It is slightly hidden away from the house, not far from what was once the chicken coop. Or to be more precise, not far from Leon Trotsky’s chicken coop. For it is in Leon Trotsky’s garden that the plaque sits. And it is there that it caught my eye as I was moseying around the garden earlier this year.

The story of Robert Sheldon Harte is both deservedly forgotten and slightly suggestive. For Harte was not just a communist, he was an American communist — born in the US in 1915. A member of the Communist Party of the USA, he offered his services as a guard at the Trotsky household in Mexico at the age of 25. On 24 May, 1940, a GPU unit turned up at the house intending to kill Trotsky. The attempt failed, and so the unit settled with abducting Harte who was subsequently shot in the head and buried in quicklime in a shallow grave.

Since Harte’s death, there have been claims and counter-claims about exactly who he was working for. Was he merely an idealistic supporter of the exiled Trotsky or was he in fact — as some have claimed — a double agent, recruited by the NKVD and sent by Stalin’s agents to help in the assassination of the man he was purporting to protect? Whatever the answer, Trotsky himself believed that Harte had been loyal and had the plaque erected himself.

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Though he wasn’t able to enjoy it for very long. For only a few months later – 80 years ago today, as it happens — Stalin’s agents were successful in their attempts to get Stalin’s greatest enemy. On August 21, 1940, agents of the NKVD managed to get into the Trotsky compound and one – Ramon Mercader – successfully killed Trotsky with an ice-pick while he was in his study.

There remains something not just gruesome but impressive about this act of political assassination. Impressive because of the message of strength it sent out. By the time of his assassination, Trotsky had been away from the Soviet Union for over a decade. He had eked out that time in a variety of comfortable and miserable surroundings, moving from Turkey to France, to Norway and eventually — not least thanks to the efforts of Frida Kahlo — to his final home of Mexico.

By the time he was there, his name — indeed any association with it — had become more dangerous than any other inside the Soviet Union. At the show trials of 1936, it was enough to be accused of having been in league with Trotsky, to be assured a death sentence. Though, of course, for Stalin it was not necessary for there to be any such connection. Trotskyist connections or tendencies were enough on their own: a routine, useful cipher when the regime needed to make up its quotas of people who needed to be killed.

And of course the impressive thing — the impressive, typically Stalinist message — is that Stalin was able to pursue this enemy to the other end of the earth and, after numerous attempts, actually get him. The assassination of Trotsky was more than an assertion of vengeance, it was an assertion of power. A demonstration that the writ of Stalin ran wherever he wanted it to run. For a dictator, this is a most useful fear to spread around.

But in many ways, what is most interesting about Trotsky is not his death, or life, but his afterlife. For, to a great extent he remained (and for some people amazingly remains still) the great ‘might have been’ of the Soviet era. Never mind the people who actually grew up while the horrors of the Soviet system were ongoing, I have heard people in my own adult life, born in my own lifetime, and sometimes younger than myself (people in their twenties or thirties), seriously describe themselves as being (or at some point having been) a Trotskyist.

How is this possible? Nobody alive, let alone any reasonably intelligent person under the age of 40, would describe themselves as having gone through a period of following Ernst Rohm, before moderating their political views somewhat.

The explanation lies in a corner of Sovietology which is still not settled, though goodness knows it should have been by now. This is the corner which continues to imagine that had Stalin not taken over (or even Lenin, in the views of some), then the catastrophe that all but the most deluded communists now admit to, might never have taken place. Of all the might-have-beens and roads tantalisingly-never-travelled, none has continued to have such appeal as that held out by Leon Trotsky.

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By Jame Bloodworth

In the Fifties and Sixties, Isaac Deutscher performed a work of personal hero-worship in his fluent and slanted three-volume biography (The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast). Although this work had significant critics – not least in the form of Isaiah Berlin – the works helped to cement among English-speakers a perception of Trotsky as the great what-if of Soviet history.

Of course, however long they have tried to sustain this belief, they could not have been more wrong. For all the what-ifs, history shows that had Trotsky been in power, the history of Russia in the 20th Century would hardly have been any different.

