A Lesson from History

By any measure, the Battle of Britain stands with the October revolution as among the most historically decisive few weeks of the 20^th Century. Little wonder its spirit is evoked so often in our national mythology  and popular culture.  It really was, bu any reasonable measure, “Our Finest Hour.”

As a playwright I try very hard to look at historical stories in the present tense, as if we didn’t know how it was going to come out.  Because that’s what it must have been like at the time.  And in the late summer of 1940, what had happened in the past year, from a British point of view, was not going to fill you with confidence.  

True, the Chamberlain Government, which would have almost certainly have made a deal with Nazi Germany rather than fight on alone, had been replaced by Churchill leading an unlikely coalition (still forming) consisting mainly of the Labour Party and a few Tory rebels. The most dangerous potential Quislings had either been interned, like Mosely and the Tory MP for Peebles, Colonel Ramsey…while other less immediately dangerous but untrustworthy individuals, including the ex King, were being put out of harm’s way.  True, the British Army and a good chunk of the French had escaped from capture and death at Dunkirk…but even a successful retreat is still a retreat.  

To the shock of the world and the Germans…and the French…Churchill had recently ordered the destruction of the French fleet at Oran …with the loss of 1500 French lives…partly to keep the ships from being added to the German navy, but also to show the Germans…and the Americans, crucially, that he wasn’t going to mess about, that he could be as big a criminal as he had to be to win. At this point, the Germans were forced into serious preparation for invasion of Great Britain…the prerequisite of which was, of course, air superiority, without which an invasion across the Channel was unthinkable. (As it was in 1944.) 

So the RAF had to be bombed and blown out of the war. 

Had we lost the Battle of Britain, then, the Germans would almost certainly have invaded the South of England before the bad weather came in October 1940…Roosevelt would likely have lost the Presidential election in November.  And the King...or his older brother... would have shaken hands with Hitler on the balcony of Buckingham palace. The Americans could never have supplied the Russians when the Nazis inevitably turned on them and the Americans would have had no forward base in Europe from which to launch the invasions of North Africa, Italy and France.

A close run thing.  At the time, entirely unpredictable 

So far, excepting with a few minor details of interpretation, I imagine I’d be in agreement with Boris Johnson and William Rees Mogg…at least in the summary of what was at stake when “we” took to the skies over the South East of England to take on the Luftwaffe in August and September 1940.  Where we might differ is in recalling the details of who “we” were…who WERE the “few” to whom so much was and is still owed by so many.

Nearly three thousand pilots – fought in the Battle of Britain. Nearly 600 of them, 20%, were not born in Britain. Around 300 came from the Commonwealth…Canada, New Zealand, Australia…Jamaica, India… Nearly 300, however, came from future EU countries. France, Belgium, Ireland…and from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The most "kills" by any Squadron during the fighting was 201...by 303 Squadron. Who were ALL Polish... 

They don't just do kitchens, you know.

So the only REASONABLE conclusion from the Battle of Britain...and of the fact that 20% of the few weren't British...and that 10% of them, including the single most effective group of them...were from Europe... is that it was a jolly good thing they were here.  And that Britain was saved from Nazi Invasion in 1940 not by standing alone, but by welcoming immigrants...

Sometimes history doesn’t quite teach the lessons that everybody thinks it does.

Speak for England, Jacob!

On September 2^nd 1939, as Neville Chamberlain sat down in the House of Commons, his speech having delivered distinctly equivocal support for Poland, invaded the day before by the Nazis, despite all the previous promises of solidarity, Arthur Greenwood was rising to his feet to reply for Labour when an angry voice came from the Tory Government backbenches, and shouted possibly the most famous and most spine tingling set of four words uttered in that Chamber during the Twentieth Century : “Speak for England, Arthur!”

