Trouble is he wrote it after the war started.

It’s interesting in the light of all this Daily Mailery to look at what the Guardian thought of Hitler.

Hitler was “definitely Christian in his ideals” – in those days that was a recommendation, not the insult the Guardian would now consider it to be.

The Guardian thought on September 25 1930 that the exclusion of the Nazi party from Reich government, given its electoral success, was not in the best interests of German democracy and that their involvement would “in the long run … help to perpetuate this democracy”.

They’re so wrong so often it’s a pleasure to read – were it not for the fact that their mistakes helped to almost disarm Britain during those crucial years.

Churchill in 1934 – five years before the war – on the Labour and Liberal opposition to expansion of the RAF.

“The Opposition is very free-spoken, as are most of us in this country, on the conduct of the German Nazi Government. No one has been more severe in their criticism than the Labour Party or that section of the Liberal Party which I see opposite…
But these criticisms are fiercely resented by the powerful men who have Germany in their hands. So we are to disarm our friends, we are to have no allies, we are to affront powerful nations, and we are to neglect our own defences entirely. That is a miserable and perilous situation.”

Nobody comes out of the 1930s with much credit, but after 1945 there was much rewriting of history: appeasement was always somebody else’s fault and the Second World War became a high point in Britain’s history. A whole series of myths grew up about the 1930s and WWII. These form an important part of British politics (”Churchillism” as it has been named by Anthony Barnett). Everybody was in the resistance and the appeasers were the three men with sandals Orwell saw at bus stop near Letchworth in 1937 or 1938.

This would seem to be the point that John Harris is making. Davis’ narrative about freedom is right in this tradition. It goes back to the 1930s (and not, say, to Chile in the 1970s or the Greek colonels or Franco or Salazar). It centres on Churchill, forgetting that he was an outcast in the Conservative Party in the mid-1930s. A small mythical group of vegetarian Guardian readers is the scapegoat once again.

It certainly wasn’t ’sound’ in its foreign policy, and I’m sure that had Hitler invaded in 1941 that Rothermere would have been an arch collaborator. He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and the Mail is not much better. But the fact remains that, following the Olympia Rally the Mail explicitly withdrw support – as did everyone else. Membership of the BUF dropped from 50,000 in 1934 to 5,000 in 1935.

Well that’s reassuring from someone who claims to ‘defend civil liberties’, isn’t it? I mean, what could possibly go wrong with lazily (and incorrectly labelling) a whole class of people as ‘enemies of freedom’?

In 1937, the Mail’s chief war correspondent, George Ward Price, to whom Mussolini once wrote in support of him and the newspaper, published a book,” I Know These Dictators”, in defence of Hitler and Mussolini. Evelyn Waugh was sent as a reporter for the Mail to cover the anticipated Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

Rothermere and the Mail supported Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, particularly during the events leading up to the Munich Agreement.

What they did following the Olympia rally was simply to publicly tone it down.They never withdrew their support.

The fact that you’re very soft on the subject gives the game away as regard how partisan you are. Sympathetic for a time? Christ almighty, the Daily Mail, via Lord Rothermere showered Oswald Mosley’s BUF with money -urging the Tories to strike a deal.
He had several meetings with Hitler and this is well documented.

You said that the Daily Mail was an active supporter of the Nazi Party. I said that it supported the BUF for a time, but that this wasn’t the same thing. That’s true. The famous ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ headline was in January 1934. The Mail publicly withdrew its support in the aftermath of the Olympia rally. That was in June 1934. Which bit of this do you dispute?

And you simply can’t say that ‘the Daily Mail, via Lord Rothermere’ did anything. Lord Rothermere was certainly pro-Hitler right up unitl 1939, but his newspapers were forced to abandon their pro-fascist editorial policy in 1934.

One more thing. Neville Chamberlain and his “policy of appeasement”.
Which Party was Chamberlain from, Labour or Tory? Can you remind me?

Do you read what people post?

And for God’s sake, ‘pacifism is predominantly a philosophy of the left’ does not equal ‘the Tories were right on appeasement’. There are sometimes more than two sides to a debate.