From the start of the revolution, till the day he died, Trotsky was the most fanatical and among the most persuasive of the communist leaders. He was as at ease and adept at the use of violence as any of those around him. His only aversion to the same began to emerge as he discovered that he, his associates, and his closest followers might have been on the receiving end of a thing he thought only worth dishing out. So why has the figure of Trotsky retained some allure even 80 years after his timely death?

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Several reasons present themselves. One is the possibility that his undoubted intellectual ability, plus his assassination in a far-away land gave him a certain martyr-like glamour. He was working on his magnum opus about his enemy right up until the moment of his death; the combination of work ethic and premature demise can be a heady brew. Especially so for a certain type of Western intellectual who likes the idea of fanaticism for a cause precisely because they have themselves never had to suffer at the hands of such fanatics.

But the greater reason would appear to be that reason which remains perhaps the greatest bit of unfinished business of the 20th Century. The recognition that the Soviet, Communist, Marxist experiments were not trees which just happened to give off some poison fruits. Or beautiful ideas which were just mishandled and misappropriated by misguided hands. But rather that the whole dream was a nightmare from beginning to end. And always was going to be. That the Communist experiment had no more likelihood of delivering peace on earth than did the Fascist attempt to try to produce the same.

Yet it is strange, this. There are still no shrines around the world (as the house of Trotsky in Mexico effectively is) commemorating and glamorising any of the intellectual heroes — let alone physical progenitors — of fascism. Yet here still, on several continents, these memorials to the glamorous heroes of communism remain. And it is an intellectual, as well as moral, failing that this should still be the case.

There is a passage in Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev worth bearing in mind. One of the novel’s many characters, who is hauled away for a crime which he had nothing to do with, is a man who has been a member of the party since 1907. For more than 20 years he has seen his colleagues, superiors, underlings and many others taken away. And now — for a suspected association with something he has no more to do with than all those others did — it is his turn to be taken away. It is a trap, he realises. The whole thing.”That’s the trap,” he realises. “The beast in the trap is you, the trapped beast, you old revolutionist, it’s you… And we’re all in it, all in the trap… Didn’t we all go absolutely wrong somewhere?”

Certainly they did. Sometimes the beast in the trap was a whole population, sometimes it was a single individual. Sometimes it was an unintelligent young fanatic like Robert Sheldon Harte.  Sometimes it was a cultured and intelligent intellectual like the man he apparently wanted to protect. It didn’t matter. They all got caught in the trap. And it is quite hard to feel any admiration or sadness for those caught in a trap that they themselves set.

Existential doubts can force a renewal of quicker thinking and commitment. We can all get tired and lazy about what we do, what we think important, and how we pursue our principal enthusiasms, motivations and beliefs. I’m sure there are some people at that once-respected newspaper asking “What is the Guardian for?”

At least the writer had the intelligence to then quote the German philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno: “Art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity.” Unfortunately, the article upheld the clear belief that pop culture has achieved this feat, whereas what is referred to as ‘serious music’ has not.

The writer completely missed the fact that the most interesting and controversial thing about the 20th century’s foremost thinker on aesthetics and philosophy was his trenchant criticism of popular culture – especially the mass-produced, American-influenced sort so repetitively, monotonously and unquestioningly championed by the Guardian.

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Adorno’s principal targets throughout his life were fascism and what he called “the culture industry” – a term also used by Max Horkheimer to describe how popular culture in capitalist society functions like an industry, producing standardised products which produce standardised people – and consequently standardised journalistic asininity.

Adorno argues that the culture industry (and its bride, the advertising industry) is a corrupt product of late capitalism in which all forms of culture (from literature, through films and all the way to elevator music) are all just part and parcel of the system of production. Capitalism has a deep cultural force as well as an economic one. The profit principal is paramount in contemporary pop culture, appealing to the lowest common denominator, with the aim of producing pliant consumers, adapted to the needs of the system.

I would expect to read in the Guardian – a Left-wing journal – constant probings of our ubiquitous pop industry and its umbilical link with the rich and powerful. But probings I find none. What I do find (which reminds me also of the BBC) is breathless, adoring praise for events such as the Glastonbury Festival and the elevation of the decidedly mediocre and banal to iconic genius status.

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Does class still count?

