The best reasons for remembering Churchill

A veteran who organised a vigil in Whitehall yesterday in order to protect the Cenotaph and to show support for retaining the statue of Winston Churchill as a great war leader, had difficulty controlling his anger in an interview on BBC News this morning. He and his comrades feel a duty to protect all war memorials, but, when police advised them that they were breaking the law in conducting their assembly in central London, they withdrew, in good order - only to be replaced by a mob of neo-Nazis and their fellow-travellers.

The neo-Nazis of course were less intent on showing respect for our war dead than on provoking fights with Black Lives Matter protesters. Extremists among the BLM movement had daubed the Churchill statue after his depiction as a racist.

There is no denying statements like this:
I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.
[Churchill's War Office Memorandum, written May 12, 1919]

Perhaps the Tommy Robinson mob took the BLM categorisation at face value and hailed Churchill as a champion of racism. But, though he shared the prejudices of his class and age, he was most of all a patriot and a defender of European civilisation. His great contribution to this was in acting as a consistent opponent of appeasement, around whom others could gather, and then, when war finally came, displacing the ineffectual Chamberlain and galvanising the country. As late as May 1940, Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, wanted to discuss peace terms with Hitler. Halifax had considerable support which Churchill had to overcome. One imagines those terms would have involved the UK handing over African and maybe even West Indian colonies to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. There would have been no Afro-Caribbean community in England and the parents and grandparents of the BLM protesters would have been living under a racist colonial regime worse than the worst aspects of British rule.

Churchill and social reform

What both Labour and Tories have succeeded in doing, for their various reasons, is erasing from the public mind Winston Churchill/s liberalism, of seeking to build and safeguard a society "in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity" to quote the current Liberal Democrat constitution. His pre-Great War achievements included the first UK network of labour exchanges, modelled on the German original which Beveridge had researched, and a statutory insurance scheme against unemployment - limited, but a world first. He established a system of wages councils which put a floor under the earnings of workers in a range of industries - a system which Mrs Thatcher systematically put an end to. He enthusiastically supported that great Liberal government's other reforms steered though parliament by his friend David Lloyd George. At the other end of his political career, towards the end of the second world war, he gave carte blanche to RA Butler to reform secondary education and turned to his former SpAd, William Beveridge, to produce the report which led to the vast expansion of the welfare state he had helped to initiate around forty years earlier.

Human rights

After World War II, he attempted to overcome the Labour Party's resistance to the UK's joining the European Coal and Steel Community, a proto-EU, for the sake of building links across Europe which would make future wars impossible. This page reminds us that:

From as early as 1942, Churchill had a vision of a post-war Europe united by common rights and freedoms. He believed that a shared commitment to these principles was necessary to safeguard Europe against the forces of totalitarianism and to prevent the further outbreak of war.