The much deeper engagement with the African colonies in the late 40s, the turning away from early European integration, the furious arguments with Dean Acheson over Britain’s imperial possessions – the Atlee Government was a profoundly imperialist one, despite the independence of India.

42 – indeed. It was a lazy shorthand. I suspect that most people knew what he meant though…

The fact that you’re very soft on the subject gives the game away as regard how partisan you are. Sympathetic for a time? Christ almighty, the Daily Mail, via Lord Rothermere showered Oswald Mosley’s BUF with money -urging the Tories to strike a deal.
He had several meetings with Hitler and this is well documented.

One more thing. Neville Chamberlain and his “policy of appeasement”.
Which Party was Chamberlain from, Labour or Tory? Can you remind me?

Next straw-man?

As an aside, these were the people who gave India independence and started to dismantle the British empire.

I’ll give you that Ernie Bevin probably didn’t take the Guardian regularly, but Michael Foot is pretty much the archetypal liberal Guardian reader, isn’t he?

*

According to Wikipedia, the Guardian supported the Republicans in the Spanish civil war, wanted Attlee’s government thrown out of office because of Nye Bevan and the ‘hate-gospellers of his entourage’ and backed the Tories over Suez. You learn something new every day.

You may want to turn that statement to David Davis as the logical somersault from WWII to veggie Guardian readers was actually his. And plain bollocks too.

You misunderstand both me and, I suspect, him. Davis wasn’t talking about the policies of the Labour Party in the 1930s, but about the mindset of the, for want of a better expression, liberal left then. The Fabians, the Bloomsbury set, the Peace Pledge Union – those sort of people. To think that he wasn’t, you have to think that Ernie Bevin was a vegetarian Guardian reader. Which is silly.

The Daily Mail, read everyday by hundreds of thousands of Tory voters around the country, was actively supporting the Nazis in the 1930s. This isn’t whataboutery. It’s a fact.

It certainly is whataboutery, and it isn’t really a fact. It was certainly sympathetic for a time to the BUF (at a time, incidentally, when it was explicitly not a Conservative paper, and had in fact helped to set up a new party in opposition to the Tories), but you can’t reach that across to ‘actively supporting’ the Nazis.

You may want to turn that statement to David Davis as the logical somersault from WWII to veggie Guardian readers was actually his. And plain bollocks too.

The Daily Mail, read everyday by hundreds of thousands of Tory voters around the country, was actively supporting the Nazis in the 1930s. This isn’t whataboutery. It’s a fact. And the obvious reposte to the utter bollocks spelt out by Testosterone Davis.

What about the right-wingers enamoured by Hitler? Would anyone from the Tory party care to comment?

I thought you were opposed to whataboutery Sunny? I certainly seem to remember some highly entertaining threads to that effect.

Attlee, Dalton and Bevin (who went on to become Labour’s Prime Minister, Chancellor and Foreign Secretary after the war – the three most senior Labour politicians) were vocal critics of the Tory National Government’s policy and persuaded Labour to change its policy on rearmament, and Michael Foot wrote a polemic called ‘Guilty Men’ which is the classic denunciation of appeasement.

Quite. And which of these was a vegetarian Guardian-reading liberal? None of them – they all espoused a muscular imperial British foreign policy. And therefore not what Davis was talking about. Davis’s point, I guess, was that fine words and idealistic opinions are not enough to defend freedom. And he evoked the ghosts of Arthur Henderson and Vera Brittain in that image.

To make what Davis said insulting to the Labour Party, you need to be arguing that ‘vegetarian Guardian readers’ = ‘the wartime Labour Party’. Which is a bit of a stretch really.

And for God’s sake, ‘pacifism is predominantly a philosophy of the left’ does not equal ‘the Tories were right on appeasement’. There are sometimes more than two sides to a debate.

Let me guess, before one of them does comment: Something along the lines of ‘oh, they were actually left-wingers’.

