, as brutal in its bombing of Yemeni civilians.
Perhaps it’s worth recording here that during the Spanish Civil War, the British people welcomed some 4,000 Basque refugees children accompanied by teachers and priests fleeing the conflict.
And yet some sectors of the British media -notably the Sun, Mail and Telegraph- struggled to hide their scepticism that the Calais children might be just illegal immigrants or worse still potential terrorists.
No such scepticism influenced coverage of the thousands who took to the streets pf Manchester in pouring rain to give a warm welcome to Britain’s Olympic and Paralympic record medal winners.
Thankfully the sports men and women themselves (a broad representation of the UK’s cultural and regional diversity) and the live TV coverage steered clear from jingoism, turning the event less into one anti-EU nation’s victory parade, than a celebration of human solidarity, team as well as individual achievement, whatever one’s social and cultural roots.
A sense of the common good pervaded the occasion as medal winners paid tribute to their teachers and their team mates and expressed delight at the prospect that they might have influenced younger people to think there might be more to sport than making money.
Rather different to the lacklustre Premier League football match that followed, a display of inflated managerial and player egos, in a game involving fortunes in sponsorship, TV revenues, ad salaries, but which failed to live up to the hype that twenty two men chasing a ball can be heroic.
