IN her speech the dinner in honour of the American President at Buckingham Palace, the Queen reminded her guest of the importance of the international institutions in the search for peace.
At the D-Day memorial ceremony in Portsmouth (Echo, June 5), alongside the West’s political leaders, she recalled the courage and sacrifice of the men who died fighting for freedom.
One of those men was a relative of my wife, a 19-year-old private in the 5th Battalion of the Coldstream Guards killed later in February 1945.
He is buried in the Reichswald cemetery near Kleve in the west of Germany near the Dutch border alongside the 7,594 other Commonwealth and British servicemen.
Such men died for values that Donald Trump and the populist right-wingers across America and Europe that he supports cannot comprehend.
They died to fight fascism and to safeguard democracy, human rights and justice. They looked forward to a fairer society in Britain and a world free of war.
My wife and I are deeply conscious of being of a post-war generation that benefited greatly from the sacrifices of British and American forces on D-Day.
We are conscious, too, of the threat to their achievement of the narrow nationalism of which Trump and his ilk in Europe are currently promoting.
Ben Williamson, Durham
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