Category Archives: Britain

Arts, Books, Britain, First World War, History

Book Review: The Unknown Warrior

LITERARY REVIEW

THERE are some things that to all intents and purposes are impossible to reconcile. Nothing illustrates that more perfectly than the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey where war and closure are signified for all to see.

Alongside the graves of several monarchs lies the remains of an unidentified serviceman killed in the First World War.

More than one million British Empire soldiers were killed during the conflict and over half a million of them have no known grave.

The casket of the unknown warrior, lowered in place in the autumn of 1920, held a “somebody who was nobody to represent all the missing”, writes the historian and former RAF officer John Nichol.

Tracing the events of history, Nichol attempts to describe the reality of life in the trenches.

“The place stank of death,” wrote Anthony French, a young soldier in the Civil Service Rifles. Trenches were cleaved through corpses. “From the one side of one there hung a hand and a forearm.” Vivid and graphic literature that explains incisively as things were.

An account of French’s friendship with his comrade Bert Bradley brings home the unbearably touching narrative.

Bradley – a generous, witty, pipe-smoking man with a fine tenor voice – was killed during an offensive. “I saw Bert pause queerly in his stride and fall stiffly on his side and slither helplessly into a hole,” recalled French. Bert’s body was never recovered.

At the heart of this story is the extraordinary figure of a Church of England clergyman from Kent, Reverend David Railton.

At the beginning of the war, Mr Railton left his parish in Folkestone to become a military padre, serving on the Western Front, where he won a Military Cross for saving three men under fire. While attempting to give solace to men about to die, he conceived the idea for the Unknown Warrior.

Former airman Nichol chronicles the warrior’s repatriation like a bank heist in reverse: a crew of crack experts – ministers, clergy, undertakers, army and naval officers – worked together to put the valuables into a vault. Secrecy about the chosen body was paramount in order that, as the Dean of Westminster noted, any mourner “be encouraged to imagine that it is her own sacred dead upon whom this great honour has been bestowed”.

Yet the body also had to be “sufficiently identifiable to ensure that the King and the British people were not interring a blown-up French civilian or, perish the thought, a German, by mistake”. Four unidentified bodies were exhumed from the key battle areas of Aisne, Somme, Arras, and Ypres. One was chosen at random and brought back with barrels of French soil to cover his coffin. Nichol also talks to wives who lost husbands more recently in the Falkland Islands and Afghanistan, and draws on his own experience as a RAF navigator during the Gulf War. He very nearly joined the sombre roll-call himself when his Tornado fighter jet was shot down and he was captured, tortured, and paraded on television around the world by Iraqi forces.

Nichol’s writing style is as engaging as it is erudite. He is forensic in his research but never dispassionate, keeping his interest firmly fixed on the human story.

At the state funeral on November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the end of the war, the tone was one of unity in grief and sorrow, rather than military pomp. Westminster Abbey filled up with mourners, including relatives of the lost – mothers, fathers, wives, and children. Not everyone could be included: 20,000 applications were received for just 1,600 spaces.

One 12-year-old wrote to the authorities pleading to be let in, declaring: “The man in the coffin might be my daddy.”

In the Abbey, one group stood out in the ranks of the bereaved, notes Nichol: “A pitiful band of 99 mothers distinguished by an almost unfathomable depth of loss. They had been selected for seats of honour because each one had lost her husband and all her sons.”

– The Unknown Warrior by John Nichol is published by Simon & Schuster, 400pp

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Labour will be judged on deeds not words

LABOUR PARTY

THE CHANCELLOR, Rachel Reeves, with a rictus smile glued to her face at the Labour Party conference this week has sought to change the government’s central message from one of unremitting gloom to one of hope.

After weeks of relentless negativity over alleged black holes, broken Britain and “tough decisions” ahead, the Chancellor has laid out her vision for the promised land to come.

No one could argue with most of it. Who wouldn’t want a fairer society, great public services, better schools, higher growth, and a strong economy? However, Ms Reeves offered no discernible strategy for achieving these admirable goals. Nor did she touch on the price we will all have to pay.

Many will be surprised to hear her say there would be “no return to austerity”.

For millions of pensioners stripped of their winter fuel allowance it has already arrived and the Budget on October 30 is expected to be an assault on the finances of middle Britain.

The Chancellor claims she will not raise taxes on “working people” but what does that mean? Does she include those who have worked all their lives but are now retired? Those whose efforts and talents put them in the higher tax brackets? Entrepreneurs? Savers?

More likely she will deliver selective austerity, in which the private sector will be fleeced to ratchet up the pay and pensions of state employees.

