Winston Churchill died in 1965; he last held office in 1961. Last Sunday the Observer published the results of a survey by the pollsters, BritainThinks . Churchill topped the poll with an impressive 100% in the qualities that were determined necessary for leadership – ‘being decisive, ‘great communicator’ and ‘having integrity. Given that he left office in 1965, only those over 50 were alive at the time and only today’s 70+ would have any genuine experience of his impact as a politician. The demographic breakdown of voters was not revealed but it is safe to assume (particularly if it was an internet poll) that the majority of those voting fell into the 25 to 65 age group. Their judgement, we can assume, must have resulted from hearsay or the conclusions of some hagiography like the recent one from Boris Johnson.
The majority of their grandparents would have voted against Churchill in 1945. It is a credit to their safe , informed judgement that we have a welfare state today, despite the best efforts of recent Tory administrations to demolish it. They had sound reason to vote against Churchill; among which were;
- his disastrous leadership in the first World War as First Lord of the Admiralty when his bungling at Gallipoli resulted in the loss of 140 000 lives;
- his use of the military against striking coal miners at Tonypandy in 1910;
- his collusion with Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945 which sealed a dire fate for European countries including Poland, Hungary and Romania;
- he was in favour of letting Gandhi die and thwarted all efforts at sending relief to Bengal, resulting in the estimated death of 3 million Indians, whom he regarded as sub-human anyway;
- Some of his own colleagues saw Churchill as a brutal and vicious, imperialist racist. His deeds in India and across colonial Africa have been well documented by respected historians;
- He approved of the brutal thuggery by British forces in the Kenyan prison camps during that country’s struggle for independence;
- Churchill invented Iraq, a partitioned state, where disparate, indigenous nations were locked together;
- He was the Colonial Secretary who oversaw the offer of the Over-Promised lands to both the Arabs and the Jews;
- And then there was Dresden;
If Churchill is the gold standard for integrity in political leadership, then his successors need not harbour high aspiration. It was my first year teaching at a Tyrone secondary school in January 1965 when Churchill’s funeral took place; it was a cold miserable day and I remember the caretaker holding up his newspaper and telling me:
‘ It’ll be hot where he is going.’
A more mature reflection, I feel, than that of the participants in the Observer poll.
Legacy issues
We do not have to look far in order to find evidence of Mr Churchill’s legacy.
Kenya was a political disaster. General George Erskine and Alan Lennox-Boyd were personal friends of Mr Churchill. With all their resources, thousands of troops, artillery, armoured cars and jets, the British turned to infamous pseudogangsters led by a man called Ian Henderson in order to deal with the Kikuyu people:
“…a man whose name would become synonymous with brutality, not just in Kenya but elsewhere in Britain’s empire as well.” (Elkins 2005:54)
Between 1952 – 1960 thousands of lives were lost as a result of systematic brutality. Efforts were made to conceal the truth about events in Kenya and a few short years later, the British Army were on the streets in Ireland with armoured cars, helicopters and guns. The phrase,
“The natives are restless…”
was often heard in the north of Ireland.
There was a discussion on RTÉ today concerning Ibrahim Halawa, a citizen of this country. He is 20 years old and this will be his 849th day of detention, in Wadi el-Natrun prison. One participant in the discussion, discussed being tortured while being detained without trial. This tends to happen when electoral mandates are ignored and Human Rights are treated with contempt.
I remember the shock I felt when Frank Aiken attended the old blackguard’s funeral, but
realise it was the statesmanlike thing to do. Today nobody would would damn Aiken’s reputation for following protocol.
I imagine that, privately, Aiken might have looked on Churchill’s grave and repeated the
words of Aodhagan O Rathaille on the death of tyrannical landlord or his agent –
“Fe lar na leice seo curtha ta an ollphiast reamhar ………………..”
Good old fashioned Irish Republicanism bitter to the end.
Was Churchill perfect no however what he did in the second world war is an inspiration to me without him the jackboot of fascism might not have been prevented.