William Tyler
Political Britain Puts its Head in the Sand: 1933-1938
William Tyler - Political Britain Puts its Head in the Sand: 1933-1938
- Hello everyone, for this final talk about the interwar years in Britain. If I look a little bit sort of stressed, it’s because I’ve been to the AGM of our flats, which began at half past 10, and I actually got home at half past three. Those of you live in flats know that these AGMs can be, what’s the word? Exhausting. So that’s one thing. Now, there’s a couple of more things I want to say. One is that on Wednesday of this week, Trudy and I are doing a session together as a discussion looking at antisemitism today, and the question of why there is antisemitism today in the light of the Holocaust of the mid 20th century. I may not be worth listening to on that, but Trudy will certainly be worth listening to. And so I encourage you, all those of you with an interest, to tune in on Wednesday. After today there’s a break and I come back on the 16th of October to do a session in a course on South Africa, where I shall be talking about the Zulu War. And then the following day, on the Tuesday, not the following week, on the Tuesday, I’m doing a session on the Boer War. And both are around the concept of imperialism; imperialism and its wars. Obviously, against the Zulu, it’s against a native people; against the Boers, it’s against another European people. And I hope those will be of interest. They’re subjects that very often aren’t studied, particularly the Zulu war, though everyone may remember the film “Zulu.” Now, that’s not what I’m talking about today. I’m talking about the 1930s.
And I wanted to begin by saying the thirties actually began, and all the Americans listening can tell me when the thirties began in Britain, they began on the 29th of October, 1929; when the New York Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Market collapsed and caused a tsunami right across the world global economy, hitting Britain as well as elsewhere. In the book that I’ve been using, “Our History of the 20th Century,” with original diary entries and so on. This is not a diary entry, it’s a bit of editorial. And Elborough writes in this editorial, referring to the stock market crash of the 29th of October 29th, “America itself was plunged into the Great Depression and more than 15 million Americans, a quarter of all wage earning workers, were unemployed in the opening years of the 1930s.” Now, we shall be doing a course with Lockdown later in the year about America and the 20th century, and I will be talking a great deal about the stock market crash and about how Roosevelt attempted with the New Deal to resolve the problem of the unemployed. A fascinating study, I think, and I’m looking forward to doing that. but Elborough goes on to say this: “These economic conditions open the way in Germany, which also suffered with rampant inflation and an unemployed population of 7 million. It led to the emergence of a new leader: Hitler.” And a new ideology: Nazism. it’s interesting, of course it’s obvious that economic issues intertwined with political issues, in the same way that geographical issues intertwine with historical issues. And you could take that story on and on.
I’m suggesting that in terms of Britain, as was the wider world, and of course the United States, the stock market crash of 1929, the ripples went out and affected the 1930s. In Britain it led, as in the States, to the Great Depression. In Germany, as I just read, it led to the rise of Hitler and of Nazism. An easy answer, so it was thought, to a difficult question. This, in turn, led ultimately to the failure of the 1929 Labour government in Britain. You may remember from past talks that the first Labour government, which lasted a matter of months, was in 1924. But in 1929, they came back as a minority government. And they were committed to a number of social changes. And that sort of all good well, really, in terms of the British situation. Unfortunately, they had to deal with the fallout of the stock market crash. And as a result of that, there were disagreements on how to deal with the economic crisis in Britain. In 1931, the government’s advisors advised that the following year, they would be 120 million pounds in debt. Now, that to us, today, sounds small change; then it didn’t. And the government said, or that is to say the majority of the Labour government, but a thin majority, led by the Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald, and his chancellor, Philip Snowden, said, look, we’ve got to cut government expenditure and we’ve got to raise taxes so that we don’t hit the wall of 120 million deficit and rising. But a significant group in the cabinet, a significant minority led by Arthur Henderson said, no, no, that goes back on everything we’ve said. We can’t do that. There are alternative ways of looking at it.
Well, the government fell apart as a result of that, in 1931. MacDonald was supported by 10 members of cabinet, but he was opposed by nine, nine members of cabinet led by Arthur Henderson. The outcome was: MacDonald continued as Prime Minister, not now of a Labour government, but of a national government in which conservatives and liberals also served. In other words, the crisis was of such a nature, that it felt that the only way to deal with it was to form a national government. The same has happened when Cameron became Prime Minister. It seems a long time ago now, but not very long ago. When Cameron became Prime Minister for the first time, he did so in a coalition; a national government, it’s all three parties. A coalition is between two parties. He became Prime Minister in a coalition with the liberals in order to deal with the financial problems. Now here is the same thing happening, except this is a national government: conservative, Labour and liberal. It was led by MacDonald, simply because the Labour party had won the previous election. And it’s a poisoned chalice to accept the job in this moment of crisis. So MacDonald continues as Prime Minister, now of the national government in 1931, and Stanley Baldwin, who is the conservative party leader, serves as Deputy Prime Minister. So it’s genuinely a national government. The oppositions of the national government is led in the House of Commons by Arthur Henderson, the Labour cabinet minister who had opposed MacDonald. It’s at this point that many people in the Labour Party, particularly on the left, accused MacDonald of being a class traitor. I think I mentioned last time that MacDonald’s background was a very, very lowly one.
He’d been born out of wedlock and his mother was desperately short of money. And when he became Prime Minister, he ate downstairs. Because if he ate downstairs and not in his private flat, the government paid for his meals. He didn’t actually have enough money. MacDonald’s life, to me, appears to be a tragedy. That’s another story for another time. Suffice it to say, that the outcome of the crash in New York in 29 lead to the collapse of this minority, but fairly sound, Labour government in 1931, which had gone on for two years; it collapsed and we have a national government. I suppose politically, you could say that Britain found itself in choppy waters and then now all of you who aren’t British are saying, oh, well what a political understatement that is. And perhaps it is; we were in choppy waters. But we were in choppy waters, not only at home because of the depression, and for Americans or Canadians or wherever you come from. Think about the Great Depression 1930s. Not only are we in a crisis over that, but we have an additional crisis which America did not face. And our additional crisis from 1933 onwards is the fact that Hitler is in power in Germany. At that time, we needed, required, dynamic political leadership. Personally, I think we always require dynamic political leadership. And we had nothing of the sort. How would you describe the three Prime Ministers?
