Iron Britannia

by Anthony Barnett

  At that moment Churchill himself was a splendid if desperate enemy of European fascism, while Churchillism was the national unity and coalition politics of the time. Among those who participated most enthusiastically, there were some who wanted to save Britain in order to ensure the role of the Empire, and others who wanted to save Britain in order to create a new and better order at home. But Churchillism was more than a mere alliance of these attitudes. It incorporated imperialists and social democrats, liberals and reformers.2 From the aristocrats of finance capital to the autodidacts of the trade unions, the war created a social and political amalgam which was not a fusion—each component retained its individuality—but which nonetheless transformed them all internally, inducing in each its own variety of Churchillism and making each feel essential for the whole.

  Today Churchillism has degenerated into a chronic deformation, the sad history of contemporary Britain. It was Churchillism that dominated the House of Commons on 3 April 1982. All the essential symbols were there: an island people, the cruel seas, a British defeat, Anglo-Saxon democracy challenged by a dictator, and finally the quintessentially Churchillian posture—we were down but we were not out. The parliamentarians of right, left and centre looked through the mists of time to the Falklands and imagined themselves to be the Grand Old Man. They were, after all, his political children and they too would put the ‘Great’ back into Britain.

  To see how the Falklands crisis brought the politicians at Westminster together and revealed their shared universe of Churchillism, it will help to note the separate strands which constituted it historically: Tory belligerents, Labour reformists, socialist anti-fascists, the liberal intelligentsia, an entente with the USA (which I will look at at greater length as its legacy is crucial) and a matey relationship with the media.

  1. Tory Imperialists

  In 1939 only a minority of the Conservative Party supported Churchill in his opposition to appeasement. Their motives for doing so were mixed. The group included back-bench imperialists like Leo Amery—the father of Sir Julian Amery, who spoke in the Falklands debate—and ‘one nation’ reformers like the young Macmillan. A combination of overseas expansionism and social concessions had characterized Conservatism since Disraeli: a nationalism that displaced attention abroad plus an internal policy of gradualist, paternalistic reform.

  Churchill, however, stood on the intransigent wing of the Party. (He had left the Conservative front bench over India in 1931 when he opposed granting it dominion status.) Unlike Baldwin, Churchill had ferociously resisted the rise of Labour, and his militancy in the General Strike made him an enemy of the trade unions until he finally took office in May 1940. Three years previously Baldwin had retired and been replaced by Chamberlain who was efficient but also aloof and stubborn. He proved incapable of assimilating Labour politicians into his confidence, while he saw the imperative need for peace if British business interests were to prosper. By continuing to exclude the restless Churchill from office, Chamberlain perhaps ensured that he would see the opposite and indeed, Churchill gave priority to military belligerency. Thus Churchill, who had initially welcomed Mussolini as an ally in the class war, became the most outspoken opponent of Nazism, because it was a threat to British power. There was no contradiction in this, but rather the consistency of a Toryism that in the last instance placed the Empire before the immediate interests of trade and industry.

  2. Labour and Reformism

  As emphasized earlier, it is essential that Churchill and Churchillism be rigorously distinguished. While the man had been among Labour’s most notorious enemies, the ‘ism’ contains Labour sentiment as one of its two major pillars. In terms of Churchill’s own career, the transformation can be seen in 1943, when he sought the continuation into the postwar period of the coalition government with Labour. Conversely, the Labour Party’s support was crucial in Churchill’s accession to power in May 1940. Chamberlain had actually maintained a technical majority in the vote over the failure of the Norwegian expedition; but the backlash was so great that his survival came to depend on Labour’s willingness to join his government. It refused, asserting that it would only join a coalition ‘as a full partner in a new government under a new Prime Minister which would command the confidence of the nation’. Within an hour of receiving this message, Chamberlain resigned.3

  It is important to recall that Chamberlain’s regime was itself a form of coalition government. At the height of the depression in 1931, Ramsey MacDonald had decapitated the Labour Movement by joining a predominantly Conservative alliance. This incorporation of part of the Labour leadership into a basically Tory government was a triumph for Baldwin, vindicating his strategy of deradicalizing the Labour movement through the cooptation of its parliamentary representatives. By the same token, the creation of the 1931 National Government was a defeat for the hardline approach of Churchill. The great irony of 1940, then, was that Labour attained its revenge by imposing the leadership of its former arch-enemy on the Tory Party. The alliance which resulted was also quite different from the National Government of 1931: that first coalition broke the Labour Party while in 1941 it was the Conservatives who were ‘shipwrecked’.4

  Churchill dominated grand strategy but Labour transformed the domestic landscape. Ernest Bevin, head of the Transport and General Workers Union, became Minister of Labour and a major figure in the War Cabinet. Employment rose swiftly as the economy was put on a total war footing and for the first, and so far only time in the history of British capitalism, a significant redistribution of wealth took place in favour of the disadvantaged. While adamant in his attitude towards strikes and obtaining a more complete war mobilization than in Germany, Bevin ensured the extension of unionism and improvements in factory conditions. Both physically massive men, the collaboration of Churchill and Bevin personified the contrast with the earlier pact between Baldwin and MacDonald. The 1931 National Government was a formation of the centre based on compromise at home and abroad. The two prime actors in 1941 were men of deeds, determined to pursue their chosen course. Once enemies, they now worked together: an imperialist and a trade unionist, each depending upon the other.

