Iron Britannia
Page 12
In his memoirs Churchill is quite shameless about the greatness of the empires, British and American, that collaborated together against the ‘Hun’. But he cannot hide the constant tussle for supremacy that took place between them, within their ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture, in which each measured its own qualities against the other. From their alliance, forced on the British by extreme adversity, came their declaration of democratic aims. Its objective was to secure support from a suspicious Congress that saw no profit in bankrolling an Empire which was a traditional opponent, and which was detested by millions of Irish and German-American voters. It had, therefore, to be assuaged with the democratic credentials of the emerging trans-Atlantic compact. Thus, in order to preserve the Empire within an alliance of ‘the English speaking nations’, Churchill—imperialist in bone and marrow—composed a declaration of the rights of nations to determine their own form of government.
In international terms, this ambiguity is the nodal point of Churchillism. By tracing, however sketchily, its outline, we can begin to decode the extraordinary scenes in the House of Commons on 3 April this year. Above all, it clarifies the ease with which those like Thatcher utilized the resources of the language of ‘self-determination’. When she and Foot invoked the UN Charter to justify the ‘liberation’ of the Falklands because its inhabitants desire government by the Crown, they reproduced the sophistry of the Atlantic Charter. What particular resonance can such terms have for the British Right, when in other much more important circumstances like Zimbabwe they are regarded as the thin wedge of Communist penetration? The answer is to be found in Churchillism, which defended and preserved ‘Great’ Britain and its imperial order by retreating slowly, backwards, never once taking flight, while it elevated aspirations for freedom into a smoke-screen to cover its manoeuvre.
In 1940 what was at stake was Britain’s own self-determination. Invasion was imminent and an embattled leadership had to draw upon more than national resources to ensure even survival. Together with the invocation of specifically British values and tradition, Churchill revived the Wilsonian imagery of ‘the great democratic crusade’ (a rhetoric that had been improvised in 1917, in response to the Russian Revolution). Such ideals were crucial not only for the North American public but also for anti-fascist militants in the UK and for liberals, who loathed warfare—the experience of 1914-18 was still fresh—and who distrusted Churchill, especially for his evident pleasure in conflict. They were uplifted by the rallying cry that gave both a moral and political purpose to the war as it coupled the UK to its greatest possible ally. While Churchill saved Great Britain, preserved its institutions and brought its long colonial history to bear through his personification of its military strengths, he did so with a language that in fact opened the way for the Empire’s dissolution. The peculiarity of this explains how Britain could shed—if often reluctantly and with numerous military actions—so many peoples and territories from its power after 1945 without undergoing an immediate convulsion, or any sort of outspoken political crisis commensurate with its collapse. Instead a long drawn-out anaemia and an extraordinary collective self-deception was set in train by Churchillism.
Perhaps the Falklands crisis will come to be seen as a final spasm to this process of masked decline. Many have seen it as a knee-jerk colonialist reaction. Foreigners especially interpret the expedition to ‘liberate the Kelpers’ as a parody of Palmerstonian gunboat diplomacy, out of place in the modern world. It may be out of place, but in British terms its impetus is modern rather than Victorian. The stubborn, militaristic determination evinced by the Thatcher government, her instant creation of a ‘War Cabinet’ that met daily, was a simulacrum of Churchilliana. So too was the language Britain had used to defend its actions. Both rhetoric and policy were rooted in the formative moment of contemporary Britain, the time when its politics were reconstituted to preserve the country as it ‘stood alone’ in May 1940.10 A majority of the population are today too young to remember the event, but most members of Parliament do. The mythical spirit of that anxious hour lives on as a well-spring in England’s political psyche.
6. Incorporation of the Mass Media
There is one final aspect of Churchillism that needs to be mentioned: the relationship he forged with the media. He brought Beaverbrook into the Cabinet, attracted by the energy of the Canadian newspaper proprietor. He himself wrote in the popular press and took great care of his relations with the newspapers, in sharp contrast to Chamberlain who disdained such matters. Then, from 1940 onwards, Churchill’s broadcasts rallied the nation: he skilfully crafted together images of individual heroism with the demand for general sacrifice. No subsequent politician in Britain has been able to forge such a bond between leader and populace.
