Who is your greatest living Englishman?

He's dead, and whilst he undoubtedly played a pivotal role in us winning WW2 his racism removes him from any "greatest ever" conversation for me.

In terms of impact on the world it's probably Tim Berners Lee. For being ******* mint it's John Cooper Clark

 

Churchill should be judged on everything he did not just between 1939 and 1945 - otherwise we would be saying Stalin was the greatest Russian ever also.

 

Brian Blessed!!

 

Many Russians do think that. Especially younger ones who don't remember the atrocities. In fact, when he won a public poll for a prime time TV show, it caused such controversy that the producers had to "disqualify" him, so Gagarin, who had come second, could win instead.

 

Churchill led this nation through it's most darkest hour to victory.

 

Mmm. I give a lot of credit to the people actually fighting the war and making the sacrifices they had to in order to win.

 

I’d have voted for Lev Yashin.

 

He was also responsible for 2m people starving to death and had vile views on race, calling whites a "higher grade of race" than native Americans, aboriginal Australians and, well anyone that wasn't white! He thought it was perfectly ok for the superior white race to go and land grab from these "lower species of humans".

Great guy.

 

He was in the top ten if I remember correctly. Absolutely revered here. Still considered by most people to be the greatest footballer Russia has ever produced. My dad reckons he was even better than Gordon Banks (and Alan Rough! )

 

Currently alive then I would go along with Attenborough , greatest that ever lived with out a doubt Churchill , if it wasn"t for his leadership we would now be speaking German

 

Nope, that's the one

 

For me its the one and only dickie bird,, true fellow yorkshireman

 

Ricky Tomlinson.

 

But he’s still dead. That’s one reason why he’s not the greatest living Englishman, among others.

 

Except he (edit. The tnuc) was born a yank. shame really

 

Just out of interest (and in no way am I suggesting this was the case) would the people who think Churchill is the greatest ever Englishman have the same opinion if he'd been convicted of possession of child pornography at some point after the war?

 

stephen fry

 

Probably not, but I'm not sure it's directly comparable with holding views on race which are not considered acceptable today. There are arguments that Churchill was a product of his time, and certainly people then expressed such ideas which they would probably be much less likely to even hold if they had been brought up and lived in modern Britain. But as far as paedophilia goes, I'm pretty sure it was completely unacceptable even then. By the way, I'm not trying to justify Churchill's racism, I'm just putting into the context of era (which doesn't in any way make it ok).

 

I might agree if they were just privately held beliefs which didn't influence policy, but it's a bit more difficult to stomach where the views were considered extreme even for the time and contributed to the deaths of 3m people in the Bengal famine, or the creation of concentration camps in Kenya following the Mau Mau uprising.

 

I'll be honest the Bengal famine is not something I know about in much detail, other than that it happened. It's really something I should read up on.