The words were spoken by Leo Amery, an anti-appeasement Tory MP in a moment of angry shame that, in his judgement, his Conservative and Unionist colleagues were preparing to bow the knee to the Nazis, that the terror of another war with Germany was about to push The United Kingdom into further acquiescence in the Nazi take over of central Europe that had begun in earnest with the unopposed invasion of Czechoslovakia in March that year. Those words were spine tingling for a reason not usually part of the story we tell ourselves about Our Finest Hour…that right from Munich in 1938 until the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, it was by no means a settled certainty that the hour in question would have been anything other than one of shame, betrayal and collaboration.  It was, as the Duke of Wellington observed on another European occasion, "a close run thing."

I’m thinking of this pivotal moment in our national history (as the UK of GB and NI) partly because I am dead certain that Leo Amery’s defiance of a weak and vacillating Tory Prime Minister is not ever far from the thoughts of Jacob Rees-Mogg as he characteristically - and not without the courage of his own convictions - identifies so clearly what is at stake as we go into “Phase Two” of the Brexit negotiations.  Jacob Rees Mogg, in his heart of hearts, knows he is speaking for England, and that what is at stake is what “England” and the “UK”…mean. 

This second stage of talks with the EU will focus on the so called “transition” after the UK putatively leaves at the end of March 2019.  The Chancellor , Phillip Hammond, confirmed yesterday that during this period, the UK will follow EU Trade Rules…even though it will no longer have any say as to what those rules are. Rees Mogg, and the rest of the “Conviction Brexiteers”…still a minority in the Tory party in the Commons, if not in the country, are horrified.  Rees Mogg has described this transition status as being equivalent to the UK being a “colony” of the EU. (Able and highly educated though he is, irony seems to be entirely lost on this scion of a newspaper dynasty and the 18^th Century.) 

Mildly absurd though the rhetoric is, it does point us to the beating heart of what Brexit means to its advocates, both consciously and unconsciously: The Independence of England.  If that Independence is sacrificed to expediency and pacifying the Irish, why then, Old England really is Done…as the song nearly says at the beginning of Dad’s Army.

When Amery used the word “England” in 1940, he meant Britain, of course.  An England equivalent to Britain…and Britain a Greater England… was as natural for him as it was for George Orwell, who in his own defining statement on the war in 1940 had to add a rather irritated footnote to the effect that Scottish, Welsh or Irish readers might object to the lumping together of the four nations under the name of one of them , but that he thought they were being a bit silly about it. Thing is, that in 1940, and for some considerable time afterwards, most Scots would have agreed with him that the differences between us added to our cultural richness and “diversity” (to use a later term) but were of no real political account.  This was and remains the opinion of those who campaigned most coherently for a No vote in 2014.

 What has changed in the last couple of weeks, I believe quite by accident, is that Ireland’s refusal to contemplate a hard border with the North, and crucially, that refusal being comprehensibly and unequivocally backed by the 27 countries of what we will need to get used to calling the rEU, combined with the risible mixture of incompetence and arrogance that somehow persuaded the Tories that the DUP would ever contemplate a functioning border between Holy Protestant Ulster and the Motherland, has catapulted us into UK wide “Soft Brexit” territory quite without plan or expectation…to the manifest relief of the Remainer majority on the Government benches.

Ireland has saved England from itself.  I always thought that was our job!

Anyway, Farage is quite openly spitting out his own teeth with rage, while in rather more civilised tones, Rees Mogg, on Newsnight last night, drew the battle lines for the next stage in the Tory Civil War that has landed us all here in the first place.

“We cannot be a colony of the European Union for two years from 2019 to 2021, accepting new laws that are made without any say-so of the British people, Parliament or Government,” Jacob Rees Mogg said on Newsnight last night. “That is not leaving the European Union, that is being a vassal state of the European Union, and I would be very surprised if that were Government policy.”

With Rees Mogg, as with Enoch Powell before him in the story of the break Up of Britain, the choice of language is fascinating. But I want to concentrate on the word “we.” 

 “We” are “the people”…to coin a phrase. And the people are being betrayed and hoodwinked by what Nigel Farage, despite more than twenty years salary and a fat pension on its way from the European Parliament, calls “professional politicians”  - involved in a conspiracy against the nation.

