Parenting & Family Quote by Douglas Hurd

Hurd’s sentence is a diplomat’s tightrope walk: admit a failure, then deny the ugliest possible consequence of that failure. The phrase “lamentable lack of balance in our education” is doing double duty. It concedes, politely but unmistakably, that Britain’s schooling has tended to frame Germany through an unhelpfully narrow lens - often wartime, often caricature. “Lamentable” signals regret without assigning blame; “lack of balance” avoids naming the culprits (curricula, media, national mythmaking) while still indicting the outcome.

Then comes the pivot: “I do not believe” and “permeated” soften what could be a hard empirical claim into a matter of judgement and atmosphere. That’s strategic. A politician speaking about national attitudes rarely wants to sound like they’ve conducted a moral census, but they do want to reassure a foreign counterpart that the public is not poisonously anti-German. “Widespread hostility” is calibrated too: it leaves room for pockets of prejudice while insisting they’re not defining.

The subtext is about legitimacy and alliance. Postwar Britain relied on a stable, democratic Germany as a cornerstone of European security and economics, yet British political culture often fed itself on WWII memory as a kind of moral capital. Hurd is trying to drain that memory of its reflexive antagonism without asking the country to stop remembering. The line reassures Germany while gently scolding Britain: our education may be skewed, but don’t mistake skewed stories for a nation ready to hate.