Island Stories: Britain and Its History in the Age of Brexit. David Reynolds
of them in the crush and competition of the world. That would be a melancholy end to all the old glories and recent triumphs.’[8] The root problem, in Churchill’s opinion, was a failure of national will since the Great War. ‘The British lion, so fierce and valiant in bygone days, so dauntless and unconquerable through the agony of Armageddon, can now be chased by rabbits from the fields and forests of his former glory. It is not that our strength is seriously impaired. We are suffering from a disease of the will. We are the victims of a nervous collapse, of a morbid state of the mind.’[9]
If willpower alone was what counted, Winston would have won the battle over India. But he led a diehard minority within the Tory party. What’s more, his vehemence and obduracy not only estranged him from the party leadership; it also undermined his credibility on more consequential matters. His description of the Indian nationalist leaders as ‘evil and malignant Brahmins’ with their ‘itching fingers stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict empire’ was striking, but it was ‘not likely to make comparable descriptions of genuinely evil men credible’.[10] Churchill’s hyperbole about India helped keep him in the political wilderness. Only with the onset of a second German war was he brought back into government.
Churchill never modified his opinions about India, empire and decline. Even in the darkest days of the Second World War in April 1942 – as Hitler’s Afrika Korps advanced on Cairo and the Japanese conquered Burma – he deplored any concessions to Indian nationalists. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt breezily informed Prime Minister Churchill that the British should concede self-government to India, on the lines of the Articles of Confederation under which the new United States had initially been run after independence in 1783, Churchill replied that he ‘could not be responsible’ for such a policy and even threatened to make it a resignation issue.[11] In November 1942 he warned defiantly: ‘We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’[12]
On this, Churchill proved as good as his word. But not because liquidation did not happen; only that he did not have to preside over it. For that lucky escape, he had the British electorate to thank: they voted him out of office in July 1945. What one might call his ‘second wilderness years’, from 1945 to 1951, allowed him to watch from the sidelines and criticise with impunity Clement Attlee’s Labour Government for its ‘scuttle’ from India and Burma in 1947. Some of his predictions had prescience – for instance that ‘any attempt to establish the reign of a Hindu numerical majority in India will never be achieved without a civil war’ – but, as in the 1930s, they were blunted by his jeremiad of decline and his lamentations about lack of will. ‘It is with deep grief that I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories, and all the services it has rendered to mankind. I am sure that in the hour of our victory now not so long ago, we had the power to make a solution of our difficulties which would have been honourable and lasting. Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself.’[13]
In similar vein, campaigning for the premiership again in October 1951, Churchill denounced Attlee’s six years as marking ‘the greatest fall in the rank and stature of Britain in the world’ since ‘the loss of the American colonies two hundred years ago.’ He asserted that ‘our Oriental Empire has been liquidated’ and ‘our influence among the nations is now less than it has ever been in any period since I remember.’[14] Back in office, however, the ailing Churchill did not fight the tide. He saw little choice but to approve the withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Canal Zone in 1954, arousing the anger of a new generation of Tory diehards, which opened the door to Egypt’s nationalisation of the Canal two years later.
Although Tories have been particularly prone to narratives of decline, something of the sort also underpinned Labour’s election victory of 1945. The party’s manifesto ‘Let Us Face the Future’ was rooted in a historical narrative of lost greatness – this time not about empire, but about social promise betrayed by wilful politics.[15] ‘So far as Britain’s contribution is concerned’, the manifesto argued, ‘this war will have been won by its people, not by any one man.’ (The Tory campaign featured Churchill.) The Great War had similarly been a people’s victory, Labour went on, but afterwards the people had allowed ‘the hard-faced men who had done well out of the war’ (Stanley Baldwin’s famous phrase) to craft ‘the kind of peace that suited themselves’. And so, despite winning the war, ‘the people lost that peace.’ By which Labour meant not only the Treaty of Versailles, but also ‘the social and economic policy which followed the fighting’.
In the years after 1918, those ‘hard-faced men’ and their political allies kept control of the government, and also the banks, mines, big industries, most of the press and the cinema. This, said Labour’s manifesto, happened in all the big industrialised countries. So, ‘The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men.’ They acted solely in the interest of their own private monopolies ‘which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic State. They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation.’
Similar forces were at work now in 1945, the manifesto warned. ‘The problems and pressure of the post-war world threaten our security and progress as surely as – though less dramatically than – the Germans threatened them in 1940. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years. The Labour Party’s programme is a practical expression of that spirit applied to the tasks of peace.’ On election morning, 5 July, the pro-Labour Daily Mirror told readers: ‘Vote on behalf of the men who won the victory for you. You failed to do so in 1918. The result is known to all.’ The paper devoted most of its front page to reprinting a Zec cartoon first published on VE Day in May. This showed a weary, battered soldier holding out a laurel wreath labelled ‘Victory and Peace in Europe’. The caption read: ‘Here You Are – Don’t Lose it Again.’[16]
This narrative of the lost peace, torn from the hands of the people by greedy capitalists, was sharpened by bitter memories of mass unemployment during the 1920s and 1930s. Together they informed Labour’s campaign of nationalisation after its triumph in 1945. The flagship policies of bringing the commanding heights of the economy – industries such as coal, steel, utilities and railways – into public ownership and providing a stronger social safety net through the welfare state and the National Health Service were presented as repayment to the people for their sacrificial efforts during two world wars in a quarter of a century.
Once built, however, Labour’s edifice became a central target of the declinist narrative of another Tory three decades later: Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. She outlined her stark version of history in the introduction to her memoirs, The Downing Street Years: ‘Britain in 1979 was a nation that had had the stuffing knocked out of it’ over the course of the previous century. In economic terms, Thatcher acknowledged that some degree of relative decline was inevitable, once rivals such as America and Germany caught up with Britain’s head start. But, she argued, the country had ‘failed to respond to the challenge effectively. We invested less; we educated and trained our people to a lower standard; and we allowed our workers and manufacturers to combine in various cartels that restricted competition and reduced efficiency.’ Most serious of all, after 1945 the country had indulged in a protracted and disastrous experiment with socialism. This ‘represented a centralising, managerial, bureaucratic, interventionist style of government’, which ‘jammed a finger in every pie’ on the principle that ‘the gentleman in Whitehall really know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves.’[17]
Breaking the hold of Labour statism