Stanley Baldwin, conservative, later, Neville Chamberlain, conservative, and Ramsey MacDonald. I suppose if I use a football, in American terms, a soccer analogy, none of them would be in the first 11. They’re not out of the top drawer, intellectually. They have difficulty in dealing with it. Now you could argue that anybody in this situation would have difficulty dealing with it. But if you take America as a guideline, it’s true that Roosevelt had difficulty dealing with it. But he had a plan, the New Deal, and he pushed it through. And although in the last analysis it didn’t work, there were more people unemployed by 1940 in America than when the New Deal started under Roosevelt, but Roosevelt had something else. Roosevelt had charisma. And his fireside chats over the radio, like Churchill’s during the war, gave people a lift. People felt this was a man who knew what he was doing. People did not have that feeling in Britain. Andrew Marr, in the book I’ve been using, “The Making of Modern Britain,” writes this about our interwar political leadership: He writes, “British socialism,” the Labour Party, “British socialism between the wars had no gods and precious few heroes. If only, people say, Labour had produced a great early speaker who could have dominated parliament and electrified large crowds.” that is Roosevelt. “If only there had been one truly brave and effective leader, how different the politics might have been.” In other words, not just MacDonald but all the others in the Labour Party cabinet and in the Tory party cabinet and also with Baldwin and Chamberlain.
These men are, the situation they faced, let’s put it like that. The situation they faced was too much for these men. Well, I’d said I’d just been to an annual general meeting of the flats and I’m afraid the issues were too much for our managing agent. She was visibly wilting by the end of four or five hours. And these men wilted in front of this double whammy; the problem of the depression, the unemployed and the rising problem of worry in Europe. In Britain, most people chose to ignore the problem of Germany, saying, it’s nothing to do with us. We could never go to war again. Nobody would be as stupid as to do that. So let’s try and concentrate on our own lives. So the Labour Party is split. Its leadership is split. MacDonald is really, I think personally, a broken man. Baldwin is no one’s answer to a lively, electrifying leader. But what happened was in 1935, the Prime Ministership in the national government moved from MacDonald-Labor to Baldwin-conservative. Why? Because frankly, the job had broken MacDonald. The polite way of saying it was, he was a mental and physical decline. His doctors were very worried about him continuing in post. He also realised he couldn’t continue. He resigned after the Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1935 of George the fifth and handed over to Baldwin. Not because Baldwin appeared to be the dynamic leader that MacDonald had failed to be, but he appeared to be in command of all his faculties. This is rather a difficult issue with all the Americans listening to me tonight. When we are faced, in America at the moment, with two potential candidates whose physical and mental faculties.
Or certainly, mental faculties, in Biden’s case physical as well, are clear for all to see. And that is a problem in democracies. It shouldn’t be a problem. In the past, when lecturing about advantages of democracies over monarchies, one of the pluses for democracies is you can elect people every so many years, whatever it might be in your own country, and make sure you elect someone who’s honest, but more than that, and capable, but more than that who at least is physically and mentally fit to do it. Whereas in a monarchy, you just take the next eldest son who might be a gibbering idiot and you are landed with them. And history is full of these people. Those who know a lot of history, just think Charles II, the last Hapsburg king of Spain. I mean, he was a very, very sad figure indeed. But here, we haven’t got people, all of them, who are in a sense like Biden or Trump, but we do have with MacDonald, or you might say MacDonald is more like Biden. MacDonald is losing his grip, physically. He can’t do the job anymore. And mentally he’s losing it. He’s losing it in cabinet. But the economic problems don’t go away. Not only do the economic problems not go away, but there are growing political problems at home as well as abroad. It is clear in the early thirties, mid thirties, that the democracies are in trouble economically. We know that, you all know that. But some people sought easy solutions. And the easy solutions post 1917 had been a communist takeover. And you remember that when I’ve been speaking about the 1920s for example, we talked about the threat of communism in Britain, but it doesn’t come to anything. It peters out. But what doesn’t peter out in Britain, okay, there are communists, but they’re are no threat to the running of the country. But what becomes a threat is the rising number of fascists. Now, I’m always very careful.
When I’m talking about fascism, I want you to think about Mussolini and Italian fascism. What happened in Germany is Nazism. Now, I’ve not got time to go into that, but many of you know that there are different, although Nazism is fascism, there are distinct differences between German Nazism and Spanish or Italian fascism, or the homegrown fascists in Britain. They modelled themselves in Britain, not on Hitler’s Germany, but on Mussolini’s Italy. And they had what the Democratic parties didn’t have: a charismatic leader, Oswald Mosley. Well, Baldwin wasn’t as stupid, or shall we say, naive as some of his critics pretended that he was. This is Ian Dale’s book on Prime Ministers, and I wanted to read this if I may. If I had the book marked in the right place. Here it is. “In his final five years in government, that is from 1932, Stanley Baldwin’s interest in an influence upon foreign policy cannot be doubted. He read ‘Mein Kampf,’” he read “Mein Kampf.” I don’t know whether Roosevelt read “Mein Kampf.” Maybe somebody can tell me, but I doubt anyone else in the British cabinet or the American cabinet read “Mein Kampf.” So don’t dismiss Baldwin. He isn’t that stupid. “He read ‘Mein Kampf,’ but he remained uncertain what, in practise, Hitler wanted. There seemed a strong possibility that Hitler’s ambitions might be confined to reunifying the German race.” In other words, the Germans outside of Germany within Europe. E.G, for example, Germans that are in Poland, Germans in Austria, and so on and so forth, Germans in Czechoslovakia. I’ll finish the reading. “There seemed a strong possibility that his ambitions might be confined to reunifying the German race. Long terms, his ambitions lay in Eastern Europe.”