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I also find criticisms, which baffle me, of the cost of classical concerts. As Richard Morrison explains in his counter-blasting response in The Times:

“You can get a standing-ticket for any of this summer’s 75 Proms for £6, and 70,000 punters will do so. Another 100,000 will buy seats costing £15 or less. Compare that with the £250 cost of attending the Glastonbury Festival. I’ve been promming for decades, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who owns a yacht. I did once meet someone who was off to his second home in Gloucestershire. He was the editor of The Guardian.”

The fact is that the pop-dominated, mass-produced culture industry and big business are inherently bound together to make a large-scale system of control and exploitation. In comparison to this behemoth, the experience of classical music for most of us is of a struggling, hard-pressed cottage industry. Those of us involved in it spend a lot of time fighting the political class (something the Guardian used to do) which is presiding over a state education system that marginalises music and the other arts.

I often come across people – sometimes on the Left but not always – who believe that complex, discursive music like classical and jazz isn’t what ordinary working-class kids should be doing, that these genres are too elitist and the preserve of “dead, white males” as the Guardian would have it. But if someone had told me and my parents this back in the day, we would have laughed in their faces.

I remember my Ayrshire home town of Cumnock as a very musical place, where ordinary men and women from humble homes would make music together. There wasn’t a lot of money around – a lot of people were genuinely poor – but it’s clear that this music making at an early age can transform lives – it certainly changed mine.

This was the beginning of a magical life in music for me. It’s a familiar path for many working-class Scottish kids who were given free music lessons and encouraged to be involved in school orchestras, bands and choirs back then in the Sixties and Seventies, where our teachers knew how to nurture our talents and enthusiasms into lifelong vocations and careers. This is now under threat – and youngsters from less well-off homes are being discouraged away from the world of music, sometimes by budget cuts, but also poisonously abetted by media pressure.

What needs to be said often and loudly – and in our press – is that discursive music, which is complicated and requires focus and concentrated skill (like learning to play an instrument or singing) can take a lifetime’s commitment, both for listeners and performers, as well as composers, of course. But it is a lifetime that is full of rewards, artistically, emotionally, socially and intellectually.

Active engagement with music brings benefits throughout people’s lives. Even very young children’s perceptual development is enhanced by musical engagement, affecting language development, improving literacy and rhythmic co-ordination; fine motor coordination is improved by learning to play an instrument.

What has The Guardian got against classical music?

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Participation in music is said to also improve spatial reasoning, an aspect of general intelligence which is related to some of the skills required in mathematics. While general attainment is clearly affected by literacy and numeracy skills, involvement in music appears to improve self-esteem, self-efficacy and aspirations – all such important factors in improving young people’s commitment to studying and perseverance in other subjects.

Why would the political class, with their media allies, conspire to create a situation which allows children, especially poorer ones, to miss out on such a vital ingredient of their education? It’s as if their sanctimonious mantras about inclusion, access and diversity get thrown straight out the window as soon as they are asked to do something about it.

If the Guardian were really interested in finding an answer to that smart-arsed opening question, it might consider acquainting itself with the grass-roots ecology of art music – something that is now under attack from philistines and ideologues of all political stripes. It should be trumpeting the expansion of horizons, not shutting them down for the sake of some small-minded dogma.

In the aftermath of that outrage, the Board of Deputies of British Jews – among others – expressed their concern that the phrase was in and of itself anti-Semitic. Since then, the Board has met with Ms Braverman and announced that it has discerned that there was in fact nothing “intentionally anti-Semitic” about her comments, and expressed sorrow about any hurt having been caused to the MP (who happens to have a Jewish husband).

It is unlikely that any lesson will be learned about claiming to hear things beneath or above the pitch of normal words. Not least because there is now a phalanx of self-appointed bodies and individuals dedicated to this peculiar form of voluntary service.

One oddity of the whole business of trying to hear dog-whistles is very basic: if you can hear the whistle, you must surely be the dog. It is the nature of the analogy that a non-canid cannot hear what the dog hears.  So to be able to hear on a whole different aural wave-length to everyone else – to be peculiarly attuned to the tones of the time and to be able to explain to everyone else – is one heck of a power to bestow upon yourself.

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Is cultural Marxism a myth?

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Which brings me to Paul Embery. I suppose I should state first – since journalism is a trade rightly under suspicion from the reading public – that Embery is not a friend of mine. I do not believe I have ever met him, though I may have once stood in the same room as him.

