The latest stage in this process comes through the crime and policing bill, which will grant Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square war memorial status. This allows for those who clamber up on it at protests to be hit by sentences of up to three months in jail and a fine of £1,000.
The Prime Minister’s position is therefore that anyone who does not have a “deep and enduring love” for this figure is indecent, as a person but also presumably as a Brit. He is challenging their patriotism and their moral rectitude.
Let’s have a different conversation about Churchill, just for a moment. One that avoids hero worship or demonisation. One for grown-ups.
Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, seen here during VE Day celebrations on Tuesday (Photo: Alastair Grant/AP)
When Neville Chamberlain resigned in May 1940, the job of prime minister nearly went to Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary. Mercifully it went to Churchill instead. That proved a decisive moment. Weeks later, Halifax repeatedly raised the prospect of initiating talks with Hitler. Churchill killed the idea. “If this long island story of ours is to end at last,” he told cabinet, “let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”
Churchill’s critics overstate or misrepresent many of his supposed crimes. He did not, in fact, order the army to fire upon striking Welsh miners in Tonypandy. He sent them out to support police forces during the strike, but discouraged direct confrontation. Much of the coverage at the time criticised him for being too moderate in his response. In fact, he was actually quite a left-wing figure – certainly much more left-wing than modern Conservatives – with a strong and consistent instinct for redistribution.
But Churchill was, without doubt, an imperialist, a racist, a eugenicist and a white supremacist. That is simply a fact. In that very same memo on chemical warfare he talked of “uncivilised tribes”. He celebrated that “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” had taken the place of “the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia”. He particularly hated Indians, who he branded “a beastly people with a beastly religion”. Leo Amery, the secretary of state for India during the war, stated correctly that “on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane”.
square JAMES HANNING
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Incidentally, it is not enough to say this was the standard of the time. For a start, many people did not speak or think this way. Deputy prime minister Clement Atlee, who supported Indian independence, certainly did not. And indeed nor did Churchill, when it came to people he was more sympathetic towards. He was a philosemite, who did not engage in the default antisemitism you’d see in British society during the era. The appeal to historic standards is a weak one and easily disproven.
Much of the discussion of this issue acts as if Churchill was solely responsible for it. That’s false. It would have happened regardless of his role. Even if he had behaved much better than he did, millions would still have died. But any fair-minded reader of the primary sources will conclude that he worsened what was already an unimaginable human disaster. Amery pressed for more food to be sent to India, but Churchill was indifferent. “Winston so dislikes India,” he wrote in his diary, “that he can see nothing but waste of shipping space.”
Is this a man who “all decent British people” should feel “deep and enduring love” for? Are we really going to say – particularly to British Asians, many of whom trace their heritage to Bengal – that they must love this man or be considered indecent? Obviously not. The Prime Minister should have thought carefully about these implications before he spoke. It speaks ill of him that he didn’t do so.
We won’t be able to talk honestly about our history as a country if we can’t talk honestly about Churchill. We’ll just be stuck in this silly simplistic spectacle, with left-wing protesters telling us everything about Britain is bad and right-wing columnists telling us everything about Britain is good. Passing laws that effectively turn his statue into the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes takes us in the opposite direction to the one we need to go.
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