Well, that’s what “Mein Kampf” says. He saw the enemy as Russia. And we know he thought that he could come to a rapprochement with Britain, because Britain was as anti Marxist, therefore anti-Soviet Union, as was Germany. But what he didn’t take into account and totally misread, that when push came to shove, Britain was decidedly anti-authoritarianism, whether the left in Moscow or the right in Berlin. So a little word about homegrown fascism. Somebody asked me last week would I speak about it? And I said, well, I would speak about it this week because this is the era in which it becomes relevant. As the fear of communism, or communist revolution in Britain, faded, remember, the general strike had no push for a political change, a revolution. It was all about decent wages and decent contracts for workers. As the fear of communist revolution died at the end of the 1920s, what happened was those looking for what I would call a simple solution began to look at Italy. Remember, Hitler doesn’t come to power until 33. They look at Italy, and they think, well, maybe there’s something in this fascism of Mussolini. And so, fascism emerges here in Britain. Mosley leads it, but Mosley is a really odd ball, or a really strange man. To start with, he was a member of the establishment. He was married to the daughter of Lord Curzon, the former Vice Roy of India. George the fifth and Queen Mary attended his wedding to this young lady. She died in 1933. In 1918, Mosley became a conservative member of Parliament with every hope, he was a bit like Boris Johnson. He thought that everyone would recognise how brilliant he was and he would soon become leader of the Conservative Party. He did not.
And in 1931, he crossed the floor to join that rump of the Labour Party. He joined the Labour Party. And as Andrew Marr writes, he writes this: “When Mosley first moved from the conservatives to the Labour, he horrified most of his friends.” He expected supporting MacDonald, to replace MacDonald as Labour leader. So this is like Johnson; it’s all about him as a potential conservative leader, now as a potential Labour leader. But the Labour Party were no more willing to promote Mosley, than were the conservatives to leadership. And in due course, he left Labour in the same year that he joined Labour, and now it is hubris gone mad. He now creates a new party called, “the New Party” in 1931. Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor, called him a “Pocket Mussolini.” Remember what I said about copying Italian fascism, not German Nazism; a pocket Mussolini. In 1932, he went the whole way and he turned his political party into the British Union of Fascists. No playing around with words. The British Union of Fascists. In 1936, he married a woman, a fascist, from the extraordinary family of the Mitfords. This is Diana Mitford. For our purposes, what is interesting is, where did he marry her? In Westminster Abbey? No. Well, he couldn’t because he’s a divorcee. Sorry, no, no, sorry. He couldn’t because they wouldn’t allow him to. However, he married outside Britain. He married in Berlin, in the home of Joseph Goebbels. What? What? Yeah. Mosley married, for the second time, Diana Mitford in Goebbel’s private house in Berlin. Stanley Baldwin, the conservative leader at the time said, “Mosley is a cad and a wrong ‘un.”
The phrase, “a wrong 'un” has sort of deep meaning in Britain. “A wrong 'un” means really, it’s a polite way of saying this is a devil, an appalling man. He’s a wrong 'un. He doesn’t ring true. In 1940, Churchill had him arrested, but he was no threat, really. He was released in 43. He died in 1980, largely forgotten by the younger generation. And fascism, British style, didn’t get anywhere. Well, it got onto the streets in the 1930s. This is an account of a fascist meeting in the county of Kent. And it reads like this: “Canterbury,” the capital of the county of Kent, “Canterbury had its dose of fascism today. Mosley at the Forester’s Hall. The Keables and all our Peacemaker group, except David, with a few reinforcements from the agricultural college at Wye and from people at Sandwich, went down as an opposition body. But three quarters of Mosley’s audience was in opposition to it. This led to a few scuffles with his gangster stewards, grimacing at every interrupter as if they were all dictators already. To a couple of ejections and a blow on the head from a baton for one young fellow. Mosley’s speech was a very clever one, in fact beautifully twisted. But when he had got his agricultural policy put across, he was clearly out to provoke bad feeling and make excuses for abuse and shouting and whipping up his own followers’ enthusiasm. He never hesitated to call an interrupter a bonehead, a village idiot, a puppet who was preventing this large and intelligent audience from listening to him. Two thirds must have been boneheads, as they clearly did not like him. Trickiness is Mosley’s greatest virtue. He’s not a magnetic personality, even striding down Canterbury’s peaceful high street with his bodyguards.”
So said an observer of the fascist meeting of the British Union of Fascists in 1937 in the city of Canterbury. This is a more illuminating quotation. This is from a man called Chips Channon, who many of you will have heard of, who kept diaries. He’s a gossip. And not a pleasant man, but he’s a gossip. But he gossips and puts down what he hears. And on the 5th of December, 37, Channon writes, “I had a long conversation with Lord Halifax about Germany and his recent visit.” Later, Halifax is to become, sorry, become foreign secretary and later still, the one man opposing Churchill’s election as Prime Minister in 1940. Halifax is another interesting creature. “I had a long conversation,” says Channon, “With Lord Halifax about Germany and his recent visit to Germany.” That was a private visit, not a government visit. “He described Hitler’s appearance, his khaki shirt, black breaches and patent leather evening shoes. He told me he liked all the Nazi leaders, even girls, and he was much impressed, interested and amused by the visit.” How can you say you were amused by a visit to Nazi Germany in 1937? For goodness sake. “He thinks the regime absolutely fantastic, perhaps even too fantastic to be taken seriously. But he’s very glad he went and thinks good will come of it. I was riveted by all he said and reluctant to let him go.” Thank every angel in the sky that Halifax never became our Prime Minister in May, 1940. I’m convinced personally, you don’t have to agree, but I am convinced that he would’ve sought a deal with Hitler. Many people think he would’ve agreed, even, to have allowed Jews to be sent to extermination camps in Germany. Others think that might have been the point at which he said he wouldn’t follow German orders. And it mattered little to Hitler, because he had Oswald Mosley as it were, that he could pop back into number 10 Downing Street. But I remain very worried and dubious about Halifax. Thank God we never had to live through it to find out, because Churchill became Prime Minister on the 10th of May, 1940, and not Halifax.