Nevertheless, we write for the same publication and that is the sort of thing that raises eyebrows if one rushes to another’s defence. So, I should probably add that Embery is generally regarded as being of the Left. Whereas close readers will have noticed that I am not always seen as being of that throng. Embery is a trade union man, which I am not. I suppose we have other differences.

But I have read him ever since he began publishing at UnHerd because I think he is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time. British journalism is not always an open race. In the talent stakes the best talent does not always rise (apologies if this sounds chippy). Often it gets nowhere near the starting blocs. Outside of the hereditary bloc in the House of Lords, journalism in Britain may be one of the most hereditary professions in the land. So as well as giving a cheer whenever any talented voice breaks through, I have to admit that I give an added cheer whenever somebody who was not themselves born into a family of journos breaks through.

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Which is quite enough throat-clearing before pointing out the unfairness of the treatment allotted to Embery this week. It was meted out after he tweeted a response to a folk singer called Mike Harding who had said ‘A nation is not a home’. To this Embery replied, “I fear this encapsulates the divide in our society – between a rootless, cosmopolitan, bohemian middle-class… a rooted, communitarian, patriotic working-class.”

It’s a point with which one may agree or disagree, but of course we live in an age where disagreement is not enough. Character assassination must stand in for debate, and so it was with Embery, with the charge being led by people who claim to hear things with the aural capabilities of a dog.

For example Labour MP Alex Sobel immediately responded, “Literally an anti-semitic trope used by Stalin the culmination of which saw many good bundists imprisoned by East European Communist regimes (including my grandfather) just what I needed to see after the @JewishLabour AGM.  Stop othering Jews.”

Since Mr Sobel is so sensitive to echoes of anti-Semitism that he can find it in two words separated by a comma, then you would have thought he would long ago have heard them in the political party of which he remains a member. Other Labour MPs have described Labour as so “institutionally racist” that they have had to leave the party. Yet Sobel stays. How you can detect anti-Semitism in adjectives online and bypass the klaxon of it on the benches is a matter for serious amazement.

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David Aaronovitch of The Times also decided to join in the lambasting of Embery. He did so by implying that Embery must lurk in very dark places if he can so easily regurgitate these particular two words and separate them with a comma. To which Embery rather smartly replied that of course not all of us spend our lives suffering from the same problems as recovering Stalinists.

Aside from being a neat rejoinder, there is a serious truth underneath this. Everybody knows that people can be extra-sensitive – sometimes over-sensitive – about characteristics which they have which they have at some point in the past had used against them.

A similar dynamic inevitably exists among those who were once devotees of totalitarian movements. Although some people who were once fascists or communists are genuinely able to slip the mindset, not all are. Many slip from the central beliefs but have to spend the rest of their lives assuming that everybody is as vulnerable to the most crazed and dangerous ideas as they once were. A more sensible interpretation would be that it requires a rather special set of character defects – to put it no more rudely – to find oneself in the grip of such ideologies in these times. Most people manage to avoid it.

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Anyhow – the censorship mob have had their way. The trade union of which Embery is a part – the Fire Brigades Union – has ordered him to dial back his online activities. Presumably there is now less chance of him using the wrong adjectives or punctuation and more chance of global peace and harmony.

But this constitutes yet another victory for a contrived hyper-sensitivity and that must surely at some stage reach its limit? If people honestly believed that Embery was an anti-Semite then they should have come out with it and said so. The fact that they did not is because they knew that to do so would be wrong, and that it would make them look ridiculous.

Perhaps it is time to mention how ridiculous they also look seeing phantoms where they do not exist. Perhaps they might also reconsider their determined distortion of the nation’s ability to hear things which certainly do exist but which normal human ears are perfectly able to discern.

Last week, I gave a keynote lecture at a major university about “these troubled times”. I said that I felt that the mainstream political rhetoric around me has become divisive and insular, and that the tenor of discussion itself has become aggressive. I wondered how I might regain a feeling of clarity and stability.

I thought the students, academics and university support staff in the audience would put up their hands and tell me about all the projects and initiatives they’re involved in that prove my despondency wrong. Instead, we were all in sober agreement. We joked that the lecture was to be a kind of blood-letting where we released our sense of anxiety and tried to analyse what fed it.