The process has already begun with inflation-busting wage increases across the public sector which, incidentally, account for around half of the £22billion black hole supposedly left by the previous Tory government.

There will be a crackdown on welfare, fraud, and worklessness. The Government has said it will make special provisions in law for the most vulnerable.

The Trade Unions, far from being grateful, are ravenous for more. RMT chief Mick Lynch is demanding nothing less than “the complete organisation of the UK economy by trade unions”.

Mr Lynch wants to sweep away the Thatcher reforms and make it easier to shutdown workplaces and even entire industries if employers fail to meet demands on pay and conditions. Welcome back to the 1970s.

Other unions are coming in hard and fast. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said the recent 5.5 per cent pay award for nurses in England was not enough and must be improved.

By giving train drivers 15 per cent and junior doctors south of the Border 22 per cent, Ms Reeves has begun a wage spiral which could strangle any hope of economic growth.

Hardened by years of industrial trench warfare with the Tories, union barons are not about to bow down to a weak and inexperienced Labour government. On the contrary, they believe they can control it.

The constant talking down of the economy is having baleful effects. It is now hard fact that UK businesses are freezing both vital investment and the hiring of staff ahead of the Budget. There is an alarming collapse in business confidence.

Ms Reeves has said this would be “the most pro-business government we have ever seen”. But with the constant negativity and parlous state of the UK economy why would anyone invest in a country when its Chancellor has been saying for weeks that it is effectively a basket case?

This speech was an attempt to inject some positivity into the Labour narrative, but she will be judged by her deeds, not her words.

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Starmer needs to recalibrate the mood

LABOUR PARTY

ELECTED to office less than three months ago, the Labour Party has begun its annual conference – this year in Liverpool – already weighed down by incumbency: rows over gifts from wealthy party donors and tickets to football games as well as rifts about Keir Starmer’s chief of staff’s pay are feeding into the public disquiet. These come amidst the burden of government in difficult economic circumstances. Coupled with the low public trust and the needless surplus of gloom, the political honeymoon period for Labour is well and truly over. We knew change was high up on the political agenda for Labour, but since day one of government it has set out with the explicit objective of dampening expectations of how soon change might come. The gloom is palpable.

There is a degree of urgency for Starmer to recalibrate the mood with a sense of optimism and purpose. He needs to give the country reasons to be glad of a Labour government in ways that go beyond relief at no longer being governed by Tory rule. New governments often come to power blaming the last for what it has inherited. The PM has given the nation an unvarnished account of the dismal legacy left for Labour; a bleak audit that covers a record of political and financial maladministration.

Conservative ministers, driven by ideological fanaticism and self-serving cynicism, squandered energy and vital resources on ill-conceived, unworkable policies. Public services were starved of the means by which they could effectively operate. With that in mind, it is easy to see that Sir Keir has a difficult job because the country is in a dire mess. Putting things right will take time. Nevertheless, that morose message has been bitterly soured by a performance of fiscal discipline, delivered without a hint of uplifting accompaniment.

The prime minister says things will get worse before they get better. His chancellor, Rachel Reeves, cites “black holes” in the budget, withdraws winter fuel payments for all but the poorest pensioners, and continually pledges that there is more pain to come. Ms Reeves’ argument is that government departments under the Conservatives overspent by £22bn in the budget and that deep cuts are needed to compensate. This is a self-imposed restriction that stems from ill-advised fiscal rules. The force of that constraint, and the zeal with which it is applied as austerity across Whitehall, is also a matter of political choice.

The government’s strategists argue that adherence to Tory spending limits was a “non-negotiable” condition of persuading the public that Labour could be trusted on the economy. Possibly, possibly not. There is no way to test the counterfactual scenario, where Ms Reeves could have fought the election with a wider range of tax-raising options still open. However, the decision to lean into unpopularity so hard, so fast, and without a countervailing narrative of hope looks like very poor strategic judgment.

Labour’s election manifesto contained plenty of reasons to expect a substantial departure from a grim status quo. A marked progressive shift was promised in the areas of workers’ rights, a robust commitment to net zero, improved relations with the rest of Europe and, perhaps most significantly, readiness to embrace a more interventionist model of economic management, including public ownership of utility companies.

The Starmerite script contains rather too much fiscal conservatism, but the hope on the left of the party is that there is a social democratic framework at its core. That would express the opposite of the Tory conviction that government’s main function is to facilitate market supremacy and then get out of the way. Many Labour MPs, activists, and Labour supporting people in the country will feel unsure which of the two strands – cringing continuity or bold departure – will dominate. Keir Starmer’s task is to answer in terms that give hope of meaningful change to come.

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