But that nation is not the place Leo Amery wanted Arthur Greenwood to speak for in 1940, it is not not the place with a Global Empire that decided to create the Welfare State in a moment of nation defining solidarity when the Labour Party, fired with a sense of British National certainty and purpose it has not had before or since, (despite “White heat” in the Sixties and “Cool Brittainia” in the 90s) swept to popular and political power in 1945. That Vision of Britain held itself together while begging to join the EU from the late fifties till the early seventies when it finally succeeded. But one part of that Britain was never comfortable with subsuming itself into the greater whole, was never comfortable with the diminution of its “place in the world”, clinging onto past greatness through folk memories of the 1940s as much as to its seat on the UN Security Council and a “special relationship“ with an increasingly bemused and indifferent United States - ALL, of course, products of that war and it's victorious but complicated conclusion. The complications of that Victory came crushingly home to the UK (and France) in Egypt just ten years after that part in a World War that came out more or less right.. I believe that "Brexit in 2016" will have the same resonance for future historians as the words “Suez in 196” do now…as a self inflicted slap in the face to British Exceptionalism based on folk memory more than current reality. And will stand with the same symbolic certainty for the difficult acquisition of self-knowledge.

Part of this learning curve is that you cannot simply pretend that the other three nations of the UK don’t exist, or rather, that they only exist when they’re being “silly” and annoying. The debacle over the Irish border saw to that. But to KEEP Northern Ireland and maybe Scotland and Wales and, crucially, LONDON, within that Greater England…then England will  have to KEEP the Single Market and the Customs Union and quite possibly Free Movement as well.  (Ask the 27...you can't have the first two without the third) 

So to keep the Kingdom United, England can’t leave the EU, in any terms that Rees Mogg and his like would accept, at all. England can’t leave the EU without leaving the UK as well.

As has been observed before, England cannot abide being “just another country in Europe.” “We”…in the Rees-Mogg sense of “we”…stood alone and unique in 1940. What Rees Mogg and his fellow Brexiteers insist upon is that once more “we” can stand alone despite the traitors and equivocators of appeasement among us. But “we”, in my view, isn’t what it used to be. “We” no longer convincingly mean the same “us.”  For example, I don’t think that even Unionist Scotland, here and now, has a problem with being “just another country.”  In fact, in Nationalist Scotland, I think a considerable number of us rather aspire to being “just another country.”

But we learned in 2014 that Breaking Up Britain was too big a job for the hesitant, equivocal Scots.  Breaking Up Britain was always a job for the English  - who went ahead with Brexit without, really, a second thought....  This despite the warnings (not entirely delivered with conviction, admittedly) that a Brexit vote in 2016 was a decisive step along that road. 

But now, as we move into the next phase of the divorce, the question of English Independence that was implicit in 2016 (Farage didn’t use the word till the next morning) is going to be explicit as the “transition” (to what?) is negotiated not just in Brussels, but in the Cabinet room, the pubs and the Parliament of England.

If Rees Mogg inter alia do decide to “speak for England” in the way I describe (though they will still call England “Britain”)…and insist that a hard, clean break with Europe is what “the people” voted for in June 2016…they will likely bring down their own government, of course.  But they will also, I think, do something else of rather more historic significance.  They will declare that the English Independence they believe in, is not only a “liberation” from the EU, and from its daily insult to English Exceptionalism. Brexit is also, in effect, an English Declaration of Independence from the UK.  

Are they really ready for that?  Because the light will dawn in the course of 2018, that Breaking Up Britain is the price of a meaningful Brexit. 

Fasten your seat-belts and pass the popcorn.

Speech During Wartime

What this is about, after the 48 Hour news rumble which I'm sure Trump loves, is the degradation of public speech. Of the defeat of evidence by noise.