The policies of the modern State are literally ‘mediated’ to the public via the political and geographical centralization of the national press. London dominates through its disproportionate size, its financial strength and the spider-web of rail and road of which it is the centre. Its daily press has long provided the morning papers for almost all of England, and they are taken by many in Scotland and Wales. A journalistic strike force has been developed, which strangely illuminates the way British political life is exposed to extra-national factors through its peculiar inheritance of capitalist aristocrats and overseas finance. Astor, an American, bought The Times in 1922; Thompson, a Canadian, acquired it in 1966; Rupert Murdoch, an Australian, took it over in 1981. But Astor, educated at Oxford, became anglicized and conserved the paper’s character. The hegemonic organ of the nation may have been in the hands of a foreigner financially, but it was edited by Old England all the more because of it. Thompson pretended only to business rather than political influence, but he too made the transition across the Atlantic to become a Lord.
Thompson’s son, however, shifted himself and the company back to North America, allowing a Catholic monetarist to lead the paper into the abyss of British labour relations and a year-long, futile closure. Now losing money heavily, The Times was sold to Murdoch, who already controlled the News of the World and the Sun. But he sojourns in New York rather than London. His papers endorsed the Falklands expedition with such a ludicrous enthusiasm that they managed to blemish vulgarity itself. But there remains a sense in which the relationship Churchill established with Beaverbrook came to be faintly echoed in Thatcher’s reliance on Murdoch. The bombastic irrelevance of ‘down under’ helped Thatcher to storm the enfeebled ranks of gentry Conservatism, and gave her a major working-class daily—the Sun. Yet the Sun’s very lack of seriousness was a signal that the militarism of the Falklands War was bursting out of the carapace of Churchillism. The cardinal world issues adjudicated by Britain in the past could hardly be applied to taking on Argentina over 1,800 people in 1982. ‘UP YOUR JUNTA’, was one headline in the paper as it welcomed an initial British success. Was this the way to fight the scourge of fascism?
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In 1940 Churchill was willing to do anything and everything for victory. Yet, as we have seen, the meaning of ‘victory’ became increasingly ambiguous in the course of the war. Churchill fought tooth and nail to defend the Empire, but in the end—to save British sovereignty itself—he formed, and was a prisoner of, a politics which accepted the liquidation of the Empire (except for a few residual outposts like the Falklands …). The ‘regeneration’ was sufficiently radical to concede decolonialization and the emergence of new states, yet it was not radical enough to adapt the British State itself to its reduced stature. This, indeed, was its fatal success. Galvanized by total war, but, unlike continental Europe, spared the ultimate traumas of occupation and defeat, Britain survived the 1940s with its edifice intact. This fact has often been alluded to as a principal cause of the ‘British disease’—the country’s baffling postwar economic decline; moreover, it distinguished Churchillism from Gaullism.
The contrast is illuminating. Gaullism was born of defeat at the same moment as Churchillism (May 1940), and was also personified by a right-
wing militaristic figure of equivalent self-regard and confidence. But in the long run Gaullism has inspired a far more successful national ‘renewal’ and adaptation to the increasingly competitive environment. Was this not partially due to the paradoxical fact that the fall of France, by reducing the Third Republic to rubble, ultimately provided a convenient building site for institutional modernization? In Britain, by contrast, the institutions held firm—like St Paul’s defying the blitz—with corresponding penalties for this very durability. The most ingenious of Britain’s defences against destructive change and forced modernization was the conserving collaboration between labour and capital. The relationship was the very core of Churchillism.