It’s true that many in the British establishment were favourably inclined to Hitler. It’s also true, as British Jews know, that many in the establishment were antisemitic. The establishment was far more pro-German, pro-Nazi and antisemitic. Of the population as a whole, I think it’s probably true. I can’t prove that, but I think that’s true. I’ve got a quotation here, which I’m just going to share and it’s this one. This is a gentleman called John Bailey who kept a set of diaries. And in 1930, that’s before Hitler comes to power, he writes, “I lunch with Lady Vera Herbert, where Sir and Lady Isabella Howard, Lord and Lady and Lady Bouclear. Lady Isabella spoke of the wonderful administrative achievements of Mussolini. Land that was boggled desert now growing wheat, total disappearance of beggars from Naples, et cetera.” There was a pro fascist view in the English establishment, linked to a pro-German view, not least in the royal family. And an antisemitic view as well, which in hindsight, should of caused a lot of people to begin to panic about where we were going. And I want, one more thing I was going to share. This is a lady called Blanche Dugdale. She’s a society lady. And she wrote in her diary, 11th of July, 1938, five years after Hitler came to power, she went in her diary, “Even Jimmy de Rothschild, with all the staff at the Ritz bowing and running to serve him, told me with panic that on the golf course at Hoy Lake,” which is up in the north of England, “on the golf course at Hoy Lake this morning, they found a swastika and ‘down with Jews’ painted on a putting green.” Antisemitism, pro-Nazis, pro-Hitler is alive of well in the Britain of the late 1930s. In English history, British history, that tends to be brushed aside and instead, rises Churchill.
But the truth? But the truth is that had Halifax have become Prime Minister, a deal would’ve been struck. And British antisemitism would’ve today be able to be compared, maybe, to French antisemitism or Italian antisemitism. Britains might well argue, oh, it wouldn’t have been like that here. But if you look at the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, which were occupied by the Nazis during the war, there was distinct anti-Semitism. And of course, some Jews were hidden by Guernsey and Jersey men, that’s true, but others had the finger pointed at them. This is not a comfortable history as we look back. I’m not saying that there was a majority that was in favour of Hitler, of course not. But I am saying there was a significant powerful minority at the top of British society, which was pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic. And this, in my opinion, was the real cause of the constitutional crisis that Stanley Baldwin faced on the death of King George the fifth. In 1936, King George is succeeded by his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, Edward, later Edward the eighth, and later still the Duke of Windsor. Edward was a flashy but shallow character with frankly, quite dubious friends. Not only German friends, but British friends. He’s a sad figure. Before his father died, he was seeking to marry an American twice divorcee. Well, she was divorced once, but in order to marry him, she would have to divorce a second time. So, a second divorce. Wallis Simpson. Now, it is true that in the Britain of the late 1930s, divorce was seen as something, by the middle classes in particular, as something quite not right about it. I remember at a family gathering, we used to have big family gatherings in the 1950s in my home city of Bristol. And I remember as a child asking, naively, “Where’s Uncle John?” “William, shush! We don’t mention Uncle John.”
And I thought, why don’t we mention him? He was nice. I found out later, he’d got divorced and he was cut out by the family. And the bigger British family wanted to cut him out. On the other hand, it was a very gender related thing. Men were keen to get rid of him, while women were divided. Many women say, oh, he’s so lovely. He’s beautiful, he’s wonderful. Oh, he can’t be anything wrong. He was infatuated by Mrs. Simpson. We know for real, because his private secretary tells us on record. He kept a loaded pistol under his pillow whilst he waited for Mrs. Simpson to tell him whether he would marry her or not. And he said that if he didn’t, he would blow his brains out. He was totally infatuated by her. She, on the other hand, was not infatuated by him. She remained, even after marriage, in love with her second husband, Mr. Simpson. We know that because she actually wrote a letter to her ex-husband, whilst on honeymoon with Edward, saying that he remained her greatest love. What she was doing was trying to get access to the top of British society and to do so by flirting with the Prince of Wales. She never wanted it to go as far as a proposal of marriage. She knew jolly well the British establishment would not accept it. So the easy solution to all of this is to say that Edward did not marry Mrs. Simpson. A, because she was a twice divorcee. And secondly, because there was some anti-American feeling as well, but that’s not true. I don’t believe that for a minute. It was handy for Baldwin. The real reason is, they couldn’t trust him.
She was conducting an affair with the German Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, later Hitler’s foreign minister. And if you say, oh, that was just gossip, there are books written which suggests that the gossip was really well based. I know, because I was giving a lecture in local history in the village of Stanstead, outside Stanstead airport in Britain. And I was talking about the abdication. And a lady came up to me afterwards, a very elderly lady came up to me, and this is about 30 years ago and said, oh, Mr. Tyler, I know he was having an affair. I know von Ribbentrop was having an affair, because he used to stay in the house, the big house where I was a maid. And I know what went on between him and Mrs. Simpson. I don’t think there’s any doubt, to be honest. So she was two timing Edward, maybe even more. Well there were probably more, she was meant to be having an affair with a Ford factory manager from Dagenham in South Essex. As we used to say, she put it about a bit. But Edward was totally infatuated. She wasn’t. And then she got caught, because he threatened to kill himself. And she knew that if he did, everybody in the world would blame her for the death. And she said, I can’t be responsible for the death of the King of England. She said, yes, but with no love. They never did. And when he was dying, she never bothered with him. It’s a terrible story. In a sense, you can say they deserved each other. But that doesn’t get us any further. What gets us further, let me read you this piece, which certainly moves the discussion on. This is Chips Channon in his diary, again. An insider, an unpleasant insider, but a man who knew what was going on. He put in his diary on the 9th of June, 1935, before George was there, “Much gossip about the Prince of Wales’s alleged Nazi leanings. He has alleged to have been influenced by Emerald Cunard of the shipping line, who is rather apprise with Herr Ribbentrop through Mrs. Simpson. He has just made an extraordinary speech to the British Legion,” this is Prince of Wales, Edward, “advocating friendship with Germany. It’s only a gesture, but a gesture that may be taken seriously in Germany and elsewhere.”
