I don’t know if anyone noticed this scurrilous piece on Spiked Online recently. A Country for Old Men?. Spiked Online is essentially the on-line version of the magazine Living Marxism.
‘Editor-at-large’ Mick Hume misappropriates the recent Battle of Britain 70th anniversary celebrations in order to denigrate this country, in an essay as distorted as it is factually wrong, as carping as it is inaccurate and confused.
His basic claim seems to be that that the only good thing that Britain can think of to say about itself is to talk about something that happened 70 years ago, and even this one solitary thing is a myth. Hume is honest enough to admit that he is a card-carrying Marxist, and what we are reading in Spiked Online this week is good old-fashioned Marxist propaganda.
The events marking the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain have not only served as an official history lesson, but have also been unintentionally revealing about the parlous state of the nation today.
The anniversary services and media bombardment have focused on the surviving members of ‘the Few’, the Royal Air Force pilots who fought Hitler’s Luftwaffe in the skies over Britain in 1940 and inspired Winston Churchill’s famous declaration that ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’. They have been feted again this past week as the men who defended our liberty and made modern Britain what it is.
The service in Westminster Abbey confirmed, however, that those brave young men of 1940 are now pretty old men, some who survive still as bright as their medals but have trouble standing to attention. So it seemed slightly incongruous that they should be proclaimed as our greatest living national heroes, with every politician and celebrity from David Cameron and the royals downwards keen to get next to the RAF veterans in the hope of getting a piece of their courageous image.
What does it say about a nation’s elite that the finest heroes and ‘role models’ it can parade before the public should have lived their finest hour 70 years ago? The inevitable impression given is that ours is a country for old men, where some in high places are more comfortable remembering a sanitised version of the past than thinking about the uncertain future.
It seems incongruous to Hume that our national heroes should be old people? Why? Is there an age limit for heroism? Is Hume advocating some cult of youth? These war veterans are infinitely more worthy and substantial role models for today's young than the kind of trash celebrity paraded on the likes of Big Brother and The X Factor. Apart from the cheap excuse to borrow the title of a recent Coen brothers film, and a blatant endorsement of ageism, I just fail to see what his point is. Feminists may be concerned that he is under-recognising women’s contribution to the Second World War effort, such as that of the admirable SOE agent Eileen Nearne MBE, whose funeral took place last week.
The contrast between the 1940 generation and today’s leaders and commanders appears stark. Who would believe the British state could fight and win such a major war in 2010? And how could it inspire today’s generation of largely indifferent youth to make such sacrifices? What would they be fighting for?
I agree that the contrast between the 1940 generation and today’s appears stark, but I have to place a large portion of the blame for that on to people like Hume and articles like the one I am discussing. The country is in a parlous state largely because of the actions of the political Left, relentlessly undermining our institutions and national identity.
If it comes to that, who could have believed that the British state could have fought and won such a major war in 1940 either? Or that its leaders at the time –some of them anyway- would be regarded decades later as great men? They fought the war simply because they had to. They only became great men because they achieved great things. Heroes are only celebrated after they have committed heroic deeds, not before. If a similar emergency arose today, we would probably rise to it, and if we prevailed, we would again have a clutch of heroes and great men to 'parade'. Hume's lack of faith in his own country is very unbecoming. I am reminded of Mrs Thatcher's anecdote that years after the Falklands War, she spoke to a Russian general, and he told her that the Soviet assessment of the Falklands crisis was that Britain probably wouldn't bother to fight, and if it did, it would probably lose. Many on the Left like to tell themselves that the British just don't have it in them. That attitude is one thing coming from a Soviet general during the Cold War; quite another coming from a British journalist, particularly when his opinion is so nonsensical and devoid of evidence as we shall see.
The wave of Second World War nostalgia is not just about remembering. These things are also about trying to connect the past with the present, drawing parallels that can boost the authority of those in power now and provide a national feelgood factor. The Tory government tried that in 1995, with a series of events to mark the fiftieth anniversary of victory in the Second World War. Many people came out to celebrate, though even then the nostalgia-fest also gave rise to what we at Living Marxism magazine described as ‘anniversary fatigue’. Fifteen years later, the recent events marking the seventieth anniversary of 1940 have only served to highlight more starkly the differences between Britain’s politicians, peoples and wars then and now.
