VE Day

It’s VE Day today. There was a socially distanced street party where we live, gardens and windows covered in Union Jack bunting, from one house you could hear Vera Lynn being played loudly. As I drove out to queue up at the supermarket I could see the turnout was pretty decent.

I wasn’t joining in because I rarely do on these sort of occasions. They always make me a little uneasy, and seem to me to have a cartoon feel. I don’t have a problem with people marking the occasion, it’s right that we should remember, and I’ll buy a poppy every year. But the celebratory events with the flags don’t interest me so much, and I wanted to get some thoughts down to articulate why. It’s a bit political, a bit historical, and a bit personal.

Like millions of people in this country, I have ancestors who were called up during the World Wars. If you look at the war memorial in my home village, two of my great Uncles are engraved on there, and with it being a small community, I’m sure that many of the other names listed would have been their friends and neighbours. Some of them would certainly have had descendants among my own school friends as we grew up.

I also had a grandad who served during the Second World War. He left behind a new wife and baby daughter to sign up in 1940. The irony is he needn’t have gone at all. He worked on the railways which was classed as a vital industry but apparently “fell out with his boss” (I’ll probably never know the full story) and so went off to war. He didn’t see his daughter again until she was 6.

If such a thing is possible, my grandad had a ‘good war’. He was promoted, came back with a number of medals, and had the opportunity to stay on though he chose not to because of his family. He’d done his bit. He died when I was 10 so I never really had the understanding to ask him about any of this, it’s all been pieced together from family recollections.

So that’s my link with what’s being marked today, no more or less significant than almost everyone in my generation. Which means I have no more or less of a stake in what’s being commemorated than most people in our street. So why doesn’t it interest me?

The starting point is probably the desire from some to be conspicuously seen to be celebrating the hardest. To put it another way, the sort of public figures who make the biggest show of marking these sorts of historical commemorations are the types who spend the time in between bemoaning everything that’s wrong with the country. Media pundits, a certain breed of celebrity, any front bench Conservative politician of the last few decades. The flag must be waved, and must be seen to be waved — that is what it means to be patriotic. And every time we join in with this, their worldview is legitimised a little more. I don’t know how or when the right managed to seize control of this narrative, but there’s no doubting that they have.

Which means, by association, that any failure to join in is somehow unpatriotic, that you don’t sufficiently love or want the best for the country. This is nonsense — of course I want us to do well, I live here and so do my family. There’s nothing to be gained from having a weak economy and community around me, or lack of opportunities for my son. But a set of bunting and a lyric sheet to help you sing along to the bits of “We’ll meet again” that aren’t the chorus isn’t going to make that happen. If the fight was really about defending our freedom, doesn’t that include the freedom to question the status quo?

Another line of argument when you challenge these events is that somehow you don’t understand or respect history, that you’re not paying sufficient dues to those who saved us from the Nazi menace. It’s true I’m glad we won, any right thinking person would say the same. But for too many people, their history book ends on VE Day — we won, end of story.

I flatter myself that I do have a decent understanding of 20th Century British History. Fast forward a few weeks past the end of the war and the British public — the ones who actually came through the war, not the descendants who claim to represent them — delivered a Labour landslide. This was the programme that they wanted for their country’s future, not the right wing worldview promoted by their most raucous cheerleaders today. My grandad was among the Labour supporters that day and I can only imagine his reaction to someone like Boris Johnson speaking for the nation to praise his generation’s sacrifice. Would he have been unpatriotic to criticise?

The poster boy for such events is of course Winston Churchill. Whatever your political standpoint, and despite his chequered history prior to 1939, it’s difficult to argue that he wasn’t the right man to lead Britain during the conflict, we were lucky to have him. Yet it’s a curious fact that Churchill stood in three General Elections in the six years after the war, and never once managed to poll the most votes. He also made multiple speeches in the late 1940’s promoting the idea of Britain playing a full part in a “United Europe”, to the extent that Vernon Bogdanor once wrote that this “would get him expelled from the Conservative Party today.”

It was probably inevitable that we’d have to address the B word. The Venn diagram of those showing most enthusiasm for today and those who voted Leave in 2016 is probably fairly close to a circle. We won, end of story. But it really isn’t, because life will keep happening in the same way that it continued after 1945, and once more we’ll all have to live with the consequences. One of the most effective lines from the Leave campaign was that ‘we didn’t need the EU to defeat Germany’. Well no we didn’t, but we did need a lot of help from the USA. And the Commonwealth. We had European allies too. I don’t see the flags from countries that worked with us represented on VE Day, is it unpatriotic to point this out because they don’t fit the approved version of events?

Victory isn’t a zero sum game, the triumph of good vs evil. This week the Guardian asked some veterans how they would be marking the day in light of the COVID situation. One recalled how the day after the war ended he was visiting the house of a German family he had befriended. Their son entered in a German uniform, and they shared drinks. This isn’t the sort of detail that gets captured in the rush to venerate our brave boys.

This year’s VE Day is happening in the middle of the lockdown when life has been turned on its head. One of the elements of that is the rocketing death rate in care homes because we haven’t provided the staff there with adequate equipment. Much of this is due to the cost cutting policies enacted in recent years by successive governments, the ones who do most to celebrate our veterans even while they rip up what’s left of the post-war world settlement they built. The irony being that some of those very veterans will inevitably be among the death toll that continues to rise. Many of them will have been cared for by immigrants, taking the low paid jobs much as they did after the war when we invited them because we needed their help to rebuild. But again that’s too often turned on its head by the keepers of the patriotic flame — ‘because they’re here the country is in a state’, rather than they came here because the country was in a state.

So how should we mark the event? With a little dignity I would hope, and not like the dancing girls in 1940's uniform I saw a couple of years ago, jiving away to a vaguely house music backing track to promote the poppy appeal. I don’t really want to spend the 80th anniversary with a ride on the White Cliffs of Dover log flume at Alton Towers, with 10% of each ticket sale going to Help for Heroes.

A few years back I got off the train on the way to work to find some soldiers in First World War Uniforms on the platform. Up the escalators to the concourse, and there were more of them there. Not speaking, but simply standing and when approached, handing out the names of people that had been killed during the Battle of the Somme. I was surprised by how moving I found it, and the feeling that this time we’d got it right. It doesn’t make for jolly pictures on the news, and it doesn’t give Little Englanders a chance to parade a parody version of Britishness that probably never existed, but it’s a fitting type of tribute.