These two British titans belie the myths of the Left
THE hard Left brims with contempt for Britain’s history. As they plot their socialist revolution, these sneering zealots are engaged in a systematic attempt to denigrate our heritage.
Viewing everything through the prism of their warped ideology, they treat our island story as a narrative of shame rather than a source of inspiration.
Nothing illustrates their dogma more graphically than their relentless character assassination of Winston Churchill. To the Trotskyite Taliban, Churchill is not the saviour of humanity but an imperialist warmonger, a bigoted white supremacist and a vicious reactionary.
Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell last week described Churchill as “a villain” for his supposed role as Home Secretary in 1910 in suppressing a Welsh miners’ strike with military force.
But far from acting with brutish impetuosity, Churchill showed great restraint when he was confronted with a major riot in the South Wales mining town of Tonypandy. Instead of sending in troops immediately, he despatched the Metropolitan Police to the area, with the military held back in Cardiff as a reserve. His tactic worked and the police had largely quelled the disorder without serious bloodshed before the troops were finally ordered in.
Equally wrong is the fashionable pretence that Churchill was a Right-wing extremist. Throughout most of his long political career, he was a pragmatic centrist and a passionate believer in democracy. For two decades until 1924, he was a leading member of the Liberal Party and close ally of the great Welsh reformer Lloyd George. 1940. McDonnell fondly sees himself as an opponent of fascism. But there was never a more robust warrior against it than Churchill. To paint him now as a criminal is to smear his legacy in defending civilisation from genocidal barbarity.
During his wartime premiership, Churchill was ably assisted by the Labour Party, led by the calm, austere Clement Attlee. The fruitful coalition between the two men is a direct refutation of McDonnell’s partisan myth-making. If Churchill had really been a Tory “villain”, Attlee’s Labour would not have contemplated going into Government with him. But Attlee was an admirer of Churchill, calling him “brave, gifted, inexhaustible and indomitable”.
Churchill described Attlee as “an admirable character” and “a great patriot”. Of their wartime alliance, he wrote that “we worked together with perfect ease and confidence during the whole period of Government”. In fact, Churchill was so reliant on Attlee’s judgment and smooth administration that in 1942 he made him Deputy Prime Minister, a position that had never previously existed.
Attlee would probably have found Jeremy Corbyn far harder to work with than Churchill. Where Corbyn supports every Left-wing cause, Attlee was a ferocious anti-communist, as shown by his post-war decision to build Nato as a bulwark against Soviet aggression.
Corbyn campaigns for the abolition of Britain’s nuclear weapons. Attlee created our nuclear deterrent in 1948. Corbyn has not a single practical achievement to his name. Attlee built the NHS, gave independence to India and established the modern social security system.
Corbyn is quasi-pacifist with a profound streak of anti-British sentiment. In contrast, Attlee had a fine military record in the First World War, sustaining wounds on the Western Front and in the Middle East.
J‘Churchill relied on Attlee’s judgment’
OHN McDonnell shows his ignorant pettiness by calling Churchill “a villain.” Attlee demonstrated his wisdom by enabling Churchill to become Prime Minister when Neville Chamberlain’s Tory government collapsed in May 1940. As Labour leader, Attlee could have refused to take office under him. But Attlee recognised that, in Britain’s hour of national peril, “Churchill stood head and shoulders above any other possible prime minister”.
The wartime coalition was their finest hour together, yet theirs was a remarkable relationship that stretched right back to their childhoods. In an amazing coincidence, the governess who taught Churchill later went to work for the Attlee family. Their lives intersected in other ways. As a social worker in the East End of London, Attlee implemented many of the measures that Churchill introduced as a Liberal minister.
During the First World War, Attlee took part in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of which Churchill was the mastermind. After 1945, they remained the dominant figures in British politics for another decade until they both retired in 1955. Tellingly, in another indicator of his moderation, Churchill’s second term as prime minister in 1951-55 retained most of Attlee’s postwar welfare settlement.
Attlee once said of Churchill that “cruelty and injustice revolted him”. Yet McDonnell and Corbyn seem to glory in sectarianism, division and prejudice, as shown by the antiSemitism that now thrives in Labour’s ranks. This gruesome pair are the real villains of British politics.