Our celebration of our past is part of what constitutes our national life and national identity. Every other country is allowed to have an identity and celebrate its past, why not us? The kind of pageantry Hume refers to is often termed in Leftist academic circles as 'Civil religion'. This is something the Soviet communists were very keen on; think of the ubiquitous statues of Lenin, the Red Square military parades, the posters promoting five year plans. The Bolsheviks closed down the churches and tried to replace God with Marx. To the Leftist mind, all life is political conflict and all cultural production is propaganda for one side or another. Thus, comrade Hume cannot look at a British public event without seeing an attempt by the evil capitalist ruling class to legitimise itself in the eyes of the gullible masses; in this case, an attempt by the current government, which he presumably despises as enemies of the working-class (or benefit-receiving class as the case may be), to cash in on some putative heroic deeds of the past. He may be suffering from 'anniversary fatigue', but I am not alone in suffering from socialism-fatigue.
The British elite still clings to the fading memory of the Second World War as its last great victory on the world stage. That is why there is more fuss about the seventieth anniversary than there ever was about the thirtieth or fortieth. The events of 1940, from the Dunkirk evacuation through the Battle of Britain to the Blitz, are particularly important to the national legend. That was the year when little Britain stood alone against the Nazis, before either the Soviet Union or America entered the war, as a gallant beacon of liberty. Little wonder that prime minister Cameron got into trouble this year when he suggested that Britain had been America’s ‘junior partner’ even in 1940.
It is sometimes hard to actually understand what Hume is getting at, beyond a generalised spray of anti-British sentiment. It is highly questionable who exactly ‘the British elite’ is today. It is certainly not as monolithic as it appeared to be half a century ago. These days, we would have to include Germaine Greer, Wayne Rooney, and Simon Cowell, Alan Rusbridger , Benjamin Zephaniah and Cheryl Cole as much the Queen or the Prime Minister. The elite’s favourite newspaper is the Guardian as much as the Times, if not more so.
Cameron was justly criticised for his historical ignorance over 1940, no doubt having been influenced by the kind of propaganda Hume is feeding us here.
As for the Soviet Union entering the war, let us not forget that the Soviet Union was Nazi Germany’s friend. The Molotov-Von Ribbentrop pact, signed a month before Britain went to war, not only agreed mutual non-aggression between the two giant tyrannical socialist powers of Europe, but also secretly to invade and carve up the sovereign nation of Poland between them. It was for Poland’s freedom that Britain and France went to war. The British Left had opposed British re-armament throughout the 1930s. Even after war had been declared and bombs were falling on London, they still opposed the war effort, and attempted to subvert it by organising strikes, distributing propaganda, and refusing to serve in the military. They would not hear of opposition to Hitler. Any mate of Stalin’s was a mate of theirs. The Molotov-Von Ribbentrop pact remained in place between Hitler and Stalin until June 1941, when Hitler broke it, and invaded the USSR. Stalin learned what Britain had already found out after the collapse of the Chamberlain government: that Hitler’s word was not worth the paper it was written on. At this point, many in the British Left promptly joined the military, declaring that they would fight for Stalin, but not for Churchill. The British Left’s record in WW2 could hardly be more squalid.
The central place of the war in the national memory has always been at least partly based - like much war propaganda - on myths that have become widely accepted as the historical truth. We have seen many of these myths peddled again around this year’s anniversaries, none more so than with the Blitz and the Battle of Britain. It may be worth questioning a few of them, before looking at how they cannot play the same role for the authorities today.
Myths of the Blitz spirit
From the summer of 1940, the German bombing raids on London and other British cities are said to have been met with the ‘Blitz spirit’ of national unity and stoical resistance – a spirit that governments of all stripes have sought to call upon in all subsequent crises. There were indeed many remarkable examples of heroism, resilience and solidarity during the Blitz. What the official version ignores, however, is that the masses struggled and survived on the homefront (sic) largely through their own efforts, and often in direct conflict with the authorities.
So, the blitz spirit is a myth because people struggled and survived through their own efforts? That is the blitz spirit. Struggling and surviving through one's own efforts is what the blitz spirit is supposed to be about.
