BY STEWART SLATER
The day passed off as such days do. People marched, horses walked, planes flew. Flags were waved, street parties held, and the nation’s swing dancers briefly emerged from the shadows. And as the sun went down, we promised to remember them, the best of us.
For the story we tell ourselves is a simple one. Roused to confront the evil of tyranny on the Continent, Britain came together, stood alone and fought for freedom, winning a victory which will echo down the ages. Like all simple stories, it is one told often. And, like all simple stories, it forgets as much as it remembers.
We forget that we were fighting a war of defensive necessity with a conscript army. British doctrine for centuries had dictated that the country got involved when one Power threatened to dominate Europe. As Louis XIV and Napoleon had discovered. There we stood, but, by our own lights, we could do no other. For other nations, war was a choice. The Dominions could have stayed at home. Canada in particular faced no threat, its Southern neighbour less restive than it appears today… India contributed 3mn volunteers to the cause.
We forget that many saw the threat as an opportunity. Reports of crime rose 60% between 1939 and 1945. There were 114,000 prosecutions for looting (an East End trader estimated that shopkeepers lost more to their countrymen than to the Germans) and, in 1943, an entire run of clothing coupons had to be pulped after 5mn were stolen.
We forget that our greatest suffering came not at home but in the East, millions of British Citizens and Nationals enduring the Japanese regime. We forget people like the father and teenaged brother of an old man I knew in Singapore, subjects too of the King-Emperor, taken away on the first day of the Occupation and never seen again, their deaths and unmarked graves lost to history.
We forget that previous generations who saved Europe from itself built the world their descendants fought to protect. The people who defeated Louis were the people who, in the Royal Society, formalised science, in the Bill of Rights, gave Britain the freedom it later fought to preserve and invented modern finance. Bonaparte’s vanquishers ended slavery and kick-started the Industrial Revolution. We celebrate the feats of those who won the War but ignore their record in peace– Denis Healey reduced from Anzio hero to IMF supplicant when the system his peers built reached the inevitable end of its road.
We forget because we want to forget, the War in Europe a comfort blanket under which we snuggle when looking for some historical hygge. Earlier generations are too tainted by Empire; War in the East summons the suspicion we should not have been there. We tell ourselves a simple story from a simpler time because we have no other story to tell.
For those quickest to announce that the festivities made them proud to be British are also the quickest to state that we could not do it again. Modern Britain, modern Britons could not summon the will or fortitude necessary. We cannot take pride in who we are, so we must take pride in who we were. Perhaps, if we just remember hard enough… We will become Them.
“The perpetual care-taking of the museum of human history” was how that nuanced herald of liberalism’s triumph, Francis Fukuyama, described the future he foresaw for the West. Less a museum, perhaps, than a theme park, an immersive experience. The King wore his grandfather’s uniform, his sister their mother’s. Timothy Spall did not read Churchill’s speech; he played Churchill reading Churchill’s speech. All in service of the idea we still are who we once were. All like the Cinderella who greets a small child in front of Disneyland’s Magic Castle.
But every holiday comes to an end. The bunting has been taken down, the barriers packed away. Life will return to normal. And we will remember the question we have fought so hard to forget – what have we done to take pride in?
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.