[Socialism Today, No 3, November 1995, p. 32]
Churchill: The End of Glory, by John Charmley. Sceptre, 1995, £9-99. Reviewed by Mike Waddington.
This is a truly good read. Although written by a right-wing historian it nevertheless provides a useful antidote to the Vera Lynn school of history and probes some of the less well-publicised issues that pre-occupied the ruling class from the 1920s to the 1950s.
One area unveiled is the real attitude of the British ruling class to fascism in this period. Charmley argues that Neville Chamberlain, in his negotiations with Hitler, was more of a realist than Churchill. He estimated British power for what it was – i.e. declining – and sought to protect Britain’s interests in that context. Charmley has found backing from the likes of former Tory cabinet minister Alan Clark in this claim. Clearly there were those in the ruling class who wanted a negotiated settlement with Germany, even in 1940.
However, although Churchill seized the chance of power when the Conservative Party turned against Chamberlain, he too was equally calculating. Charmley himself, for example, outlines Churchill’s attitude in the post-war discussions on how to deal with Franco’s surv[iv]ing fascist regime: “There were those in his cabinet who still fought the ideological battle of the 1930s and, having uprooted fascism in Italy and Germany, wanted to go on to deal with its Iberian manifestations. Churchill gave them short shrift. The war had been fought to prevent the spread of German power, and there were already enough signs to suggest that too great a price might have been paid for that … Churchill feared that destabilising Franco would mean a Communist triumph in Spain, which would lead to the ‘infection’ spreading”.
Another theme illuminated in the book is the antagonism that existed between the old imperialist power Britain and the emergent imperialism of the USA, prior to, during and after the second world war. Charmley shows, for example, that US military assistance to Britain was used by Roosevelt to gain advantages for US capitalism – the first fifty ‘clapped-out ships’ were exchanged for British bases in the Caribbean; the US took the British gold reserve from Cape Town; and in 1944 Roosevelt raised tentatively a US stake in the ‘British’ oil fields in Iran and Iraq! Eventually Roosevelt had to concede that “we have been milking the British financial cow, which had plenty of milk at one time, but which has now about become dry”.
All of this is evidence to justify Charmley’s assertion that “Churchill’s enthusiasm for the Americans made him a rare bird among the British ruling elite”. The majority feeling in ruling class circles was one of “being supplanted by the Americans as a world power” which “stimulated anti-American feeling in many quarters in Britain … it is plain that it was one of the motives which impelled Donald McLean, ‘Kim’ Philby and Anthony Blunt to spy for the Soviets … who, like John Le Carré’s Bill Hayden, they considered by far the lesser of the two evils”. Even Anthony Eden admitted that he “felt more at home in the Kremlin’.
“Churchill strove to secure the rule of ‘the 300 to 400 families that guided Britain’ for centuries”.
Overall Churchill was an accomplished representative of the British ruling class, consumed with maintaining the rule for the next “three to four hundred years” of the “three to four hundred families” who had guided England from being “a small struggling community to the headship of a vast and still unconquered Empire”. To do this he was prepared to manoeuvre on the domestic field as on the international plane, to advance where necessary radical reforms for the working class from above while always being prepared to resort to repression to prevent a movement from below.
Charmley records that Churchill read the Daily Worker every day, to try and gauge the mood of the working class. Likewise we should use the truths uncovered by this right-wing historian about the thinking of the ruling class.
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