He seems pleased about the fact that people sometimes found themselves in conflict with the authorities. This was inevitable; it always is the case in a democracy, but more so at a time of national emergency, when ordinary social and economic structures are breaking down (which is the enemy's intention), emergency powers are assumed, policy is often made up on the hoof and people are displaced, desperate and scared, and the authorities are struggling to keep the country running. Of course you will have conflicts. On the whole, though, if Mick Hume had asked the population in 1940 whether they supported the government's war effort or not, the vast majority would have answered with a resounding yes.
Back in 1989, on the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Second World War, Ed Barrett published an essay in Living Marxism about the myths of the Blitz Spirit (sadly unavailable on the Web), which drew on historical research to detail eye-opening facts and stories: from the reserve policeman trained to fire a rifle in 1939 and told he would have to use it on Londoners ‘if they get out of control when the invasion and the bombings come’, to the Lancashire MP who reported in horror in June 1940 that munitions workers in his constituency were all saying ‘well at any rate, one good thing about Hitler is he robs the rich to help the poor’. Some Londoners also blamed the Jews for their plight.
I agree that it is unfortunate that this essay is not available to read. However, let us think about some of the incidents mentioned here. Police trained to shoot? Well there was a war on. The policeman's principal target would have been invading Germans, but in addition to that, looting, rioting and social disorder had to be anticipated. It is interesting to note that many leading lights of London's post-war underworld served their criminal apprenticeships during the blitz; 'Mad' Franky Fraser began his career during the blitz, later remarking that ‘the opportunities for crime were so good that he never forgave the Germans for surrendering’. Reference Many such thieves and criminals took advantage of the fact that the authorities' attention was elsewhere. Which government does not act to contain looting and social disorder? It is one of the basic functions of government. Hume seems to be trying to plant the idea in our heads that the evil agents of capitalist oppression were being ordered to gun down innocent cockney mothers in a bread queue. The truth, of course, was nothing like that.
“munitions workers in his constituency were all saying ‘well at any rate, one good thing about Hitler is he robs the rich to help the poor’".
This lends further weight to the claim that Hitler was left-wing, not right-wing, and everyone at the time knew it. The term ‘fascism’ was coined by Mussolini, who came from the Left. What was the name of Hitler’s party? The National Socialist German Workers Party. After Hitler’s invasion of Russia, the Soviet Union distanced itself from fascism, and pulled off an enormous propaganda coup by claiming that National Socialism had been right-wing all along. That, not the blitz spirit, is the biggest and most enduring myth of WW2.
Blaming the Jews for their plight? So anti-Semitism existed in Britain in 1940. I think we knew that already. Along with the Communists and Socialists, whom Mr Hume presumably admires, home-grown fascists were among the many people trying to stymie Churchill's war effort.
Once the bombs of the Blitz began falling in 1940, the British authorities were able to create a more national mood of resistance. Yet even here the myth of the united Blitz spirit does not really hold true. The authorities tried to stop Londoners sheltering in Tube stations, subjected those whose homes were bombed to humiliating means tests under the Victorian Poor Law, and exposed them to such horrors as the Tilbury bomb shelter in east London, where four earth buckets served as toilets for a disused warehouse supposed to hold 16,000 people. When the shelter inmates organised a committee to run their own affairs and sent a deputation to protest at conditions they were charged by baton-wielding mounted police.
The authorities tried to stop Londoners sheltering in Tube stations for the simple reason that transport infrastructure is a strategic asset. The authorities were probably hoping to run trains. How unreasonable of them. The authorities had to back down when the Tube stations were effectively overrun by popular demand, and there was nothing they could do about it - except presumably, send down those armed police Hume mentioned, with orders to clear the place by force. The British government, needless to say, didn't do that. I wonder what Stalin would have done.
Inadequate re-housing? Inadequate bomb shelters? None of this stuff matters. Existing pre-war institutions were used for want of any others. Wartime infrastructure like bomb shelters was being hastily improvised. Let us bear in mind that throughout the 1930s the Left was systematically opposing British re-armament. If Mr Hume's socialist friends had not gone out of their way to hinder the government, there might have been better bomb shelters around by 1940.