The talk at the top of British society was that this man could not be trusted. Now, Wallis Simpson was far more fascist than Edward. Edward was pro-German and leaning towards fascism, but he was pushed the whole way by Mrs. Simpson. And I don’t need to tell you that they spent part of their honeymoon with Hitler, at Berchtesgaden. And that during the course of the war, they were watched by both the British and American Secret Services. Roosevelt gave strict orders that when Mrs. Simpson came shopping in New York, when she and her husband were with the governor and the governor’s wife in Bermuda, and she used to go off for a fortnight shopping in New York, He gave strict orders that she must be followed by the FBI, the whole way. They did not trust her. But that is to say, Roosevelt didn’t trust her to be passing on messages to Germany. He was forced into abdication. Baldwin basically gave him no choice. You abdicate, sir, or I resign. And let me inform you that the Labour leader will not take office either. Go. It was a national government still, but they could have swapped to a Labour Prime Minister, nobody would take it. The only person who made a speech in his favour, really, in the House of Commons was Winston Churchill, who was a friend. And later, he regretted it. But he wasn’t on the inside of all this information, which Baldwin, as Prime Minister, was. They were very worried indeed, about Edward. He went and his younger brother Albert, took the title King George VI and life went on, as though there’d never been a crisis.
I rather criticised the interwar Prime Ministers. But I have to say that Baldwin absolutely rose to the issue over the abdication crisis. God had helped us if we landed up in 1940 with Edward as king and Halifax as Prime Minister. It just simply doesn’t bear thinking about. Now, the fact that we got rid of a king basically in 24 hours, is important for those who think that a king can’t be got rid of. The king is not a constitutional monarch legally in Britain. He or she is a parliamentary monarch, which means that parliament can get rid of a monarch and it can do it jolly quickly. And that’s what Baldwin did. If, God forbid, Charles loses his mind and refuses to abdicate and no one can get him to abdicate, sign the piece of paper, then simply the Prime Minister of the day and the leader of the opposition can say “Go.” And there’s nothing he can do about it, he will go. And that’s something I think a lot of people don’t quite understand about the British Constitution. It’s a parliamentary monarchy; parliament, since the Civil War and Cromwell, is supreme. Even over the king, when push comes to shove as it did in 1936. So this interwar period, MacDonald and Baldwin have been struggling. They’ve been struggling with the Great Depression. They’ve been struggling with the whole issue of hunger marches beginning with Jarrow, but going on afterwards. Now the hunger marches, like General Strike, were not about a political revolution. The hunger marches were about, we are dying, give us food. I cannot feed my families. We know that George the fifth said, to the Prime Minister, “If I was earning as little as they are, I would march.”
There was a distinct feeling in Britain that something had to be done. Actually, the phrase used by Edward himself, when he first became King, something must be done, but he was always saying something must be done and he never did anything about it. Whereas, the royal family today take issues like mental health and actually do something about it. Edward was not like that. So we have the crisis of unemployment rising. We have the crisis of, a very big crisis, of hunger marches, of real problems, but there’s no suggestion that we will have a communist revolution. And although there’s support for a fascist revolution, the fascists never really gained a foothold, they never gained a suit in parliament. They never really looked like threatening the status quo. There aren’t that number of fascists who are members of the fascist party. It didn’t seem to sort of work like that, I’m pleased to say. They didn’t solve the problem in the 1930s, as Roosevelt didn’t solve the problem in the States. The problem for Britain, the problem was solved in Britain as the problem was solved in the United States, by the coming of war. The requirement to employ more men and women in factories, that helped America, before America came into the war, as they’re sending war material to Britain. It helps in Britain, of course, as well. All of this is the reason why, to the question that’s more frequently asked than any other about the 20th century British history.
Why did Churchill lose the election in 1945? He lost the election because the Labour party, under Attlee, promised with detail how they would improve life for everyone. And people understood the message, not least because the Army education call that were running courses and lectures when after the war ended, before men came out of uniform, were pressing the Labour cause. And the Labour cause was based upon a document that had been set in motion by Churchill. Churchill was never opposed to this concept of a welfare state. He did not dismantle the welfare state when he came back to power in 1951. Quite the reverse. So it explains why revolution didn’t come after the end of the war, after the end of the second World War, because then people were presented with a genuine alternative to the interwar politics of Britain. They were presented with this fantastic idea of a welfare state. And that welfare state got us through the difficulties of the late forties. The story then goes on, of course. When did we basically face a possibility of revolution, was not in my belief in the 1930s with fascism, but after the first World War with communism. If there was going to be a revolution here, it would’ve occurred in the early twenties, in my belief. It didn’t; and it didn’t, because people, I don’t know. Because people really, in Britain, most of us don’t take politics too seriously, to be honest, until there’s a general election. And we don’t like things, we like to go on as we are. It takes a lot to rouse, the English in particular, to take action. And we didn’t take action in the twenties. In the thirties, very few people, in truth, believed in fascism. They made a lot of noise, but we didn’t believe it. That doesn’t mean to say that we didn’t have a sneaking support for, admiration for Mussolini, or that we weren’t antisemitic. All of those things simmer away. History isn’t simple; it isn’t this or that, either or, it’s a whole mix, a whole menage of views.