Trump and his people are inviting us not to care about whether a Britain First video is "real" or not because Trump retweeting it "elevates the conversation." This elevation is clearly not intended in any sense that Jane Austen or Henry James might have recognised elevated dialogue. No. What Sarah Huckabee means by "elevates" is "make louder." In Trump world, in what is increasingly "our world," all that matters is that an opinion be loud. That it garner re-tweets and follows. Britain First understand this principle of the new media, which is dragging the old media along behind it like your "other" Grandad, the one who isn't the boorish, embarrassing one who rants about women and immigrants and Muslims over Christmas dinner. Nice Grandad goes along with the distasteful crudity of the boor who carves the roast simply because he no longer has the conviction or energy to tell the man to shut up.

Why does the degradation of public speech matter? What is wrong with the loudest voice being the most important? With there being no agreed standards of ,if not "truth" then at least ethics in what people in positions of power carelessly chuck onto social media because it gives them a warm feeling in their tummy as their own worst, weakest most bigoted instincts are confirmed? Or indeed offers the opportunity to sneer loftily at the idiots on Twitter, one of whom happens to be Dipstick In Chief? Isn't it all just a bit of fun, reduced like all consumed news product to titillation at one level or another? Does it really matter if Rupert Murdoch was right all along? That the most cynical, bleakest view of all human conduct, elite or not, turns out to be right?

What matters to me, I think, most...is that The Triumph of Energy that Trump represents is also the Death of Hope. The triumph of prejudice over evidence, of the triumph of loudness over intellectual process is the Triumph of the Will over Reality. Reality itself gets bent out of shape so that stuff which was unthinkable a year ago is normal times now. God knows about five years from now when he's in his second term.

It isn't just Trump. It's the making of the machinery of government into his echo chamber. The reduction of government itself into loud, cheap lie machine to protect the hatreds and stupidity of a cheap crook. That a White House staff would calmly dismiss the promotion of a Neo-Nazi Hate Group as "elevating the conversation" is more than absurd: much more dangerously, it is what you have come to expect. As each line of decency is crossed, as each decline and fall of what it is publically possible for the President to say and retweet is crossed and normalised, the more we really are, as a civilization, handing over our future to the successors of the Trumps and Farages simply because they seem to have more get up and go than we do.

In the same way, cherished liberal elitist notions of "Balance" - that the media can offer a neutral platform for the debate of ideas within a commonly agreed window of responsible disagreement - are blown out of the water when you interpret this to mean giving equal time to climate change deniers and fascists on an equal footing with actual scientists and ...well, let's just say Nicola Sturgeon, or Vince Cable, or Hillary Clinton. Whatever complications one may have about any or all of these, surely we can agree to recognise that there is a qualitative difference between them and Nigel Farage and Donald Trump? "But what can we do?" bleat the newsminders. "We can't be Reithean Policemen of the Public Good anymore! This is what the democracy has chosen, it is what the new media has thrown up, this is what the market wants!"

The apparent energy of the faux authentic...of the "good bloke in the pub" Nigel Farage, and of the "No nonsense Man's Man" Donald Trump seems to just floor the equivocating, desiccated toffs who have lost all conviction about their role as "keepers of standards." Even the fact that I am putting so much of this little lament into inverted commas tells me that I too am hidebound by deadened language, crippled by quotation, unsuited by my own civilised, pussy footing irony to properly face of the enemy. It feels like dereliction of duty even to try to explore an idea rather than reach for a baseball bat.

Of course, one reaches for past parallels. One is gaining from the present debacle a tremendous insight as to what the 1930s must have felt like at the time as we drifted in apparent hopelessness towards war and genocide. But what requires no retrospection or gazing into a crystal ball is the observation that right here and now we are in real trouble. That if we continue to hand over the field of public speech to the boors and thugs then maybe will get the future Trump, the Future Farage that such equivocation deserves. Maybe it really is time to finally abandon ideas like "balance" and "truth" rather than simply imprison them in quotes. We need a new set of weapons to take these people on. Right now it feels like life during wartime. And only one side is suited up.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/30/trump-tweet-anti-muslim-far-right-white-house