The Old Lie

Ben Wildsmith

Now that the broken glass has been swept up from last month’s riots in England, under-occupied culture warriors will be looking forward to politicising Christmas.

Before scouring council announcements for evidence of Christ-erasure from the festival of consumerist vulgarity, however, they can ease themselves into the mood with a full programme of poppy-shaming and historical distortion.

Remembrance Day has mutated in recent years from a quiet, solemn event to a month-long assertion of questionable values. Every public figure is scrutinised to gauge their enthusiasm for proceedings whilst small groups of local busybodies insist on ever gaudier murals and displays of poppies.

To object is, apparently, to insult the fallen. Where I lived in Mid Wales a couple of years ago, an elderly gent was publicly berated for wearing a white poppy at the commemoration.

These were introduced in 1933 to warn against renewed militarism as the immediacy of WWI faded.

Given what the future held, you must concede that the Co-operative Women’s Guild, who produced them, had a point.

Winston Churchill

For all the Wilfred Owen poems we study at school, though, it is the collective memory of WWII under which the UK chooses to shelter from the realities of the 21st century.

In particular, the wartime utterances of Winston Churchill, alongside his subsequent history of the conflict, dominate the nation’s imagining of itself. For many, the utopian vision that Churchill used to cohere a nation under threat has replaced the inconvenient truths of our past.

Americans refer to those who fought in WWII as the ‘greatest generation’. In the UK, the achievements of this cohort have been minimised and misrepresented in the service of values to which most never subscribed.

My grandfather, who reluctantly fought in North Africa, saw the war through the prism of life before it.

He’d lived through the miners’ strike in 1926, when new, horrifying levels of poverty settled on the Valleys. In 1931, he and his brothers had battled with police who were trying to force entry into houses to enforce the new means test – designed to remove unemployment payments from all but the starving.

Inspectors were empowered to rifle through the belongings of households looking for anything of value. 53% of claims were cancelled as a result.

So, for him, the war was part of an ongoing narrative in which the forces of capital conspired against the people.  Having spent six years fighting it, he emerged not with an idealistic gratitude for the country’s past, but a conviction that it must change.

New start

He wasn’t alone. Labour’s 1945 election victory was delivered by the votes of active servicemen and those who had recently returned to find their bomb-damaged country in need of a new start.

Many had seen their fathers return from WWI to promises of social justice, only to be cast into spiralling poverty as the interwar years unravelled.

The achievements of post-war Britain derived from a determination to march away from the war towards a modern way of life based on equality of opportunity and a base standard of living for all.

The NHS, quality social housing, and free university education were declarations that the old way of doing things was over. Entry into the Common Market in 1973 seemed to signal a final acceptance that the imperial model was over.

Six years later, when Maragaret Thatcher won power, the WWII generation was approaching retirement.

We forget that before the internet turned us all into publishers, retirement effectively silenced people.

Without the forum of the workplace, nor the opportunity to shape national life through working practice, pensioners lost their voice and influence.

Ersatz patriotism

Thatcher’s rhetoric was consciously Churchillian, evoking a lost, halcyon age that had existed before the progressive politics of the post-war consensus. Cloaking the UK in ersatz patriotism, she sought to tear down the achievements of those who had shaped the country after fighting for it.

Their contribution was reduced to military service and nothing more; their values derided as unpatriotic and foreign. A country that was purposefully rejecting the failed statecraft of its recent history was turned around to face a fictionalised version of it and told to believe.

A few years later, in the 2000s, Vladimir Putin would commission state television to make lavish dramas about the ‘Great Patriotic War’, foregrounding Russian resistance to Ukrainian Nazis.

Contrasting the quiet gatherings around war memorials that I remember from childhood with the militaristic hubris that characterises national commemoration nowadays, I see a shocking betrayal.

The people lost in contemplation were remembering actual human beings whose loss had marked their lives, not the flag-draped phantoms of a political fantasy.

Five miles from the Cenotaph, Grenfell Tower still stands as a tombstone over the values that would have kept it safe.

Means testing

As our Labour government embraces means testing and military solutions, they wear the clothes of the Attlee government, as if in mockery.

My grandad kept his medals hidden away in a box; I’d have to beg to see them.

‘Why would I want to look at them? It was the worst six years of my life.’

He knew there was no golden age before the war, so did everyone he fought alongside.

The half-starved victims of industrial exploitation were herded into a conflict that wasn’t of their making and returned with the moral vigour to make a new world.

Through the mountains of lies, flags, poppies, royal weddings, huckster politicians, spivs, and deliberate impoverishment it is still possible to see their hopes realised in the NHS.

Fight for it, on the beaches if it makes you feel better.