THE MAJOR Oak in Sherwood Forest – reputedly the meeting place of Robin Hood and his Merry Men – has stood for more than a thousand years. It has weathered storms, invasions, civil wars and human folly.
So when it failed to bring forth leaves this spring and experts concluded it had died, it felt like a metaphor for the death of something far larger: continuity, and shared understanding of a country that once knew its place in the world, a country that once knew what it valued.
We are living through a time when the institutions meant to hold us together seem to be divided and self-loathing. Trust in government has collapsed. Public services are paralysed by bureaucracy and fear. The monarchy, once a symbol of continuity, now feels aligned with the political class rather than the people.
And beneath it all is a sense of moral drift – a quiet erosion of the values that once defined us. Not nostalgia for some imagined golden age but the simple, foundational principles that we were once globally respected for: duty, responsibility, courage, honesty and the protection of the vulnerable.
The worst aspect of this moral drift is the current rash of stories of the abuse and murder of children by the very people who should have loved them. Like most others, I cannot bring myself to read the details any more. As a mother and grandmother, I cannot look at the photographs and read the reports of missed warnings and failures on the part of the services that are meant to safeguard vulnerable children and adults. The cruelty is too much. The failures are too familiar. This particular horror is yet another part of the huge moral decay and abdication of personal responsibility.
I do not wish to use these tragedies as rhetorical devices. They are too raw, too sacred, too horrific. But they haunt me and as I write, I fear for the future of a country that does not even protect its own children.
The United Kingdom is in rapid decline. Under the current government, there will be no attempts to preserve what is left of this country. Its history is continually misrepresented and rewritten by what I perceive as the Enemy Within.
We are again at the junction of yet another political disaster, created by the welcome ‘abdication’ of the sixth prime minister in a turbulent post-Brexit decade, as the lion voice of Great Britain growls its fury at the years of incompetence, repeated elections and failed promises.
The Major Oak is supported by crutches. It has been monitored, tended, and protected. Generations understood their duty of care to it. They recognised its significance. They knew it was worth preserving.
The question it forces upon us is unavoidable: If a tree can survive a thousand years of storms, invasions and upheavals, why can’t the institutions of modern Britain survive the mismanagement and moral cowardice of a government that seemingly hates its own people more than any previous invading force? And what of the current invasion? The promise to ‘stop the boats’? This government insists that it has undertaken to end the constant influx of undocumented (mostly) males. Where is the evidence?
What does it say about us that we can preserve a tree but not the values that once held this country together?