If Churchillism was born in May 1940, it had at least a twenty-year gestation. Keith Middlemas has shown that state, capital and labour sought to harmonize relations in a protean, tripartite affair after the crisis of the First World War. In his view, ‘crisis-avoidance’ became the priority after 1916 and has dominated British politics ever since. A significant degree of collaboration was achieved between the wars, often covertly, sometimes called ‘Mondism’ (after the man who headed the cartel that became ICI). One of the key figures on the Labour side was Citrine who led the TUC; another was Bevin, whose direction of manpower was, as we have seen, the backbone of Labour’s contribution to Churchillism. Thus wartime corporatism radically intensified and made explicit an already established relationship. In Middlemas’s words, 1940 instituted a ‘political contract’ where previously there had been an unwritten economic one.11
It is not my purpose here to try and add further to the list of elements involved. In academic terms it can be said—and it is important to say—that the picture is incomplete. Yet even when the skeleton is fully delineated we might still miss the unifying tissues. For Churchillism was essentially the political flesh of national life: its skin, muscle tonality and arthritis. Churchillism combined the contradictions of capital and the workforce, as well as the desires for political freedom with those of imperial grandeur. Furthermore, it wedded these two distinct sets of opposites into a single enveloping universe of demagogy.
To help show that ‘Churchillism’ was not a momentary thing, born complete and fully armed from the jaws of defeat in 1940, but was itself a historical process we can glance at the events of late 1942. Churchill’s role was contested to some degree from both left and right after May 1940, in the House of Commons and outside, especially as military defeats continued. It was only in November 1942 that the protests against his leadership ebbed away. That month was in fact the turning point of the war in Europe. It saw the Red Army turn the scales at Stalingrad and begin the destruction of Hitler’s forces. It was also the month that the Americans landed in North Africa. This opened a small ‘second front’ as far away as possible from the main theatre, and signalled the arrival of the United States from across the Atlantic. The huge pincer movement that was to divide Europe between Moscow and Washington was underway, and it meant ‘victory’ for Britain as well.
Coincidentally, the Beveridge Report was published to massive acclaim at home. It held out the promise of full employment, a health service, adequate pensions and social benefits, at the end of the war. Not only was victory forthcoming, however hard the battles ahead, but the peace would be worth fighting for. Within two weeks of its publication in December 1942, a Gallup survey in the UK discovered that 19 out of 20 had heard of the Report and that 9 out of 10 thought that it should be accepted.12
Yet it was none of these things that ensured the supremacy of Churchill. The combination of American power and Beveridge could reassure the liberals, the coincidence of Stalingrad and the Report seemed to confirm hopes on the left. But what mattered most, pathetically so, was the victory at El Alamein. Finally, after months of bungling and defeats in Egypt and Libya, a huge concerted effort by the Empire swung the battle against Rommel, who was massively outgunned. In comparison with the Russian front, the adventures in the North African desert were a small sideshow (even then the British had at one point begun to evacuate Cairo). Yet for Churchill it was El Alamein that was the ‘Hinge of Fate’. ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat’, he suggested as his conclusion to the campaign.13 In so far as ‘we’ meant the Allies, it was not only wrong (Midway had given the Americans control over the Pacific six months before); it was also fortuitous, as it preceded the far greater Russian breakthrough at Stalingrad by only a fortnight. But of course, the ‘we’ also meant the British, as if the entire course of the conflagration had been determined by the UK and its Empire. As the war was being won, it seemed that Churchill’s Britain was winning the war; El Alamein secured his position at home politically. The battle also received disproportionate coverage in the UK, and has continued to do so across four decades of war books. The number of pages dedicated to North Africa has been an index of the desert war’s ideological role in preserving British face, not its actual contribution to the world conflict. In this respect the current Falklands fanfare is its descendent.
The contrast in the aspirations represented by the conjuncture of El Alamein and the Beveridge Report was never reconciled by Churchill. His passion for Grand Imperial Strategy blinded him to the upsurge of hope amongst millions of his fellow countrymen, who longed simply for health and security. He took ‘strong exception’ to the Report and refused to commit the Coalition to its implementation after the war, pointing out that the financial demands it might make could conflict with the costs of occupying enemy countries.14 When a Commons’ debate on the Report was finally held, the Cabinet’s prevarication and crassness left it remarkably isolated. All Labour members (bar one) who were not actually in government jobs voted against the Coalition’s social paralysis. This firmly associated the Labour Party with the prospects for a new future; one historian considers that its Commons’ vote then was probably responsible for winning the 1945 election.15 The debate over Beveridge also led to the formation of a Tory Reform Group that sought to reconcile the Conservatives to social change.