But, let me take the story on. By the time that Baldwin also tyres, leaves government in 37, we get Neville Chamberlain. Still a national government. The clouds were darkening. The night was coming even closer by 1938. Almost all of us could now see what many of us had closed our eyes to, was the rise of Hitler’s Germany. It doesn’t mean, well Blanche Dugdale, this society lady, put in her diary on the 11th of November, Armistice Day, 1938, “Armistice Day! And the news of a pogrom in Germany as bad or worse than I had dreaded or expected.” You all know that two days before, the 9th of November, was Crystal Night in Germany. This lady expresses what I think is the, I more than think, is the majority view in Britain. “The news of the pogrom in Germany as bad or worse than I had dreaded or expected. But don’t think that as we go towards war, we’re not antisemitic.” This is Gladys Langford, who in her diary on the 23rd of December, 38, “Rosa is a Jewish refugee, an ex secretary speaking and writing six languages. She was driven out of her office by the Nazis with a revolver at her head. Her old parents were in a concentration camp for 18 days and returned to find every valuable taken and every stick of furniture smashed. Her fiance, to whom she should have been married in October, is deported, but to Shanghai, and it is doubtful if they will ever meet again. She has been, since August, with a Roman Catholic colonel here in Britain who worked her nearly to death, telling her daily how the Jews have only themselves to blame and how she ought to be grateful for finding shelter in England. He seems to have been a positive sadist.
Then she went to a couple with a baby, who worked her from 6:00 AM till midnight, then woke her up for baby minding. I gave her two shillings for a Christmas box.” Now, there may be people listening that can say, well, that happened in my family. What I’m trying to say, and maybe badly, is that immediately pre-war, this is a confusing country in Britain. We would like to believe post 1940 and Churchill, post the end of the war and the horror of the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials, that we were not anti-Semitic. Yes, there were some anti-Semites, but as a nation, we weren’t. It’s not true. It ran deeper, in our DNA, than simply a few people following Mosley. Also, although Mosley had a small following, in national’s terms, there were a lot of people, about a hundred thousand or so, there was a lot of people who sympathised and therefore, if a fascist government had come, would’ve gone along with it. Exactly as they did in Jersey and in Guernsey, in the Channel Islands. The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, in 1938 signed an agreement with Hitler at Munich and returned to Britain a hero. He appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and the slogan of the day was, “Peace in our time!” Hooray! And Hitler thought him a fool. But it wasn’t to be, because on the 3rd of September, 1939, Britain found itself, for a second time in the century, at war with Germany. The British ambassador of Berlin, so Neville Henderson, tells this story in his autobiography, which is called “Failure of Omission,” 1937-39, when he was British ambassador in Berlin. And this is the moment when Hitler has been given time to withdraw the attack on Poland. 3rd of September, 1939. He was given, Hitler, 11:00 AM. “Shortly after 11:00 AM, I received a final message from Ribbentrop,” foreign secretary, “asking me to call upon him at once.
I did so at 11:30 and he lost no time in giving me, on this occasion, a lengthy document to read, beginning with a refusal on the part of the German people to accept any demands in the nature of an ultimatum made by the British government, and stating that any aggressive action by England will be answered with the same weapons in the same form. The rest of the document was pure propaganda. My last official communication with the German government was a note, which I presented on the instructions of his Majesty government, inquiring whether the German government would observe the provisions of the Geneva protocol of 1925, prohibiting the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and the bacteriological methods of warfare. The French ambassador had presented at noon a similar ultimatum to the German government to expire 5:00 PM.” They left the British Embassy, they left the hotels where some of the British were staying, and they were put up at the American Embassy. “The American Embassy’s aid and help were invaluable. No trouble was too great for the change d'affaire, Mr. Alexander Kirk and the members of his staff. They did everything that was possible to smooth over the difficulties of those last 24 hours. And our only pleasant recollection of that time is our appreciation of the great sympathy and willing assistance, which we received from the American Embassy.” And then we get the announcement here in Britain, that we are indeed at war. And everyone I’ve talked to, who was alive at that time, and some of you were alive at that time in Britain and might like to comment. 3rd of September.
“At 10 o'clock today, Hibbert, the chief announcer on the BBC, told us that the Prime Minister will broadcast at 11 o'clock. At 11:15 precisely, speaking in an intentionally English accent, Chamberlain told us that since Germany had not replied to the ultimatum, England was now at war. At half past 11, the first air raid warning goes. Orderly retreat to dugout. Nothing happens. All clear after half an hour, they go into the street and I see a man look at his watch and hear him say, ‘They’re open. The pubs are open.’” We are a strange people in this country. But Chamberlain was a lacklustre war leader as he’d been a lacklustre peacetime Prime Minister. And we went into what is called the phoney war, in 1939, early 1940, which culminated in the defeat and withdraw from Norway in May, 1940. There was a debate in the House of Commons. Chamberlain was forced to resign. And because the conservatives had the biggest majority, it had to be a conservative Prime Minister to take over. We don’t have, unlike the Americans, we do not have general elections during wartime. And so it was up to the conservative party to choose a leader. In those days, it was done by a small group. And the two candidates were: Halifax or Churchill. Thank God it was Churchill. In a book called “The Oaken Heart,” which I may have used with some of you before, wrote by Margery Allingham, who was a detective fiction writer, popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Margery Allingham writes this about her village in Essex. “Mr. Churchill saved the government and saved the country and saved Tolleshunt D'Arcy too.
In a week it was over and all was safe and true again, whatever the outward danger. Mr. Churchill’s appointment as the new Prime Minister was never questioned in Tolleshunt for an instant. It was unanimous. But neither was the importance of the choice underestimated.” At times during the war, his index of popularity rose over 90%. Gosh, what would politicians give for that today? And then she tells a story, and I’m going to finish with this story. “The fact that, from the beginning, everybody chuckled when Mr. Churchill’s name was mentioned, and does still, is one piece of evidence that we had chosen correctly. And the conversation that Nurney,” one of the villagers, this is factual history, this isn’t fiction. “And the conversation that Nurney heard in London between two char ladies,” ladies who were cleaners, “two char ladies who had turned up to clean an office, which had disappeared overnight,” through bombing, “was another. One of them was completely taken aback and temporarily demoralised. The whole mooring post of her existence has come out of the rock, in her hand. The other was telling her off. ‘My dear old girl,’ she was saying, ‘blubber away, but you can take it from me: While one bloody brick stands on another, Churchill will never give in; never let us give in.’” And that was the difference. If the thirties were a time of, and the twenties, a time of dashed hopes and the thirties ended in the complete horror of World War II, the election of Churchill eight months or so into the war, on the 10th of May, 1940, gave people at the time hope. We like pulling down heroes in the 21st century. Many historians, young I might add, attempt to pull Churchill down.
