“I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, 'Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.'”
Minnie Louise Haskins
When we said in last week’s commentary ‘the fact is that the best leaders empower others to take control of their own lives, because they know that their most successful legacy is to endow continuing progress after they’ve moved on’, we had no idea that there would be such incontrovertible evidence of that statement before the week was out. Historians regard the first Elizabethan era as laying foundations for the future, but each day that passes since the Queen died is showing us the immense and global legacy that the second Elizabethan era is leaving for our otherwise so turbulent world.
There have been so many tributes already, so our spoken contribution is quite simply to record the tribute made to the Queen in the House of Commons on the day after she died, and to recall in our opening quotation the poem which inspired her so deeply throughout her life.
We will see the Queen’s legacy unfold further over the coming years; but already, in the smooth handover of power to Charles and Liz Truss, we are seeing that benefit coming through in quite a transformation from where they both were thirty years ago. There is a growing sense of optimism that they will provide strong but well-measured leadership, and hopefully they will bring out the same servant leadership which we have experienced from the Queen over the past seventy years.
This sense of continuing progress is particularly evident across the Commonwealth which, as we said on 6th June in our commentary, ‘The Global Elizabethan Legacy’, has been the Queen’s crowning achievement over these decades. As our opening quotation from Commonwealth Youth Worker Robin Lockhart says, “We are in a time when we need more unity. Communality and respect for others runs through all youth work — and the Commonwealth seems to have that at its heart”. That sense of unity and respect for others is abundantly evident in the wake of her reign.
More mundane matters must wait — many may be finding this period following the Queen’s death quite disorientating, as if normal life is on hold while we experience these days of mourning and remembrance. But those issues have not gone away, as our programmes show: it’s an opportunity to put them into that wider perspective.
With that in mind, we’ll defer further comment on those everyday issues until next week.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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