June 11, 2015

Finest Hour 101, Winter 1998-99

Page 40

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SCOTTISH AND WELSH DEVOLUTION

Why Churchillians tend to believe that Winston Churchill would have opposed the development of separate Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, which they see as spelling the beginning of the end of the United Kingdom. “Listserv Winston” enraged in some of this banter in December. Professor Paul Addison of the University of Edinburgh and Allen Packwood of the Churchill Archives Centre put the List straight on this matter, proving once again that what is widely believed of Churchill is not always what Churchill believed…

From: [email protected] (Prof. Paul Addison)

A word or two in response to the gentlemen summoning up the ghost of Winston Churchill when attacking Tony Blair’s proposals for Parliaments in Scotland and Wales. Churchill himself before 1914 was a supporter of Home Rule for Ireland, Scotland and Wales. If his proposals for Irish Home Rule had been implemented before the First World War, the twenty-six counties might still be a part of the United Kingdom today. There was so little demand for Scottish and Welsh home rule after 1918 that the question of devolution disappeared for the rest of Churchill’s life, but some of his comments suggest that he continued to favour a federal UK including regional Parliaments in England.

The main reason for the resurgence of Scottish nationalism in the 1980s was the determination of Mrs. Thatcher not only to reject Scottish home rule but to impose on Scotland policies which the majority of Scots plainly and repeatedly rejected at the polls. She behaved, in other words, more like an English nationalist than a custodian of a multinational Union. By the time Tony Blair came in the damage was done and it may now be too late to save the Union. But Home Rule offers a last chance of holding it together and it may just work, as Churchill hoped it would work in Ireland.

From: [email protected].

(Allen Packwood, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge)

I was very interested to read about Churchill’s hypothetical reaction to current political developments within the United Kingdom. I have been selecting material for an exhibition on Churchill to be staged next summer at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. One of the items I am proposing to feature is the following speech, delivered by Churchill in his Dundee constituency on 9th October 1913:

“Another great reason for the settlement of the Irish question in the present Parliament and for disposing of the Home Rule controversy now, while we have the full opportunity presented, is that the ground is thereby cleared for the consideration of claims of self-government for other parts of the United Kingdom besides Ireland. You will remember how, last year, I addressed a meeting in Dundee on this subject. I made it perfectly clear that I was speaking for myself. I made it clear that I was not speaking of the immediate future, but dealing with the subject which lay for the moment outside the sphere of practical politics and raising a question for reflection and discussion rather than for prompt action.

“I spoke of the establishment of a federal system in the United Kingdom, in which Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and, if necessary, parts of England, could have separate legislative and parliamentary institutions, enabling them to develop, in their own way, their own life according to their own ideas and needs in the same way as the great and prosperous States of the American Union and the great kingdoms and principalities and States of the German Empire.”

Just a few years earlier Churchill had been advocating reform of the House of Lords. And who says politics does not go in cycles?

DID CHURCHILL MISUNDERSTAND HITLER?

From: [email protected] (Karl-Georg Schon):

Let me see whether I can start something with three theses (for the sake of the argument I will oversharpen them):

1. Churchill completely misunderstood Hitler. For instance he called WW2 “the unnecessary war.” This is wrong because Hitler wanted war for war’s sake (vide his saying in August 1939: “Hopefully there won’t be someone to turn up with a mediation plan” or something to this effect; vide his disappointment that he was unable to crush Czechoslovakia by military force but had to do it with Munich). War was for Hitler the ultima ratio of life itself. Perhaps (only perhaps) war could have been avoided through military intervention during the Rhineland crisis—when Churchill was conspicuously silent. From then on Europe was doomed. Another example is that Churchill saw in Hitler the (or at least some) embodiment of Prussian militarism. The reverse is actually true. Hitler crushed Prussian militarism forever. It was no historical accident that it was the truly Prussian element of the German officer corps who staged several attempts on Hitler’s life. Hitler, indeed, established (albeit in a perverted way) civilian control over the military.