  Within the alliance, the centre worked away. To compound the ironies involved, some of the Conservatives who most readily accepted the domestic reforms were from the appeasement wing of the party. Butler, for example, who disdained Churchill even after the war began, put his name to the 1944 Education Act that modernized British education (though it preserved the public school system). But the administrative reformists of the two main parties never captured the positions of ideological prominence. Bevin was more a trade union than a Parliamentary figure, Attlee led from behind, and Labour in particular suffered from its inability to transform its ‘moral equality’ into an equivalent ideological hegemony over the national war effort.

  3. Anti-Fascism

  Overarching the centre was an extraordinary alliance of left and right in the war against fascism. Those most outspoken on the left were deeply committed to the war effort (even when their leading advocate in the Commons, Aneurin Bevan, remained in opposition). The patriotic anti-fascists of both Left and Right had different motives, but both had a global perspective which made destruction of Nazism their first imperative. When the Falklands war party congratulated Michael Foot—the moral anti-fascist without equal on the Labour benches—for his stand, it was like a risible spoof of that historic, formative moment in World War Two when the flanks overwhelmed the centre to determine the execution of the war.

  Yet it was not a hoax, it was the real thing; though it related to 1940 as damp tea-leaves to a full mug. The Falklands debate was genuinely Churchillian, only the participants in their ardour failed to realize that they were the dregs. This is not said to denigrate either the revolutionaries or the imperialists of the World War. Their struggle against fascism was made a mockery of in Parliament on 3 April: for example, when Sir Julien Amery implicitly, and Douglas Jay explicitly, condemned the Foreign Office for it
s ‘appeasement’, just because it wanted a peaceful settlement with Buenos Aires; or when Patrick Cormack said from the Tory benches that Michael Foot truly ‘spoke for Britain’.5

  Above all, it was a histrionic moment for Foot. Although frequently denounced by the Right as a pacifist, he was in fact one of the original architects of bellicose Labour patriotism. Working on Beaverbrook’s Daily Express he had exhorted the Labour movement to war against the Axis. In particular, in 1940 when he was 26, he inspired a pseudonymous denunciation of the appeasers called The Guilty Men, published by Gollancz. Foot demanded the expulsion of the Munichites—listed in the booklet’s frontispiece—from the government, where Churchill had allowed them to remain. The Guilty Men instantly sold out and went through more than a dozen editions. It contains no socialist arguments at all, but instead is a dramatized accounting of the guilt of those who left Britain unprepared for war and the soldiers at Dunkirk unprotected. It points the finger at Baldwin and MacDonald for initiating the policy of betrayal. On its jacket it flags a quote from Churchill himself, ‘The use of recriminating about the past is to enforce effective action at the present’. Thus while the booklet attacks both the Conservative leadership of the previous decade and the Labour men who sold out in 1931, it impeaches them all alike on patriotic grounds: they betrayed their country. Churchill’s foresight and resolve, by contrast, qualify him for national leadership—for the sake of the war effort, the remaining ‘guilty men’ had to go.

  It was precisely this rhetoric—the language of Daily Express socialism—that was pitched against the Thatcher government in the 3 April debate by the Labour front-bench. Foot denounced its leaders for failing to be prepared and for failing to protect British people against a threat from dictatorship. The ‘Government must now prove by deeds … that they are not responsible for the betrayal and cannot be faced with that charge. That is the charge, I believe, that lies against them.’ (my emphasis) Winding up, John Silkin elaborated the same theme, only as he was concluding the debate for the opposition he was able to bring the ‘prosecution’ to its finale, in the full theatre of Parliament. Thatcher, Carrington and Nott ‘are on trial today’, as ‘the three most guilty people’.

  4. Liberalism

  The political alliance of Churchillism extended much further than the relationship between Labour and Conservatives. The Liberals were also a key component, and this helps to explain why an important element of the English intelligentsia was predominantly, if painfully, silent at the outbreak of the Falklands crisis. In 1940 the Liberals played a more important role in the debate that brought down Chamberlain than did Labour spokesmen, with Lloyd George in particular making a devastating intervention. Later, individual Liberals provided the intellectual direction for the administrative transformation of the war and its aftermath.