None of this constitutes a refutation of the 'blitz spirit'. It merely confirms what we already knew; that the blitz was unpleasant, unglamorous and squalid, a time of grave national emergency.
When I spotted Prince Charles on the TV on Sunday, talking about how he was raised on his grandmother’s tales of Buckingham Palace being bombed, it reminded me of how the old king and queen (his grandparents) were initially booed when they visited the blitzed East End of London. Then the Ministry of Information (the inspiration for Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984) seized upon the minor bomb damage to the palace as what they called an ‘opportunity… of counteracting the bad feeling in the East End’. They organised a press offensive around the bombing to emphasise the theme: ‘King with his people in the frontline together.’
As an MOI memo had suggested at the start of the war, the authorities would adopt a ‘pragmatic definition’ of the truth; lying to the public all the time would be hopeless, but when a sufficient emergency arose they must be ready ‘to tell one big, thumping lie that will then be believed’. Ed Barrett concluded in 1989 that the myth of the Blitz spirit had in many ways served as such a big, thumping lie for the duration of the war and half a century afterwards.
What should the authorities have done? Surrendered to Hitler? Hume seems to be offering us a counsel of despair, the Grima Wormtongue of British online journalism. Propaganda is all right as long as it promotes the Left, of course.
As for Orwell, he was nothing if not patriotic. 1984 was a condemnation of State Socialism, not of the British establishment. There is no evidence for the claim that the fictional Ministry of Truth was based on the British Ministry of Information. It is much more likely to have been based on the Nazi Propaganda Ministry of Herr Joseph Goebbels. Let’s not forget that Orwell was a propagandist himself, broadcasting for the British from Room 101 of the BBC in London. He also handed a list of names of left-wing subversives to the security service. I think we can definitely say that Orwell, unlike Hume, was on our side.
The truth about the Few
The Battle of Britain has its own powerful mythology. It is a David v Goliath tale of how the plucky RAF, vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the evil Nazi Luftwaffe, prevailed against all odds. The victory in the Battle of Britain – the empire’s ‘finest hour’, as Churchill proclaimed – is said to have marked a turning point in the fortunes of the Second World War.
Well, yes – and, mostly, no. Little-discussed truths about the battle have more recently been highlighted by clear-eyed historians such as Professor Richard Overy, author of The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality. Overy points out that, contrary to the notion that a mass Nazi invasion of Britain was imminent in 1940, Hitler was always rather reticent about embarking on such a seaborne attack, with his commanders uncertain of the chances of success, while his own priority was preparing to invade the Soviet Union. He also makes the point, well-known but often suppressed out of embarrassment, that in 1940 the British establishment was far from as resolute as the young pilots who supposedly symbolised the national spirit; there was an influential faction in the corridors of power who wanted to do a deal with Hitler rather than ‘fight them in the skies or on the beaches’.
‘Little discussed truths’? He makes it sound like some sinister conspiracy of silence by the evil British establishment. Instead of that, all we have in reality is a difference of academic opinion, and Hume seems to be in the minority. Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain, Operation Sealion, has been well-documented. Hitler may well have been reticent about it, and some of his staff may have doubted its chances, but the point is the British didn’t know that at the time. Let’s not forget that Hitler had been a lowly landser in the trenches of the Great War. He was an army man. His military focus was on land campaigns on the plains of central Europe. At that time, amphibious landing was in its infancy. The best example of it having been tried was the Gallipoli campaign of 1915-1916, and that had been a disaster. Of course Hitler and his staff were reluctant to repeat it. But they were certainly prepared to give it a try. British photoreconnaissance at the time revealed that invasion barges were being assembled in Channel ports, and RAF Bomber Command made some attempt to strike at these preparation sites. Signals intelligence also showed that German troops amassing on the French coast had been issued with life-jackets. And all the while, the Luftwaffe is trying to destroy Britain’s air defences. What conclusions should the British government have drawn?
Nor is it strictly true to claim that the Germans had the upper hand in numbers and capability of planes. The RAF was a match for the ‘Goliath’ Luftwaffe in men and machines, plus the Brits had hi-tech advantages such as radar and were fighting in their home airspace. It would arguably have been a shock result if the Germans had prevailed.