So, what has caused this sense of malaise? At its heart, I think the prognosis is so frightening that we don’t want to face it. I think we are edging towards a third world war. It doesn’t look like the previous two world wars. There are no big blocs of allies sending tanks against a common enemy: the liberal democrats against the authoritarian fascists.

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By Paul Embery

There is no single front. Instead, there are a dozen different points of fracture and crisis: cyber warfare and climate change are ushering in an unknown future; a new generation of technocratic power-holders such as Facebook and Amazon seem to be above the law and wield more influence than individual nation states; networks of vested interests (think of men such as Steve Bannon and Aaron Banks) are allegedly able to skew public opinion and sow political division.

Ordinarily, the battle lines would be clearly drawn: pluralistic, progressive and open societies would speak out against militarised, repressive, heavily controlled and regressive (say, in terms of attitudes to LGBT people and women’s roles) states.

But ideology no longer offers certainty: we see such counter-intuitive overtures as Trump’s admiring comments about Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un. We notice centrist and Left-leaning parties absorbing the concerns and kowtowing to the interests of the far-Right – such as their “admission” that immigration, multiculturalism and plurality of faith, heritage, colour, language and culture are to be interrogated and resisted instead of fostered.

Across Left and Right alike, public debate has been corrupted by aggression, sloganeering and macho posturing. I have voted Labour all my life, except in protest after Iraq and Brexit, when I voted Lib Dem. But in this new aggressive world, to criticise Jeremy Corbyn is to receive vicious abuse from his cult followers, along with the accusation of being “a Blairite”!

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So even Labour, supposedly the party that champions feminist values and racial diversity, is governed by a macho principle. I hate Corbyn’s thug army of tight black T-shirted footsoldiers just as much as I hate any boys’ club. Yet their aggressive mode of action has become normalised, leaving me feeling alienated both from governing party and opposition alike.

At a much wider level, we are seeing the frightening manifestation of this macho principle in global rulers: men such as Putin, Xi Jinping, Trump, Orban, Edogan, Salvini, Duterte and Bolsonaro. They share the same qualities, values and demeanour, despite differences of historical context, geographic location and political system.

Brexit and Trump are a part of this new worrying world, but they are both signs of a broader tendency. It is suggested, by some, that the Brexit vote was racist and the 2016 US election result was propelled by misogyny against Clinton and a whitelash against Obama, and that both represent a self-righteous philistinism. But that would be to avoid the hard fact that some of the grievances which led to these results had been incubated by decades of under-investment in basic services, education, infrastructure and healthcare; by stalled social mobility, painful inequality and the destruction of workers’ rights, benefits and job security.

As a result, we see, in England, people who can’t afford a home, even if they work all hours. We see people who have to visit food banks in order to feed themselves. Ordinary people no longer believe that anyone at the top is advocating for them. And it’s happening the world over as infrastructure, mobility and ordinary people’s safety net dissolves around them.

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There’s a tendency towards insularity, self-righteous monoglot ignorance, xenophobia, nativism, white supremacy and jingoism. Ugly hate crimes and racist violence against anyone who looks or sounds ‘different’ are out in the open and increasing. It’s online, sure. But it’s also on the streets. I’m experiencing comments and insults and the kind of casual racism that my mother heard 45 years ago, but that I had been spared, until now.

On a train to Hull, City of Culture, in 2017, the chatty woman next to me was regaling the carriage with dreams about her forthcoming retirement in Spain. Then she lowered her voice, gave me a long sidelong glance and said, “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate other races or anything, but,” then she began snickering, “I’m getting the hell out of this country!”

A half-Pakistani but fair-skinned friend of mine was in a taxi, also in Hull, and commented, “This looks like a nice town.” “That’s because there’s no foreigners in it,” retorted the driver.

At an everyday level, there is an underlying feeling of aggression and self-righteousness – as a woman of colour I have a fine-tuned sense for latent prejudice, having dealt with it all my life – and I have seen multiple times how petty arguments, say in a shop queue or on the street, end with me or another person of colour being told, “If you don’t like it, go back to where you came from.”

