by Richard North
http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=83194
Following on from David Cameron’s faux pas on the Magna Carta, the Daily Mail has turned to Cameron’s Oxford tutor, Vernon Bogdanor, “for advice on 15 things that everyone should know”, about history.
Bognador, is a Research Professor at the Institute of Contemporary British History, King’s College London and is writing a history of Britain in the 20th Century, so his offerings are of some interest, and especially his item 9 on the Second World War, of which he says:
From June 1940 to June 1941. Without our heroic resistance, Europe would, Churchill predicted, have entered a new Dark Age. It changed the dynamic between leaders and troops. Field Marshall Montgomery asked a soldier to name his most important possession. The man said: “My rifle”. Montgomery replied: “No. It isn’t. It’s your life and I’m going to save it”. Such humanity by leaders led it to be called The People’s War.
What leaps out of the page is the claim on the “People’s War”, which is complete rubbish – a total re-write of the entire social history of that period.
That particular phrasing emerged to some prominence during the second half of 1940, and was a major theme during the TUC annual congress in Southport of that year. It was then that Labour cabinet ministers were accused by union bosses of not doing enough to make the conflict a people’s war, a “war fought for the people by the people”.
Previously, the term had been given considerable prominence by J B Priestley, in his Sunday “postcript” talks, which had also cemented it in the left-wing iconography, distinguishing it from the Tories’ unpopular “bosses’ war”, made for spivs, capitalists and profiteers.
The reason why it was a people’s war, of course, was because it was at one the first “total war”, which involved civilians as much as the military, and it was also an industrial war, where factory output had as much, if not greater influence on the outcome than military victories.
Because of the left-wing connotations, right wing authors (and Churchill himself) have tended to play down the people’s contribution in their post-war histories, as we saw in the Battle of Britain, where their vital role has largely been airbrushed out of the narrative.
But then to pretend that the term “People’s War” emerged as a reflection of the “humanity” by leaders such as Montgomery is utterly bizarre. If Bognador really believes that, then he has no claim to the title of historian. If he doesn’t, then his description is cynical beyond belief.
Either way, it is so wrong that it is the sort of thing that you could only find in the pages of the Daily Mail, the newspaper which, before the war, was a great fan of Hitler, with its proprietor Lord Rothermere supporting Oswald Mosley and the National Union of Fascists.
One can only reflect though, that if this is the sort of thing that Bognador was teaching Cameron at university, it is not surprising the prime minister has such a poor grasp of history.