Hume has raised several issues here:
- Numbers of aircraft
- Quality of aircraft
- Radar
- British airspace, which affects:
- Length of supply lines
- Morale
- Damage to ground assets
- Length of supply lines
It is worth considering each of these in turn.
With regard to numbers of aircraft, Hume disagrees with everyone else. Nowhere does anyone say that the RAF and Luftwaffe were evenly matched. The general consensus is that the RAF was outnumbered by around 3 to 1. Order of battle is given in some detail on Wikipedia for both Fighter Command and the Luftwaffe
Elsewhere, one may consider this site:
"At the start of the battle, the Luftwaffe had 2,500 planes that were serviceable and in any normal day, the Luftwaffe could put up over 1,600 planes. The RAF had 1,200 planes on the eve of the battle which included 800 Spitfires and Hurricanes - but only 660 of these were serviceable".
So the general consensus seems to be 1600+ planes, as opposed to 660, or a ratio of about 2.4 in favour of the Germans.
For more detail, an excellent book is Fighter Boys by Patrick Bishop.
The German tactic was to draw the RAF fighters out to battle so that they could be destroyed by Luftwaffe fighters. They did this by launching bomber missions against British targets, initially merchant shipping in the English Channel, later, RAF ground assets, and then London's infrastructure and civilian population. The intention was that the British would scramble fighters to oppose the German bombers, whereupon they would be pounced on by German fighters and shot down. In this way, the RAF would be destroyed, leaving the way open for an amphibious invasion of Britain. As such, the German bombers initially were mostly used as provocation and bait; the real Battle of Britain was between fighters, for the control of British airspace.
With regard to quality of aircraft, it is only worth comparing single-engine fighters. The Messerschmitt bf109e was generally regarded as being superior to the Spitfire, as it had a fuel injection system instead of the Spitfire's carburettor, and was armed with 20mm cannons, as opposed to the Spitfire's 'popgun' .303 machine guns. The Spitfire in turn was better than the Hurricane. Most of the British planes were Hurricanes.
Hume's comment on radar is particularly strange: "plus the Brits had hi-tech advantages such as radar". He makes it sound as if this was some kind of unfair privilege. We had radar because we had built it and paid for it. It was probably the single most important factor in the battle, as it allowed Dowding and Park to use their scarce resources more effectively. The Germans made no serious attempt to disable it, and that probably lost them the battle. By saying "hi-tech advantages such as radar", he seems to suggest that radar was only one a whole raft of British technological advantages. It wasn't. It was the only significant one ever mentioned, and Hume cannot suggest any others either.
As for airspace, this was a mixed bag for both sides. The British benefitted in that they had shorter lines of supply; their fighters had more loiter time in the air, as they did not have to conserve fuel for a long return journey. They also had a strong morale incentive in that they were defending their own homes. On the down side, the fact that the battle was fought over Britain meant that British shipping, aircraft, runways, hangers, ground crew, and eventually civilians were bombed, while Luftwaffe and other German ground assets remained largely unscathed.
The outcome of the Battle of Britain was certainly still important, and the fact that its destiny lay in the hands of a few hundred brave young pilots does show how thin was the line of defence a bankrupt Britain was able to offer in 1940. But Overy concludes that it was only a ‘victory of sorts’, since the Luftwaffe emerged with almost as many planes as it started with, and Britain’s problems in the war were only just beginning until its more powerful allies weighed in.
The Luftwaffe emerged from the battle with almost as many planes as it started with because it was able to replace lost aircraft. In order to permanently destroy the Luftwaffe's stock of aircraft, the British would have had to destroy German aircraft production, with the accompanying logistical supply chain. Destroying German aircraft production was not, and could not have been, one of Fighter Command's war aims in the Battle of Britain. If Hume or his beloved Overy could have asked Hugh Dowding or Keith Park 'What are your victory conditions?', they would have said 'Survival', 'Retaining control of British airspace', 'Persuading the Germans to call off the attack' or 'Preventing amphibious invasion by denying the German fleet air cover'. They would not have said 'Destroying the German aircraft industry'. How could Fighter Command possibly have achieved that?