  Keynes was its economic architect, Beveridge the draughtsman of the plans for social security that were to ensure ‘no return’ to the 1930s. Liberalism produced the ‘civilized’ and ‘fair-minded’ critique of fascism, which made anti-fascism acceptable to Conservatives and attractive to aristocrats. Liberalism, with its grasp of detail and its ability to finesse issues of contention, was the guiding spirit of the new administrators. Because of its insignificant party presence, its wartime role is often overlooked, but liberalism with a small ‘l’ was the mortar of the Churchillian consensus. One of Beveridge’s young assistants, a Liberal at the time, saw the way the wind was blowing and joined the Labour Party to win a seat in 1945. His name was Harold Wilson.6

  5. The American Alliance and ‘Self-Determination’

  Churchillism was thus an alliance in depth between forces that were all active and influential. Nor was it limited to the domestic arena; one of its most important constituents has been its attachment to the Anglo-American alliance, and this was Churchill’s own particular achievement. Between the wars the two great anglophone powers were still as much competitors as allies. During the 1920s their respective general staffs even reviewed war plans against one another, although they had been allies in the First World War. The tensions of the Anglo-American relationship four decades ago and more may seem irrelevant to a discussion of the Falklands affair; yet they made a decisive contribution to the ideological heritage which was rolled out to justify the dispatch of the Armada.

  When Churchill took office in 1940 Britain was virtually isolated in Europe, where fascist domination stretched from Warsaw to Madrid, while the USSR had just signed a ‘friendship’ treaty with Germany and the United States was still neutral. Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador in London (and father of the future President), was an old intimate of the Cliveden set and a non-interventionist. He had advised Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that the English ‘have not demonstrated one thing that could justify us in assuming any kind of partnership with them’.7 But Roosevelt, eminently more pragmatic, saw that genuine neutrality would allow Hitler to win; it would lead to the creation of a massive pan-European empire, hegemonic in the Middle East and allied to Japan in the Pacific. On the other hand, by backing the weaker European country—the United Kingdom—the US could watch the tigers fight. Continental Europe would be weakened and Britain—especially its Middle East positions—would become dependent on Washington’s good will. In other words, it was not fortuitous that America emerged as the world’s greatest economic power in 1945, it simply took advantage of the opportunity that was offered. But this opportunity also provided Britain with its only possible chance of emerging amongst the victors. At issue were the terms of the alliance.

  On May 15, immediately after he became Prime Minister and just before Dunkirk, Churchill wrote his first letter to Roosevelt in his new capacity. He asked for fifty old American destroyers and tried to lure the President away from neutrality. The Americans in turn suggested a swap arrangement that would give them military bases in the Caribbean, Newfoundland and Guyana. The trade of bases for old hulks was hardly an equal exchange, but by deepening American involvement it achieved Churchill’s overriding purpose, and allowed the President to sell his policy to Congress. Later, as Britain ran out of foreign reserves, Lend-Lease was conceived. The United States produced the material of war while the British fought, and in the meantime relinquished their once commanding economic position in Latin America to Uncle Sam.8 (So when Peron—whose country had been a British dominion in all but name for half a century—challenged the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon bankers in 1946 by resurrecting the irredentist question of the Malvinas, it was a demagogic symbol of already fading subordination that he singled out. The real economic power along the Plata now resided in Wall Street rather than the City.)

  Four months before Pearl Harbor, the ‘Atlantic Charter’ (August 1941) consolidated the Anglo-American alliance and prepared US opinion for entry into war. The Prime Minister and the President met off Newfoundland and agreed to publicize a joint declaration. The main argument between them was over its fourth clause. Roosevelt wanted to assert as a principle that economic relations should be developed ‘without discrimination and on equal terms’. This was aimed against the system of ‘imperial preferences’ which acted as a protectionist barrier around the British Empire. Churchill moderated the American position by inserting a qualifying phrase before the clause. Behind the fine words of the Atlantic Charter there was a skirmish and test of wills between the two imperialisms. Although we can now see that the Charter was determined by self-interest, its function was to enunciate democratic principles that would ensure popular and special-interest support in both countries for a joint Anglo-Saxon war. Both governments announced that they sought no territorial aggrandizement or revision that did ‘not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’. Churchill later denied that this in any way related to the British colonies. He was to declare in 1942 that he had not become Prime Minister to oversee the liquidation of the British Empire. Nonetheless he also claimed to have drafted the phrase in the Charter which states that the UK and the US would ‘respect
the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live’.9 There is a direct lineage between this declaration and Parliament’s reaction to the Falklands.

  By the end of the year America had entered the war as a full belligerent. On New Years Day 1942, twenty-six allied countries signed a joint declaration drafted in Washington which pledged support to the principles of the Atlantic Charter. Henceforward the alliance called itself the ‘United Nations’, and three years later a world organization of that name assembled for the first time. In its turn it enshrined the principles of ‘self-determination’ codified by Roosevelt and Churchill.