But Churchill gave hope, not only to us, but hope to the wider world or else we will be living, those of us living in democracies in western Europe certainly, in a very, very different world. For had we fallen in 1940 before America came into the war, there was no way that America could have launched a seaborne invasion across the Atlantic to free Britain. We depended upon British survival. Churchill realised that, and in one of his early speeches said, well, what he was doing was really keeping Britain going until America, in his view, inevitably came into the war. So there we have the story of the interwar years. We began it in war and we leave it in war. How depressing is humanity? Thanks very much for listening. I’m sure lots of people got lots of things to say.
Q&A and Comments:
Let’s have a look and see. Monique, thank you very much.
Q: “Mussolini and fascism were before the US stock market crash. How do you reconcile that?”
A: I wouldn’t, it’s quite different. It’s a different question. What the stock market crash did, was to provide an opportunity for Nazism and for the growth of fascism. Mussolini’s Fascism was of a different order and emerges out of the chaos of the Italian political system. I wouldn’t want to reconcile. It’s two different issues.
Q: Shelly says, “How would you characterise how the abdication crisis affected Baldwin in the economic political situation with Hitler they had to deal with?”
A: Not at all. It didn’t affect the other issues whatsoever. The abdication crisis was, it was Clinton who once said that the only way you can do the sort of job as president of the USA or Prime Minister or whatever country, is to compartmentalise. And Baldwin was very good at compartmentalising, exactly like Clinton. I have great admiration for people that compartmentalise. I’ve never been able to.
Judy, “I agree his gait makes him look fragile, but I think his faculties are largely intact.” Oh, Biden. Well, I’m glad you think so, Judy. What I’ve read, he said, they’re anything but intact, but I’m not getting involved in, I have no vote. You can vote who you want.
Ellie says, “No, there’s not much left to lose. He’s a disgrace.” I leave you Americans to fight it out, hopefully only in words. Because from this side of the Atlantic, the situation looks grim indeed, in America.
Hannah said, “I spoke to an American journalist this week and she said Biden is frail physically, but quite sound mentally.” I can’t think how you can say that. When he mixes up countries and had to be stopped by his press secretary because he was rambling on only a week or so, now. Oh, I see. I should shut up. I’ll shut up on Biden, because I’m getting involved with too many. Sorry Faith, I’m not getting involved. No, we could not have used Biden in the 1930s. Thank you very much.
Q: Naomi, “My sister and I were born in London in 36 and 38 to middle class Jewish parents. I’ve never understood how they could have been confident enough to start a family in those obviously very uncertain times, in every different way. How do you explain that absence of concern for the situation in Europe?”
A: Naomi, I think the answer is, I think the answer is that they trusted Britain. I’ve been asked this before by, in another context. I think many of the Jews who came before the war, I’ve talked to many, had a confidence in Britain. They didn’t think Britain would give in or thought they had a confidence as deep down did the British people, which emerges when Churchill becomes Prime Minister. I think you’ve got to have lived through it to know why they thought that. But that’s how their reasoning went.
Sorry, Sherry. “Don’t equate Trump with,” I’m not going in there. “Please define deranged.” No, no, no, I can’t. If you want my honest answer, we should do what the ex British Foreign Secretary, David Owen says, there should be full physical and mental checks on everyone seeking high office. And those should be published and they should be independent. Because there’s been some question of doctors reports on American presidents, we don’t even have them at all, and we definitely need them.
Angela says, hello Angela, “I agree with your view of Halifax. It was a near thing.” I don’t understand Steve, what you’ve said. He said today’s subject, Britain in 1930s.
“It is really interesting,” says Marilyn, “to note the different percent,” but oh, no, no, no, I’m not going there.
Q: Warren, “How close did Halifax get to becoming Prime Minister? Was there a vote between him and Churchill?”
A: No, there were four men in a meeting. Chamberlain, the chief rep of the Conservative Party, a man called Tom Margerison, Churchill and Halifax. In Churchill’s telling of the story, which is relatively, but not entirely perhaps true, the position was that there was a lot of support for Halifax. But he began, when it looked as though he might get it, he began by saying, well, I’m in the house of lords. It will be very difficult to do it, I don’t think. And he began to talk himself out of it. And Churchill, when offered it, because there was no one else, Halifax talked himself out of it, wrote that “Uncharacteristically, I said very little knowing that the job was mine.” He knew that Halifax was a broken reed and it would be his. it’s an extraordinary story.
And Judy says, “watch the film ‘The Darkest Hour’ and you’ll get a sense of the power struggle of Halifax and Churchill. Many supported Halifax, but frankly they did not prevail.” No, and of course after the war, you could find no one that supported Halifax. They were all pro-Churchill. But it took a long time, because I think a month after Churchill became Prime Minister, Chamberlain was still leader of the party, but Churchill was Prime Minister. And Churchill made a speech in the House of Commons, and all he could see was the Labour party opposite, who all clapped madly and shouted in support. And Margesion noted that many on the conservative benches were not applauding Churchill. And he went along the benches behind Churchill, which Churchill couldn’t see, and said, “Stand up, you buggers! Stand up!” And they stood up. And Churchill never knew because he wrote, “This was the first time I knew I had the support of the house.” But he hadn’t, he only had the support of a group of conservatives and the Labour party opposite him in the house. He could not see those that Margesion made to stand up. It’s an extraordinary story.
Q: “How did a man like Halifax become foreign secretary?”