In fact, throughout the rest of the war, it was the task of RAF Bomber Command (later assisted by the USAAF) to destroy German industry. The British pursued this aim with great ruthlessness and determination, despite heavy losses. It was ultimately a very successful policy. Beevor reports that during the Battle of Normandy in the summer of 1944, German troops told each other a wry joke: 'If you see khaki planes in the sky, they are British. If you see silver planes in the sky they are American. If you see no planes in the sky, they are German'. The Germans by that time could only travel by night, because the Western allies ruled the skies of France unopposed, and would strafe anything that moved in daylight.
Bomber Command gradually wore down German industry to the point where it could no longer produce war materiel in sufficient quantity to continue the war effort. Beevor, in the same work cited above, reports that German troops in the battle of Normandy bitterly complained that the well-supplied Western allies were fighting 'a rich man's war'. German supplies got so low that in places artillery gun crews were rationed to firing a single shell per day, and sometimes had to get permission to fire at all.
By hammering Germany with heavy bombing almost every night, it still took Bomber Command four years to achieve this. To criticise Fighter Command for not having done it in the summer of 1940 is simply absurd, a clear example of spurious carping designed to deceive the gullible.
Hume fails to mention the loss of trained aircrew that the Germans suffered in the Battle of Britain. Planes can be easily replaced. Pilots cannot. Luftwaffe losses in the battle were over 1200, compared to about 500 RAF. The Luftwaffe certainly did not emerge from the battle with almost as many pilots as it started with. These unsustainable losses were no doubt a factor in convincing the Germans that they were not going to destroy the RAF any time soon. They called a complete halt to daytime missions, which as far as Dowding and Park were concerned, was victory.
Hume argues that the Battle of Britain ‘merged into the Blitz’, against which the victorious RAF offered ‘relatively little defence’ for the people, and suggested that the question worth asking now ‘is not about the well-known spirited activity of the “few”, but the capacity of the “many” to absorb the German attack for almost a year without buckling’.
I am amazed by Hume's unremitting hostility towards the British establishment. Both sides switched to night bombing, as daytime losses were unsustainably high. Neither side had significant night-fighter capability in 1940, although this had drastically improved by the end of the war.
Hume previously turned up his nose at British radar, and now criticises Britain for not having night-fighters! When we have technology we get no credit. When we do not have it, we are criticised.
If the legitimacy of a government is to be judged by its capacity to protect its civilians, then the most illegitimate government of all in WW2 was that of the Soviet Union, which lost more civilians than all other combatant nations combined. If British citizens die, it is the fault of the British government for failing to protect them, not the Nazis, but if Russian civilians die, it is the fault of the Nazis, not the Communist Party which failed to protect them. Total sophistry.
If Hume really wishes to carp about British performance in the Battle of Britain, then he would have benefited from doing some homework. If he had bothered to read some books, he could have pointed out that two thirds of the fabled Few never actually shot anything down. He could have pointed out that the squadron with the highest kill rate was 303 Polish squadron, with not an Englishman among them. But Comrade Mick isn't really interested in facts.
" the capacity of the “many” to absorb the German attack for almost a year without buckling"?
Isn't that what we call 'the Blitz spirit'? It didn't last for nearly a year either, it lasted for 79 days, about two and a half months.
(One other minor myth of the Battle of Britain was aired again this time around when one commentator suggested that the Few who saved the nation were largely public-school educated – like him, Cameron, and Clegg. It was left to the historians of Private Eye to point out that in fact relatively few of the Few were public-school boys, and that Churchill himself had complained about the failure of Eton, Harrow and other top people’s schools to provide many pilots. The Duke of Wellington’s aristocratic boast that the Battle of Waterloo had been won ‘on the playing fields of Eton’ – ignoring the small matter of the many dead soldiers on the fields of Europe – sounds even more like pie in the sky where the Battle of Britain is concerned.)
This ‘one commentator’ remains unnamed, but Hume tries to blame the statement on Cameron and Clegg. This is pure sophistry. It seems that our unnamed public-school commentator is not any better informed than Hume is.
War for another world
These partial truths, myths and legends of the Second World War have done a lot to sustain a broadly patriotic political outlook in Britain through the decades since 1940.