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What happened to so affect public rhetoric and to empower this kind of self-righteous, philistine aggression? It’s the result of the conflation of several issues: the fear of terrorism, Islamophobia, scepticism about multiculturalism, aversion to immigration and immigrants and scare-mongering around refuge and asylum.

People are afraid and state action is doing nothing to dispel these fears – if anything, it’s making things worse, much like Theresa May’s “hostile environment” speech did  back in 2015.

We’re seeing the steady normalisation of detention, invasive control in the name of security, imprisonment, internment, militarisation, surveillance, police violence, forced family break-ups and state brutality.

Donald Trump’s camps for migrant children are a repulsive new low in this dark tendency, as are China’s camps for its Uighur minority and the ghettoisation of Syrian refugees in camps in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.

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It beggars belief that barely a decade ago we were watching the pan-Arab revolutions. With its hopeful young populace taking to the streets, building on previous generations of pro-democracy activism to protest against Mubarak, Gaddafi, Assad and other authoritarian leaders, the so-called Arab Spring shimmered with potential and optimism.

The region has now devolved into a horror show of fragile states, unaffiliated militia, terrorist death cults like ISIS and razed homelands from which millions are fleeing – in addition to those escaping extreme poverty, political persecution, authoritarianism and climate change from Afghanistan. Iran and Iraq, sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.

My fear is that once Angela Merkel – the last grown-up in the room and a woman I admire for her stance on refuge and asylum – has left political life, we will not be able to turn things around. We will be over-powered by the fascist tendency. The signs are loud and clear: even where they have not ascended to outright power, the far-Right have made significant election gains across the world.

At my university talk, a woman asked me what a solution could be, if our unease was just making us ill and grassroots activity (such as the large rallies in favour of a People’s Vote) weren’t making much impact on those in power, at the top of the hierarchy.

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We agreed that the system itself didn’t need to be smashed up and reconfigured; indeed, there is no time left for that. Instead, we need a cohesive, strong and distinctive opposition, one which boldly stands against what is happening now and faces contemporary issues head-on.

If we do not get it together, we are handing the world over to society’s worst tendencies. A macho, violent race war is exactly what both ISIS and the white supremacists want.

Social breakdown, with the spoils up for grabs, is exactly what rich and powerful vested interests want. Division, escapism and isolation is exactly what the technocrats want, the better to monetise all those clicks and maintain the flow of entertainment and fake news keeping us hooked to our screens.

And a loss of faith in institutions and organisations of justice, government and culture are what the philistines want, so that they can seize power and rule by mob force and the threat of violence.

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Is Europe on the brink of a new Thirty Years' War?

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As a political analyst, I dislike overblown reactions, passive fatalism or the tabula rasa, shock-doctrine death-drive that welcomes catastrophe in the desperate hope of building a better world in the ruins. But if we look at the facts and observe what is going on, it is worrying.

The fascist tendency crosses vast differences of language, region and culture and has infiltrated mainstream discourse. It is difficult to find a united bloc of international allies who will work together to fight it. As such we are in a worse position than during 1914-1948. If my worst fears are true, anyone born this year will inherit a broken world and a decimated earth.

I hope that I’m wrong. I hope I laugh about this essay two years from now. I hope I am being hysterical, paranoid, misguided or any other word a troll could throw at me. But I am worried. Not by the negative factors I’ve outlined but by the lack of effective, unified and powerful opposition to this atrocious thuggery. We need to find our voice, unify our forces, defend our beliefs and wield our power before time runs out and trouble comes to our door.

War imposed huge strains on the societies involved, and all felt the consequences, including the United Kingdom: Ireland broke away, and the empire began to fissure. Infinitely more traumatic were the fates of central and eastern Europe and the Middle East, where the collapse of the empires that had ruled them gave opportunities for independence to new nations, but caused years of bloody conflict and revolutionary violence that destroyed many millions of lives and led to mass ‘ethnic cleansing’. Some of the consequences still fester today.

The human cost for Britain, though less than for several other countries, had been immense: the line of mourners for the inauguration of the Cenotaph in Whitehall stretched for seven miles. People wanted victory to be for more than selfish reasons: in the novelist H.G. Wells’s phrase, they wanted it to be “a war to end war”. Only this seemed to make the terrible sacrifice bearable.

