The Churchill statue in Parliament Square in central London has been a focus of protest and counter-protest this month. First, the statue was defaced during a Black Lives Matter demonstration; the following Saturday, ‘football lads’ and sundry right-wingers rioted in London in the name of protecting such statues. Each side showed that they did not know their own country’s history, because they should have been on opposite sides, writes Mark Rowe.
One of the odd features of an altogether peculiar month as Britain emerges fitfully from coronavirus lockdown has been the weekend protests, first by Black Lives Matter and then by right-wingers, that make historical statues – such as the slave-owner Edward Colston in Bristol, and Winston Churchill in London – their target, either in attack or (supposed) defence. The likely definitive image of the month, at an incalculable reputational cost to the UK, will be the Churchill statue entirely hidden behind a protective box.
Consider however Churchill’s record in the only at all comparable crisis to now, May 1940, the month that Churchill came to power as Prime Minister. He came to power on Friday, May 10, 1940, coincidentally the day that Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands and France. Within ten days Nazi tanks had reached the English Channel and cut off the British Expeditionary Force (BEF); inside another ten days, it was making an emergency evacuation from Dunkirk. By June 1940, all three invaded countries had fallen and Britain faced a likely, even probably, German invasion.
As if that were not suddenly and drastically bad enough, the British Union of Fascists, founded and led by the former Labour MP Sir Oswald Mosley represented a potential enemy within – a ‘fifth column’, to use the term of the day. In Norway, for example, Major Quisling was collaborating with the German occupiers – so notoriously that his surname has entered the English language. Might Mosley, or some other fascist or Nazi sympathiser, be a British ‘Quisler’?
That was the decision for Churchill to make; could be, on behalf of the British state, trust Mosley and his BUF to be loyal, or would at least some of the BUF put their loyalty to their ideology first, and assist German paratroopers if they landed on the Sussex and Kent wealds?
He decided he could not trust them. Under the defence regulation 18b Mosley was arrested on May 23, 1940 – eventually, because comically, police went to his seventh-floor flat in Dolphin Square beside the Thames, only to find that he wasn’t there, so headed for his farm in Buckinghamshire, only to find that Mosley had meanwhile set off by car for his London flat. Back-tracking, police made their arrest and took Mosley to Brixton Prison. The BUF headquarters at 16 Great Smith Street was shut down and other BUF officials – no-one was keeping count – were detained likewise. Some stayed jailed for three years, until all risk of invasion had passed.
So the story is in the history books. The British state judged that Mosley and his main henchmen could not be trusted at liberty, even though they had not committed any crime. Indeed, Mosley through his BUF newspaper Action appealed to his members’ patriotism; and many members were genuinely patriots – that was why they said they had joined Mosley’s movement; but was that true of all? And how to know which was which?
Behind the scenes, at least some in authority were uncomfortable about going so far as to imprison people before they did any crime. The diary of Guy Liddell, a senior manager at MI5, now file Kv4-186 at the National Archives at Kew and downloadable, shows how on Monday, May 20, 1940 he attended a meeting including War Cabinet ministers. The Home Secretary Sir John Anderson was lukewarm about detaining Mosley and his men (and women) because he had no evidence to suppose that the BUF would assist enemy if they landed. The new Labour members of the Cabinet, Arthur Greenwood and Clem Attlee were for acting against BUF. According to Liddell’s diary, the new minister at the War Office, Anthony Eden ‘did not want to have a half-hour lecture from John Anderson on the liberties of the subject’.
At a meeting the following evening Sir John Anderson stuck to his position; he said he needed to be ‘reasonably convinced’, as if imprisoned Mosley and the BUF would be bitter after the war. Liddell confided to his diary; ‘I longed to say that if somebody did not get a move on there would be no democracy, no England and no Empire, and that this was almost a matter of days’.
While Liddell like everyone else outside the War Cabinet was not privy to their discussions, it’s plain that Churchill broke such deadlock and ordered the arrest of the BUF. In another sign of how the Home Office did not have a grip on its work, on Thursday evening, May 23, Liddell was at another high-level meeting chaired by the former prime minister Neville Chamberlain – still a member of Churchill’s War Cabinet. Afterwards Liddell complained to diary that Anderson gave impression that the Home Office had ‘aliens’ (foreigners in the country including as refugees) under control, when in fact control over entry ‘has been extremely lax’.
On Saturday, May 25, Liddell wrote; ‘it seems that the PM takes a strong view about the internment of all fifth columnists at this moment and that he has left the Home Secretary in no doubt about his views’. At 6pm, Liddell got a call to see Attlee and Greenwood, who asked about the hold-up of internment at the Home Office. Liddell blamed ‘an old fashioned liberalism …. The liberty of the subject, freedom of speech etc were all very well in peace time but were no use in fighting the Nazis. There seemed to be a complete failure to realise the power of the totalitarian state and the energy with which the Germans were fighting a total war.’
Attlee and Greenwood said Churchill had asked them to inquire. While Churchill as a Conservative, was a life-long imperialist, and shared the cultural assumptions of his time and privileged social class; the one time it really mattered, he acted for democracy and against fascists.
Picture by Mark Rowe; Churchill statue, Edmonton, Canada.
