This VE Day, our NHS staff are being aligned with the war dead – and it’s shocking

Our leaders were too busy discussing getting ‘Big Ben to Bong for Brexit’ to prepare to protect their citizens and frontline workers against the spread of Covid-19. Now we are being asked to downplay tragically unnecessary deaths with a jolly singalong

It’s chillingly seamless how we’ve been asked to clap for our NHS carers on a Thursday evening, then sing for our war dead on a Friday morning.

I recognise the importance of remembrance, of course – in particularly to older, and some vulnerable, people. But amid a growing culture of health worker heroism, this feels like an explicit parallel; treating hospital staff as expendable soldiers, sent to unavoidable deaths on today’s "frontline".

Last month, the Queen gave a special address to the nation in which she likened the Covid-19 pandemic to her own experience of living through the Second World War. She ended with the words “We will meet again” – a reference to the lyric from the 1939 Dame Vera Lynn song, one of the most famous popular numbers associated with the war. Now, as community celebrations of the 75th VE day have been cancelled due to coronavirus, we’ve been asked to sing this song from our porches and windows to celebrate instead. This seamlessly transfers our performance of doorstep gratitude from our underfunded, overstretched NHS workers to the war dead.

It bears repeating that a health crisis is not a war. Doctors, nurses and other vital NHS workers are not cannon fodder. They would not be dying, in such high numbers, were it not for shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), a problem which falls squarely at the feet of a government which failed to plan, act quickly enough, and invest in public health and healthcare services.

What does national pride mean at a time like this? A health crisis is a time for humility, collaboration and learning from other countries about to how best to deal with Covid-19. Instead, the invocation of war creates a space for macho posturing from our leaders, whether that’s Boris Johnson’s Churchillian mimicry or Donald Trump’s terrifying calls upon his citizens to bear arms.

In January, having been warned about the rapid spread of the virus, our leaders were too busy discussing getting “Big Ben to Bong for Brexit” to prepare to protect their citizens. Now we are being asked to downplay tragically unnecessary deaths (past and present) with a jolly singalong. My gratitude is equal only to my fury. National pride now would be observed by sustained investment in national infrastructure such as the NHS and the care sector.

A charity single of “We’ll meet again” has been released, with proceeds going to NHS Charities Together. Katherine Jenkins duets with Dame Vera Lynn, who celebrated her 103rd birthday last month. The proceeds will help those caring for patients with coronavirus. The song itself and Lynn’s performance of it is touching, as is her sentiment that, “The words ‘We’ll Meet Again’ speak to the hope we should all have during these troubling times.” But the NHS is not a charity, even though it has charitable arms, and in any case charity singalongs are no replacement for sustained government funding of essential services.

The call for a “Blitz spirit” requests that we respond to the health crisis with cheerful stoicism. It draws on romanticised characterisations of the working classes sheltering in tube stations, keeping their spirits up with a right good old sing-a-long. The historic truth is more apt: for many, sheltering in tube stations was a mass act of civil disobedience – citizens were forced to break into some stations after the government made inadequate protective provision during German bombing raids.

Twee wartime nostalgia does a disservice to the past as much as to the present. Our health workers did not want to make this sacrifice; in that much, they are alike to the conscripts who perished between 1939 and 1945.

So respect those who secured our safety 75 years ago by not rose-tinting their war or the trauma of survival in the wake of mass death. And respect those dying in the process of securing our safety now by holding our government to account for failing to protect them as they do their jobs.

Remember the horrors – and protect the workers.

Hannah Yelin is a senior lecturer in Media and Culture at Oxford Brookes University