2. Churchill’s greatness lies in his defeat—if you measure defeat or victory in terms of the declared aims of an individual statesman. He said, “I have not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” yet he precisely did so. But in the way of doing it he defeated the most evil system of modern times and thus gave to the “liquidation of the British Empire” (one is tempted to say to the Empire itself) a noble meaning. Liquidation became “Their Finest Hour.” There is an element of tragedy in this. But is there greatness without tragedy?

3. Churchill did not and perhaps could not recognize that the British Empire was doomed anyway—doomed from what Paul Kennedy calls over-extension. As an aside: it was doomed for this reason from its very beginning. Churchill’s empire-mindedness prevented him from doing Britain the perhaps greatest service he (and at the time probably only he) could have done, i.e. to prepare Britain for integration into Europe. Churchill came, in my view, close to doing so in 1946-48, but he dropped his effort when he realized the implications of such a step for the fading empire.

From: [email protected] (Editor)

1. Did Churchill’s term “the unnecessary war” have anything to do with whether or not Hitler was bent on war? Didn’t Churchill argue that by timely action, through about 1936, France and Britain could have prevented war (whatever Hitler wanted) by preemptive action, e.g. over Germany’s rebuilding the Luftwaffe? Was he as noncommital on the Rhineland as is commonly held?

2. Chinese, Ukrainians, Baits and central Asians might dispute whether Hitler’s was the most evil system of modern times, although it was unmatched in genocidal precision. But to the point, which is very valid, William F. Buckley Jr. makes some parallel comments in our 1994-1995 Proceedings, words which I put among the twenty or thirty best passages about Churchill I’ve ever read:

Mr. Churchill had struggled to diminish totalitarian rule in Europe which, however, increased. He fought to save the Empire, which dissolved. He fought socialism, which prevailed. He struggled to defeat Hitler, and he won. It is not, I think, the significance of that victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster….It is simply mistaken that battles are necessarily more important than the words that summon men to arms, or who remember the call to arms. The battle of Agincourt was long forgotten as a geopolitical event, but the words of Henry V, with Shakespeare to recall them, are imperishable in the mind, even as which side won the battle of Gettysburg will dim from the memory of men and women who will never forget the words spoken about that battle by Abraham Lincoln. The genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind. The total fusion of animal and spiritual energy…

3. It was Clement Attlee, in the first phase, and Harold Macmillan, in the second, who presided over the dissolution of the Empire. But we often judge past history by present-day standards, not to mention hindsight. It is very clear today that Churchill failed to understand the strength of the anti-colonial movement; the desire of colonial peoples to be governed by their own rascals, even if the latter turned out to be worse than the British civil service; and the endgame of the Europe Unite movement. From WSC’s point of view in the 1940s and 1950s, Britain and the Commonwealth were a viable Fourth World, and based on that mindset he took the view that Britain was “of” Europe, but not “in” it—a benevolent, interested partner, but not a party; and that European Unity depended primarily on the continental powers resolving “the ancient quarrels of Teuton and Gaul.” Yet some historians continue to remark over how, with a remarkable lack of foresight or comprehension, or even perhaps a sense of self-preservation, Britain herself—not simply Churchill, but the whole governing establishment— allowed her moral and political force to decline. This is to a certain extent John Charmley’s argument in his Churchill’s Grand Alliance.

From: [email protected] (Dr. Robert J. Caputi)

I enjoy the intelligence and collegiality of the Listserv. In reply to Malakand’s statements: It is offered how Britain’s “whole governing establishment” allowed her moral and political force to decline in the postwar period. I submit that the two awful world wars and the crippling Depression era led to the unavoidable losses of both tangible and intangible overseas assets and had much to do with the “decline” of that moral and political force. I do not believe the British Lion relinquished anything willingly; instead it was forced into a reactive rather than proactive role after V-E and V-J Days. Economics, sadly, played a critical role. The enduring greatness of “Their Finest Hour” was that those immense sacrifices, the dissolution of the Empire and Britain’s great power status, in the long run, was worth it to secure the defeat of the beasts from Berlin.


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