You wouldn’t know it to read some of these contributions, but the Tories were in power from 1931 with a majority of over 200, not Labour or the Peace Pledge Union. It wasn’t because of Labour that Britain appeased Hitler and didn’t rearm sooner.

George Lansbury was a pacifist, and that’s why the Labour Party got rid of him as leader in 1935. Attlee, Dalton and Bevin (who went on to become Labour’s Prime Minister, Chancellor and Foreign Secretary after the war – the three most senior Labour politicians) were vocal critics of the Tory National Government’s policy and persuaded Labour to change its policy on rearmament, and Michael Foot wrote a polemic called ‘Guilty Men’ which is the classic denunciation of appeasement.

In 1945, the soldiers who had fought and defeated the Nazis voted overwhelmingly for a Labour government.

Quite what any of this has to do with civil liberties today is a matter for David Davis, but the revisionism involved in trying to blame appeasement on the gutless libruls when it was a Tory policy voted for by Tory MPs in their hundreds and cheered on by the Daily ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ Mail is quite breathtaking.

What about the right-wingers enamoured by Hitler? Would anyone from the Tory party care to comment?

Pacifism during the Second World War was a phenomenon of the left, and not of the right (and note that Davis isn’t talking about the Labour Party specifically, but to elements of the left in general). Read up on the history of the Peace Pledge Union – whose membership list reads like a definition of the soggy liberalism Davis was deriding. They were so extreme in their pacifism that it’s hard not to agree with Orwell that they were objectively pro-fascist: they were even opposed to air raid precaution legislation.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/6122386/World-War-2-Labour-backs-Government-stand.html

Hardly an attempt to roll over and allow it to happen, is it?

Statement by George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party 1933 and remained in post until 1935.

Cheers though for the history lesson, it still proves very little about the “reasons” why such decisions were made back then, and certainly doesn’t provide what I was asking for and that’s proof that Labour and Liberals campaigned to surrender and act in a pacifist manner during WW2. In short, anything other than proof of this means DD is scoring cheap points off of crass and insulting lies about history.

If Mitchell had not designed the Spitfire and Chamberlain decided the duty of the RAF was to defend Britain, the Battle of Britain would have been lost. The Trenchard doctrine basically considered it was impossible to defend a country from bombers and the duty of the RAF was to bomb the enemy not destroy the enemy’s bombers. The gap between Munich in 1938 and summer 1940 meant we had enough time to build 19 squadrons of Spitfires.

There is little evidence that any Labour politician had thought about the forthcoming war with Nazi Germany and ensure we had suitable armed forces. If Labour had fully suppoted re-armament from 1935, Britain and France may have had a capability to hold the German army at the border in 1940. The construction of German pocket battleships, battlships and U – boats meant that Britain was nearly starved into submission which was Churchill’s greates worry. At one point of the Battle of the Atlantic Britain was losing one merchant ship an hour. Did any Labour MP raise the risk of Britain being starved into submission prior to 1940 and ensure we had a capabilty keep the sea lanes open? The U-boats did massive damage to Britain in WW1.

The only Labour supporter whom made any sensible comments was G Orwell on the tactics required for streetfighting.If we look at writers E Waugh, the Tory snob did far more more fighting than most of the Labur ones; Isherwood and Auden spent the war in the USA and Sartre was hardly a resistance fighter.

When it comes to MPs after WW2 it is interesting to see how many actually fought. Gaitskill and Wilson were civil servants; Foot was a writer, Healey and Crossman fought, Heath fought and Carrington, Whitelaw , Pym and Deedes were all awarded the MC. If more Tory MPs won gallantry medals than Labour MPs does that mean the Tory Pary was more determined and effective in fighting the Nazis than the Labour Party?

In fact when it comes to providing effective support to Churchill, before 1939 from Labour politicians it boils down to Attlee and Bevin. Attlee took over leadership of the Labour Party from Lansbury because of the latter’s naive pacifism.

If Britain had had a sufficiently large and modernised armed forces by 1940, perhaps far fewer people would have died. Labour apeared to have made no attempt to encourage Britain to have the armed forces we needed prior to the start of WW2.