Don’t forget lesson of the Thirties (From The Northern Echo)

Don’t forget lesson of the Thirties

12:08pm Tuesday 27th July 2010 in

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THIS year marks the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. I do hope our dear Prime Minister mugs up on the history of that momentous struggle before the celebrations of our victory really get going.

The other day in the US he said we are the junior partner in an alliance in which America is senior “just as we were when fighting the war in 1940.” For David Cameron’s information, this so-called “senior partner” did not even enter the war until the end of 1941.

I’ve been reading about the decade that preceded the Battle of Britain and the facts that emerge are truly shocking: the spinelessness of the European democracies among which we were the worst offender. Even the French government was in favour of attacking Hitler when he entered the Rhineland with a handful of ceremonial troops in 1936.

But we sacked our ambassador in Berlin who upset Hitler by reporting that concentration camps had been set up and that storm-troopers were beating people to death in the streets. A new ambassador was appointed and ordered to keep his mouth shut.

Our Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, was in favour of scrapping the RAF as useless in modern warfare. He said: “The Bomber will always get through.” Tell it to Park and Dowding!

Germany was rearming furiously and we helped by selling them 118 Merlin aero engines.

When Churchill objected, Chamberlain said any attempt to stop the sale would amount to an interference with free trade.

I don’t think the citizens of London’s East End, of Hull, Liverpool and Coventry would have been too concerned about stopping trade with the Nazis – if this had reduced the number of German bombers overhead.

When Churchill was being mentioned as the best man to head our national defence, Baldwin refused, saying, appeasingly: “If I appoint Winston, Hitler will be offended.”

In Mayfair, fashionable ladies were wearing swastikas on their bracelets and bright young men were parting their hair like Uncle Adolf. There was a prominent Nazi sympathiser in Buckingham Palace, King Edward VIII, who subsequently went off to Germany on his honeymoon with that woman and raised his arm in “Sieg Heils” in the street.

Lloyd-George described Hitler as “the most impressive man in Europe”. And Lloyd- George, Butler and Halifax were still anxious to sue for peace with Hitler even after the Battle of Britain was won.

It is not an exaggeration to describe Baldwin as a traitor. In 1934, he reluctantly promised Parliament that we would match Germany in aircraft production. When, two years later in the Commons, Churchill cornered him about why this had not been done, Baldwin replied: “I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.” Talk about party before country.

It was appeasement then; it is appeasement now. The immediate danger is nuclear proliferation, beginning in North Korea, Pakistan and Iran and spreading to innumerable terrorist groups anywhere in the world.

Countless authorities have warned that it is not a question of “if” we might come under nuclear attack from one of these groups, but when. The response of statesmen in the democracies in the Christian West is to do nothing. It is all too difficult, they say. As they did in the Thirties, they opt for appeasement.

But there is a huge battle coming…

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.