Further reading

Why are woke liberals such enemies of the past?

By Peter Franklin

Although there was anger against the enemy, and a popular demand to ‘make Germany pay’, there was a countervailing desire for reconciliation and a new peaceful world – an aspiration that earlier generations would have thought impossible, but which we have never abandoned. A League of Nations was created to keep the peace. King George V declared that war should be consigned to “a dead past“.

Many progressives, with the economist John Maynard Keynes as their spokesman, deplored what they saw as excessively harsh treatment of the now democratic Germany, which was made to pay economic “reparations”. Here was the origin of the policy of “appeasement” – to satisfy German grievances – which was generally accepted in Britain. Support for the League and for general disarmament was strong in all parties and sections of society. The Oxford Union famously voted in 1933 that “this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country“.

Our modern political landscape was created by the war. The once dominant Liberal Party split, and Labour replaced it as a major party. Wartime solidarity led Britain to take its final steps to democracy, giving the parliamentary vote to all adult men and eventually all women. The then prime minister, David Lloyd George, promised “homes fit for heroes“. Welfare benefits rose faster than ever before or since, despite the huge public debt created by the war.

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But the British economy had been severely damaged. Vast overseas investments had been liquidated. Industry had slashed exports to supply the war effort, and overseas customers had turned to other suppliers such as America and Japan. Postwar markets for textiles, steel, ships, and coal collapsed, plunging whole regions into depression – something that still scars our society today. The short 1926 General Strike was one of the consequences. Worse was to come. Global economic crisis from 1929 onwards created mass unemployment, caused serious political instability in much of Europe, and brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany.

For all these reasons, disillusionment with the outcome of the war began in the late 1920s. It seemed that “the war to end war” had been a mirage, and that life had got worse. Books, plays, poetry, paintings and films appeared in every country highlighting the horrors of the trenches. The British public clung, during the 1930s, to the “no more war” ideal, opposed spending on armaments and placed its hopes in the League of Nations.

Mounting aggressiveness by fascist regimes in Italy and Germany met with a redoubled desire to ‘appease’ Germany, and to keep Britain out of European conflicts. “Do not compete with the fascists in arms and they will not rearm”, declared the Labour leader Clement Attlee. By a tragic irony, fear and hatred of war born out of the sufferings of 1914-18 thus made another war more likely; and it materialised in 1939.

Further reading

Lessons from the first attempt at a European union

By Peter Franklin

To have to fight a second war against Germany and its allies might seem final proof that the First World War had been for nothing; indeed, that it had sown the seeds of even worse horrors. Or – as many at the time believed – that victory in 1918 had been wasted by the politicians. But whether this was due to treating Germany too harshly or by “appeasing” it was a matter of debate. It is a question that can never be resolved.

Britain had fought, in 1914, to prevent the dominance of the Continent by an aggressive Germany and its allies, and to ward off a potential threat to its own security. Victory meant the temporary removal of this threat. What if Britain had been defeated? It is impossible to gauge all that was at stake in the war, and how a different outcome might still have been affecting us today.

But defeat would surely have meant severe impoverishment, economic and social disruption, insecurity, and dangerous political division and bitterness. The prospects for a democratic future for Europe would have been bleak. In short, while the First World War did not bring the utopian future that idealists hoped for, it staved off an immediate danger, and gave peace and democracy a chance. So the Europe we live in has as its matrix the victory of 1918.

Further reading

Remembrance Sunday is a noble tradition. But there’s also a compelling case for forgetting

By Michael Burleigh

Was Britain changed in ways that still affect us? The belief that the carnage of the trenches somehow destroyed national solidarity, confidence and trust is fanciful. The funeral in 1922 of Field-Marshal Earl Haig, the former Commander-in-Chief, brought huge crowds of mourners into the streets.

Only since the 1960s has the First World War become a byword for futility and an easy way of bashing the Establishment and ‘militarism’ – though ironically, ‘militarism’ was what people in 1914 thought the war was against. The truest symbol of the legacy of the First World war is the poppy, which has no parallel in any other combatant country. The poppy combines a sense of national solidarity with consciousness of human suffering – very different from the heedless jingoism of the late Victorian age, which the First World War destroyed for ever.