Cameron's delusions of grandeur.

David Cameron seems, like so may British fantasists, to be obsessed with the idea of Britain remaining a world leader.  In his speech to the Tory conference yesterday he warned us that without lots of "striving  ( a new buzz-word)... Britain may not be in the future what it was in the past."  In the past we were, among other things "The country that beat the Nazis."

I grant that the number of lives lost on the Allied side in the Second World War is not a completely accurate measure of the contribution made to the defeat of Naziism, but the figures below, taken from a plaque in  a French museum, give some perspective: 

• USSR  26 600 000
• Poland 6 000 000
• France 580 000
• Greece 460 000
• UK 365 000
• USA 340 000
• Commonwealth 135 000

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It is true that, for many months the UK stood almost, but not quite alone (if the film of the Battle of Britain is to be believed the Poles were a great help) but it is astonishing  that the massive contribution of the Soviet Union to the defeat of Naziism has been almost brushed out of British and American history, and certainly from our films and folk memory

It is high time we in the UK began to aim for modest competence in the future rather than attempting to retrieve  an allegedly glorious past.  Ironically, the one  area in which we can still claim world leadership, communication via the  the BBC, our politicians seem determined on destruction, and in one in which we can at least hold our own on the world stage, higher education, Tory obsession with immigration has tarnished our reputation.