Corona is not the WW2 Luftwaffe, explains Guardina columnist

A few more attempts to draw solemn lessons for Brexit from corona: P Wintour in the GRaun writes:

The coronavirus pandemic underlines the need for greater international solidarity, including more cooperation between Britain and the rest of Europe, all 27 European Union ambassadors and high commissioners to the UK have asserted in an unprecedented joint statement....The statement celebrating Europe Day [borrowed clothes?] also represents a reassertion of EU unity and the continuing relevance of European values within the UK.

Going for gravitas:

One ambassador said of the statement: “This is not about getting British people to change the referendum decision, [heaven forfend!] but just to say we are not ashamed of what we represent, and have much in common with the British people.”...The statement said the ambassadors regretted but fully respected the UK’s decision to leave the EU, though it also reasserted their belief that European nation states, proud of their individual histories, are “stronger together”.

Meanwhile,J Freedland is more obvious in this, although it starts with an old favourite of mine:

As Churchill’s grandson, the former MP Nicholas Soames, reflected in a BBC interview on Thursday, seven decades ago people had had to get by on one egg a week, but “these days there’s practically a riot if you can’t get strawberries in November”.

Freedland soon hits his stride though:

war and disease are not the same [fancy!]. Covid-19 reduces no buildings to rubble; it drops no bombs from the sky [who was it that did that again?] ....Victory in Europe was a victory of an alliance, won at a high cost in British, Commonwealth, American and especially Russian blood. Not for nothing did Churchill’s VE day speech spill over with “gratitude to our splendid allies”.

Which segues into the entirely predictable narrowing and shaping:

Not long after VE Day, Churchill was pressing the case for what needed to happen next. “We must recreate the European family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe,”  ...He hoped Britain would join the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor of the Common Market. Close ties to our European neighbours were precious, Churchill argued, even if that sometimes meant “the abrogation of national sovereignty”....In today’s Downing Street there’s a Churchill tribute act who led the campaign to wrench Britain away from its allies in the European Union, who has made Brexit into a defining credo and who has presided over a government that passed up three chances to protect its doctors and nurses from a deadly virus, lest joining an EU procurement scheme be seen as engaging in treacherous European cooperation.

OK, a few points: Churchill probably did not mean we should join anything like the actual current EU, of course, and post-War Europe was not what it is today. People will cheerfully abrogate national sovereignty if necessary -- say to form a wartime alliance -- but not necessarily to meet the goals of the modern German economy. Of all the wartime allies, only 'our European neighbours' seem to remain in Freedman's vision of international cooperation. There is no evidence that joining any EU procurement scheme would have helped protect our doctors and nurses, and I would like to see the case for ideological anti-Europeanism being responsible. Apart from that ...