VE Day, and as with all these anniversaries from the World Wars, I feel ambivalent.
It’s right to honour the dedication of the people who fought in the wars. They included my Dad. He wasn’t celebrating VE Day because he was still fighting in the Far East. When he did get home, in 1946, he was proud of his war service, and later became an enthusiastic member of the Dunkirk Veterans Association.
But he didn’t glorify war, or pretend that it had somehow been a good thing. Among other interruptions to his life, it meant that he didn’t finish his qualifications in Insurance until 1952 – when we moaned about the length of our studies, he pointed out that he was 35 when he took his last exam. More generally, he used to tell us that nobody won a war. He didn’t come away hating the Germans or the Japanese. He started out by looking for the good in everybody rather than the bad.
So I’m wary about glorifying war. And I wish I thought we had really learnt the lessons, both as a country and as part of the western alliance. The world is a more peaceful place now than for much of the last century. But far too many wars go on, with the inevitable attendant suffering, and our attitude is inconsistent. Britain persists in pouring resources into an independent nuclear deterrent, for purposes that elude me apart from a hangover of national pride. We took a willing part in the disastrous attack on Iraq in 2003. And while we have made some efforts to strengthen international cooperation, war and suffering took place on a large scale in the former Yugoslavia in the1990s before the international community finally intervened. The same is happening in Syria and parts of Africa today.
I’m also wary about drawing too many parallels between the war and the sacrifices arising from coronavirus, about national endeavour, togetherness, “Dunkirk spirit”, and all the rest of it. Wartime sacrifices were forced on us by the need to repel the Nazis before they changed our way of life possibly forever. To combat this evil, tens of thousands of civilians died, and the whole country suffered privations. The need to rebuild the economy meant that food rationing extended until 1954, so longer in peacetime than in wartime. By contrast, we have at least some choices as to how we respond to coronavirus.
So as we emerge from the coronavirus crisis, I’d rather focus on creating a better 2020s than a modernised 1940s. The Attlee government made huge changes for the better in creating the NHS and the rest of the welfare state. But they also traded heavily on the nation’s willingness to put up with the continuation of wartime privations, and were slow in modernising the economy. Churchill, rightly idolised as a wartime leader, was much less successful in his 1950s peacetime government, again slow to modernise the economy, and clinging on to past glories in foreign policy in a way which came crashing down at Suez. In the 1940s, most of the parents and grandparents of the BAME people staffing so much of the NHS and care sector today were living in what we still called the Empire. So let’s forge our own way forward, rather than try to recreate even the good bits of the past.
I’ve been reflecting for some time about why there is growing interest in the two World Wars – I don’t remember these anniversaries being such a big thing in the 1970s and 1980s, maybe because those who fought the wars were busy with family and working life at the time. I wonder whether it’s because the sacrifice of the wartime generations makes those of us who haven’t faced that feel small by comparison. That’s understandable – and their sacrifice should be respected – but we don’t lack challenges of our own: climate change, gross inequalities at home and worldwide, child poverty, homelessness, and continuing war in some parts of the world to name a few. There is a contrast, in that the fight against wartime enemies was a clear and uniting national goal, whereas today’s challenges are more amorphous. But we can actually all play a part in tackling these, through our own behaviour, through volunteering, through campaigning and activism, and (for some) donating money. Whatever cause each of us finds closest to our own heart, we can do something to advance it.
If the combination of VE Day and coronavirus leads to more enthusiasm for today’s causes, I shall be delighted, and will eat my words well ahead of the 80th anniversary. If not, I’ll keep making these points.