Which brings us to the party aspect of Churchillism and its legacy: the alternating two-party system, once heralded as proof of Britain’s attachment to democracy and now under attack from the SDP as the cause of its decline. Not without reason, for each blames the other for the cocoon the two spun together after 1940. The reformers gained the ascendancy within the Conservative Party as Churchill remained aloof. The result was that despite his dominating national role, it was really Baldwin who was ‘the architect of mid-century Conservatism’ in attitude and spirit.16 Yet Churchill’s presence as leader of the opposition until 1951, and as Prime Minister again until 1955, prevented the overt expression of reformed Toryism from obtaining a positive, modern profile.
After his disastrous handling of the Beveridge Report, Churchill sensed the public swing away from him. In March 1943 he broadcast his own partial conversion to its principles and proposed a national coalition to continue into the postwar period. The Labour Party was unable to tolerate permanent institutionalization into a subordinate place, at least in such a naked form; it smacked too much of 1931. Rank-and-file militancy stiffened the resolve of the leaders to fight an election after the war. This opened the way for those merely sensible measures of nationalization undertaken by Labour after 1945 to be assailed as the most dreadful socialism by the Tory press. It has long been recognized that Labour’s formative moment was not so much 1945 as 1940—Attlee was continuously in the Cabinet (first as Deputy Premier, then as Prime Minister) for over a decade. Labour, rather than the Tories, built the postwar consensus which was then utilized by the Conservatives.17 To preserve this creative tension, with its invariable centrist bias, violent parliamentary attack was modulated with bipartisan understanding: Churchillism intensified and legitimized the operatics of pseudo-debate. And this was the price for so panoramic an incorporation.
Labour also inherited the full costs of Churchillism internationally. No sooner had Germany been defeated
than the United States summarily severed Lend-Lease, making the abolition of the imperial preference system the precondition of any further financial aid. ‘The American Loan’ became the terrain of a major domestic and international battle over the financial and monetary autonomy of Labour reformism. With the installation of the coalition in May 1940, the old omnipotence of the Treasury over the national economy had been temporarily eclipsed—‘in total war it was essential to plan resources first, leaving the financial side to be adjusted accordingly.’18 In 1945 stringent American conditions helped clear the path for the restoration of the Treasury’s authority. Moreover, the immediate financial crisis in war-exhausted Britain—fueled by the continuing foreign exchange shortage and gigantic debts to the dominions—was exacerbated by commitments to a high rate of military expenditure. One year later, for example, Britain still retained a garrison of 100,000 troops in both Egypt and Palestine. Despite Attlee’s flirtation with a withdrawal from the Middle East, Bevin and the Chiefs of Staff persuaded him otherwise.19 Soon the relative costs of Britain’s military budget would become a major factor in the slippage of its economic power. Internalizing the Churchillian delusion of the country’s destiny in the ‘Grand Scheme’, the Attlee government and subsequent Labour governments paid on the instalment plan the double costs of Churchillism: economic subordination to America and the projection of an independent world military role.
To sum up: Churchillism condemned to a slow death that which it saved from catastrophe. Its impulse was to preserve the Empire but Churchill was pragmatic enough to pay the costs of commitment to democracy—to ‘self-determination’ abroad and social reforms at home—that were anathema to the bedrock of his views. His militancy against Nazism made him welcome to the left, and Labour was crucial in putting him into office: it sustained the war effort that he spoke for. Thus Churchillism opened the way for the Labour victory in 1945, the creation of the welfare state, the legislated independence of India, and American domination. So too British socialism made its compromise with the capitalist nation under the benediction of Churchill’s cigar and ‘V’ sign, which in turn crippled the modernizing, radical impulse of the social democrats and liberals who provided the brain power of the Labour Party in office. At the same time, Labour’s international independence was clipped by the Cold War, itself dramatically announced by Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech of March 1946, where, in front of Truman, he called for Anglo-American military co-operation to be formalized into an anti-Soviet alliance.