No doubt to Hume’s dismay.
Yet they no longer have the purchase on public opinion that they enjoyed even 15 years ago. What has been striking this time around is the gap rather than the continuity between then and now. The heroic struggles of the Second World War must seem to many today to have taken place not only in another century but on another planet. This is not merely because they happened a long time ago. Nor can it all be put down to the shortcomings of history education (although I was taken aback to hear on a recent BBC quiz show that only 28 out of 100 people they asked knew that Germany had fought against Britain in the Second World War…).
I have written elsewhere about the devastating impact on education that the Left has had in the last 40 years, so if Hume is taken aback, he only has himself and his comrades to blame.
No, what has changed most starkly is the political atmosphere in modern Britain. Our leaders have lost not just the empire of old but also the firm belief in Britain’s place in the world. They lack the sense of mission and the martial spirit of their predecessors (as well as their sense of national and racial superiority).
I’m not convinced that the British ever had a sense of racial superiority. He must be mixing us up with the Nazis. At the height of Empire, there was certainly a feeling of national superiority (arguably justified by the facts), but the British have always recognised themselves to be ethnically mixed, with their not-always-friendly rivalry between English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish members, and even within England, its rich mix of regional identities, and the undeniably vast array of ethnicities in the territories of the Empire. We have always been aware of the fact that we were invaded by the Romans, the Normans, and the Anglo-Saxons. I don’t think the British have ever perceived themselves to be racially pure, let alone anything resembling ubermenchen. Again, this is pure sophistry.
Thus Cameron and Clegg strike schoolboyish figures alongside an imperial orator such as Churchill. With old-fashioned nationalism no longer the dominant political force in British society, there is no Blitz spirit, or even ‘Falklands factor’, for the current crop of political pygmies to tap into by talking about the Second World War.
It is unfair of Hume to compare peace-time, managerial-style leaders with a great dog of war like Churchill. Hume himself cuts a sad and pathetic figure next to Marx or Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Mao or Pol Pot, and to my mind, that is one of his good points.
Over the past week there have been many clunky attempts, in the media and the Westminster Abbey service, to link the Battle of Britain with contemporary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Well, these are all military actions that British forces are, or have been, involved with, so there is some connection.
All of them simply serve to highlight the absurdity of such comparisons. The politicians who engineered those localised military debacles, and have just sounded the retreat from an obscure Afghan province, appear unlikely to have been able to take on the challenge of a total war.
I have written elsewhere about Labour’s largely hostile attitude towards the military, and on the foolishness and illegality of Blair’s military adventurism. Again, Hume has his comrades on the Left to thank for the debacles to which he refers. As for the question of whether this country or its leaders could rise to the challenge of a total war: let’s thank our lucky stars we don’t have to. And if we did, would we, leaders and people, rise to that challenge? Of course we would. And would we prevail? Who can say? If Hume has nothing good to say about his own nation, why doesn’t he emigrate? What is he even doing here?
Those who would seriously attempt to put Britain’s Afghan war-without-a-war-aim on a par with the struggle for global influence between the British Empire and Nazi Germany only reveal their own historical ignorance and political desperation. The current controversy over cuts in Britain’s military spending through the coalition’s Strategic Defence and Security Review illustrates how far Britain has slipped in the great power stakes over the past 70 years.
Perhaps Hume is regretting the loss of Empire. Maybe he would prefer to see Britain restored to its former pre-eminent position in the world.
In 1940 the country was on the verge of bankruptcy, yet the national government still had the wherewithal to win the Battle of Britain and poured its remaining resources into fighting a world war to defend its empire. In 2010, with the armed forces already complaining about overstretched resources, the Lib-Con coalition government is preparing to make major cuts to the defence budget, with senior officers complaining about a lack of any coherent strategy for Britain’s defence policy in the ‘strategic’ review. Back then the cry was victory at any cost. Today it is more like cuts for cuts (sic) sake.
