July 5th, 2011

The United Kingdom Erects A Statue Of An Admired American President: Remembering Ronald Reagan

Posted by: Conservative Refocus
Published on July 5th, 2011 @ 11:06:26 pm , using 423 words

Posted in Events and Issues: Credible Resources

Cr Editorial note: Um...Don't hold your breath on the Obama statue....and to our greatest ally in Great Britain "Thank you from America" and from the bottom of our swelling hearts.

The powerful bond between Great Britain and America has just been reforged by our stalwart British allies and friends in so many ways and we do indeed get the message, well, at least some of us do anyway....

Ronald Reagan represented what is great in America, and Ronald Reagan loved Great Britain.

UK Telegraph

By the end of his second term in office, he had transformed the economy and helped bring the Soviet Union to its knees.

Ronald Reagan, the centenary of whose birth fell earlier this year, yesterday became the third great American to be honoured by a statue in Grosvenor Square. Attending the ceremony, Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, spoke of “a memorial and a commemoration of a glorious past but more importantly a call to an even more glorious future”. The reminder is apposite. In yesterday’s paper, Toby Harnden, our US editor, wrote that unprecedented uncertainty and self-doubt were clouding the Independence Day celebrations.

The mood is not dissimilar to that when Reagan was sworn in as the 40th president in 1981. On the campaign trail, his answer to the failures of the Carter presidency was a pledge to restore “the great, confident roar of American progress and growth and optimism”. By the end of his second term in office, he had transformed the economy and, from a position of strength, helped bring the Soviet Union to its knees.

In that heady period, as in the darker days of the Second World War, close personal relations between the American president and the British prime minister played a crucial role. Just as Churchill and Roosevelt faced down one great tyranny of the 20th century, Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did the same to another; he identifying the USSR as an “evil empire”, she undermining it by her support for the Polish trade union movement Solidarity.

Ironically, the American embassy is planning to leave Mayfair, where Washington has had an official presence since the late 18th century, for Battersea. But the bronze triumvirate which it will leave behind – Roosevelt, Reagan and Eisenhower (who oversaw the D-Day landings from the square) – will be a permanent reminder in the heart of London of our shared history and the depth of our friendship.