Britain has produced a generation too fearful of the real world
His remarkable generation are now almost all gone; and one wonders how many of today's twentysomethings can begin to understand his courage, and that of millions like him; and how when faced with danger and adversity they simply got on with it.
Of course, there were important differences between Group Captain Hemingway's generation and those born in the early 21st century. People were not designated as suffering mental health problems because they were unhappy or nervous; self-obsession, the main pastime of too many of today's young, was a taboo.
But, above all, there was hardly any welfare state. Several generations have been conditioned, through welfarism and poor parenting, to ask (as President Kennedy might have put it) not what they can do for their country, but what their country can do for them.
This becomes a terrifying prospect should the country face some challenge to its security. Polls have recently shown that many younger people wouldn't want to fight, having also been indoctrinated by school and university teachers that British values are generally questionable and the British past is largely despicable.
Also, suffocating welfarism has encouraged them to develop the lack of resilience of character and self-reliance that would make them entirely incapable of engaging in the sacrifice and heroism that so distinguished Group Captain Hemingway and his contemporaries when their age. Even if Putin decides not to put us to the test, what all this means for the future prosperity and success of our country is profoundly alarming.
The most recent figures show that 987,000 people aged 16 to 24, or one in eight of that cohort, are not in work, education or training. Sir Keir Starmer's spokesman said last week that there was a 'moral and economic' case for welfare reform. Despite many disabled people working, the numbers of all ages receiving sickness or disability benefit in England and Wales have risen from 2.8 million in 2019 to 4 million now. Many have been diagnosed with mental health problems.
The media have been full of young people talking about how they are too anxious to work. One imagines the young Group Captain Hemingway feeling quite profound anxiety as he climbed into his Hurricane yet again, not least because he had close comrades who never returned.
But then if you are used to the state surrounding you with a financial comfort blanket that spares you from confronting the real world, you are unlikely to turn out like Group Captain Hemingway. One will, instead, be cowering indoors awaiting the next benefits cheque, despite plentiful job vacancies in many parts of Britain.
Many say this is a legacy of the pandemic: the idiotic idea to confine people to their homes for months on end may well have produced a generation fearful of the pressures of the real world. But then, as the legendary Australian cricketer and former fighter pilot Keith Miller famously observed, 'you don't know what pressure is until you've had a Messerschmitt up your arse.'
One suspects Group Captain Hemingway might have been too self-deprecating to have agreed. However, if cutting off their benefits remoralises substantial numbers capable of working, at last breaking the spell of the welfare state, it would be good not just for the needlessly dependent who were affected, but for the future of Britain.
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