Britain is again, today, on the verge of bankruptcy. This is again, due to the economic incompetence and recklessness of the outgoing Labour administration. The blame, again, can only be placed at the door of the political Left. It is very far from ‘cuts for cuts' sake’. Why on earth would any politician pursue so obviously unpopular a policy for absolutely no reason? We do still have elections in this country. The cuts are the bitter medicine needed to try to sort out the disastrous mess left by Labour. My own view is that cutting the defence budget is a wildly stupid course of action. Especially when we are leaving the overseas aid budget untouched, and paying the workshy to breed. But that is Britain for you. The malign influence of Socialism long ago penetrated even to the highest corridors of power.
The appearance of those surviving members of the Few also highlighted another major difference. Where are the heroes of today? There are of course still soldiers and airmen fighting and dying in Afghanistan, and until recently in Iraq. Yet those conflicts have been treated with indifference, if not outright hostility, by much of the public. There is no clear sense of what ‘we’ are supposed to be fighting for. Instead, the perception is that the servicemen are being shot at and blown up ‘for nothing’. Thus while polls show there is widespread public support for the armed forces – as opposed to the wars – which is expressed through campaigns such as Help for Heroes, it takes the form more of sympathy for soldiers as hapless victims than solidarity with them as heroic warriors. Meanwhile, British soldiers face war crimes charges arising from the conflict in Iraq, while many of the young people who are the same age now as the Few were then are condemned as slackers, slobs and yobs.
It often seems that the only heroes our culture can comfortably produce are what Homer, in The Iliad, describes contemptuously as ‘heroes of the dance floor’ – TV celebrities, sportsmen, movie stars, etc. How telling that even the Battle of Britain commemorations could not pass without some celebrity input, with David ‘Del Boy’ Jason and Ewan ‘Trainspotting’ McGregor fronting ‘history’ programmes that mainly involved them whooping at the surviving Spitfires and Hurricanes.
McGregor, whose brother is an RAF pilot, was even invited to perform one of the readings before the nation in Westminster Abbey, presumably because somebody thought the grandeur of the historic church required a bit of glamour from a man who advertises aftershave.
Or was it just because he is a major British actor, and was given a job, which, in a previous generation, might have been given to John Gielgud?
The insecure British elite can no longer celebrate its own great triumphs without falling back on the ‘x’-factor. (Then again, McGregor did play the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels, and the original of that movie apparently borrowed from the movie Battle of Britain for some of its action sequences, so maybe he was qualified…)
You’re rambling now, Mick. Time to stop typing and go to the pub.
Trying to hide behind the elderly heroes of yesteryear can offer no answers to the crisis of national identity and mission today. Of course we should remember the past and endeavour to learn the lessons of history – though preferably as it was, warts and all, not as some wish it could have been.
But the focus needs to be on the present and the future, giving the youth something worth pursuing audaciously.
Perhaps Hume could suggest what such a project might be, instead of sitting around carping because others have not done so. One of the best lessons we can give to the young of today is to give them a touch of that blitz spirit, a pride in themselves and their country, an ability to motivate themselves and be self-reliant, to keep struggling through life’s challenges with head held high, rather than living off the work done by others, either by thieving or whining for handouts. By constantly talking down their country, Hume isn’t helping.
A twenty-first-century society that continued to tell itself our ‘finest hour’, the high point of our history, passed in a war 70 years ago really would risk looking like a country for old men.
Mick Hume is editor-at-large of spiked.
Britain, according to Hume, was an oppressive and socially divided, bankrupt, rubbishy little country even back in 1940, and it is much worse than that now, inhabited by people who can only make up lies about a glorious past in order to avoid having to confront how weak and pathetic they are.
The 'Blitz spirit' and 'the Few' are myths, but not because they are fictional; not because they are sexed-up stories that never really happened. They really did happen, and when we look at WW2, we in Britain (those of us not on the Left anyway) can be justly proud of ourselves, and we should continue to honour the veterans for as long as they live. These things have become myths in the sense that they have become a component of British national identity, part of what it means to be British. They are myths like the Spanish Armada is a myth, like Henry VIII and his six wives are a myth, like the Norman invasion is a myth. They are tales we learn at our mothers’ knee, and they are none the worse for that.
Every country needs its foundational myths, and the Battle of Britain is one of ours among many. Hume is right that the young in Britain today need something to believe in. Let’s not take it from them.