A: Oh my dear, he had absolutely, he knew what knives and forks to use for goodness sake. He was a friend of the royal family. I mean, how could a man like that not become foreign secretary? Look, we’ve had some pretty awful foreign secretaries and I think we’ve got one now. No, it’s, don’t get me on. If we get the politicians we deserve, then we deserved Halifax in the 1930s, but we certainly didn’t deserve him in 1940.
Q: What turned the aristocracy against Germany?
A: Churchill. Churchill. That’s the simple answer. George the fifth’s wife, the late Queen Mother, before Churchill became Prime Minister, went down to the east end of London, which had been heavily bombed. She was booed. Booed. When Churchill becomes Prime Minister, the royal family are no longer booed. But Churchill went down to the east, this is an absolute true story. It was recorded by one of his aides who was with him. And he went down and was walking through a blitzed area of the East end, that is the very poor end of London. And he put his hat on his stick and he held it up so they could see that it was him. And a lady, so his aide said, There was a lady near him who was in floods of tears. And his aides really didn’t want him to go, because they thought it would lower morale, because he bursts into tears. He always bursts into tears, and he was flooding, tears rolling down his face, and they were trying to get him away, and he refused to go and he kept on walking. And the aide heard this lady say, “Look, he really does care. He’s crying.” And that’s the difference, he did care. The royal family, George Fifth and Queen Mother, I’ve always had a view that if Hitler had landed, they would’ve gone along with it.
[Wendy] William, I just want to jump in quickly, just to say that, hi! Hi, it was really brilliant. Another great movie, hi, hi, hi everyone. Another great movie worth watching is “Munich.” It was Jeremy Irons was playing Chamberlain, I think it was released last year. Really is well worth watching.
It’s based on Robert Harris’s book, “Munich.” And that is an absolute fantastic book to read. Absolutely right. It gives you a real insight into what was going on.
[Wendy] Yeah, that’s excellent. And I just want to say to our American friends, just because one mentions Biden doesn’t mean that you’re pro-Trump and Republican. And if you not, if you say something about Trump, doesn’t mean that you’re a Democrat. And it’s ridiculous.
I think we just have to, Wendy, let me
[Wendy] Yeah.
Work out that,
[Wendy] Yeah.
What seems to us from outside,
[Wendy] It’s insane!
It’s a really appalling and worrying situation.
[Wendy] Very, very.
And it’s mind blowingly awful.
[Wendy] But isn’t it, surely you choose a leader, and really the party’s irrelevant. It doesn’t mean that you, you know, it’s always a strange loyalty to a party. Doesn’t make any sense. You know, when Mandela came into power, we just thought we had great hopes for the ANC. Great hopes. And then look, you know. Anyway, alright, that’s my 2 cents worth and I’m going to get shut down for that. But I think it would be a great topic, for us to talk about leadership and party loyalty, church and state, democracy and fascism and et cetera, et cetera. We should, offline, discuss that for Lockdown.
What I should add to what Wendy said, everyone, is that one of the views in Britain, is that now you don’t vote for a party, you are voting for a man or a woman who’s the leader of the party. And it’s been described as, we now have a presidential Prime Ministerial situation. So we don’t elect a party and their leader happens to be X, we elect Sunak or we elect Starmer, in the same way that you elect Trump or you elect Biden. And there’s a lot of views in Britain that that is not a good way to go. And I don’t know how, we have our own constitutional problems. And the idea of a presidential Prime Minister isn’t one that we are happy with, because we don’t need a president in the way that Americas as Republic needs it. We need a different sort of, well, that’s another issue for another time. Let me just see if I can take a few more questions.
There’s Biden, right, you’re all going on. Hang on, I think I need to go down a bit further. I get there in the end.
Oh, Rita, I’m sure I didn’t get there. Oh, sorry.
Q: Susan says, “Secret Services in America followed Simpson when she was out shopping. So what secrets would she have access?”
A: No, it was communication between her husband and they feared the Swedes, in Washington. The Swedish, the Swedes were not in the war, and it was a way of communication. That’s what they were frightened of. And in fact, Edward and Mrs. Simpson borrowed a yacht from a Swede, and that Swede was supplying armaments to the Nazi regime in Berlin. That is what exercised Roosevelt.
Q: “Why did Brexiteers always say they wanted to keep…”
A: Hannah, well, the idea of a constitutional, oh, you mean instead of a parliamentary monarchy? Because most people in Britain don’t understand that we have a parliamentary monarchy and not a constitutional one.
Oh, Sherry says, “We had a previous lecture on Lockdown that totally contradicts what you were saying about Edward. Edward was an anti-sematic, Wallis Simpson was not.” Well, ha ha. Yeah, okay. Not something I would agree with. Maybe one day I’ll talk about them. I just find them a disgusting couple to talk about.
“I’ve just finished reading,” says Mara, “‘Tea with Hitler,’ the secret history of the royal family and the Third Reich.” There’s a lot of problems, not least the Duke of Edinburgh’s family.
Q: “How did the Germans manage to get out of the depression in 1930?”
A: Because Hitler went to a wartime economy.
Q: “Why didn’t Britain do the same?”
A: We weren’t on a wartime economy. We weren’t a dictatorship. Oh, and David’s answered the question for me. David, you’d be much more concise than I was in my answer.
David said, simply by spending money on arms, Britain did not. Yes, absolutely.
Q: If people are pro-German, how did Churchill get into power?
A: Because there was no alternative. Had to be a Tory. By the beginning of May, 1940, with the collapse in Norway, it was clear that we had to have proper leadership. This was not a war, unless you wanted to do a deal with Hitler, this was not a war that we could, Pro-German feeling had evaporated by then. Churchill was the darling of ordinary people. If you talk to any ordinary person, I don’t mean that disparagingly. Any person, not a politician, not related to aristocracy, ordinary people absolutely worshipped Churchill. Everywhere he went, people worshipped him. He said, after a trip to my city of Bristol, after it had been bombed in 41 I think, he was coming back on the train and he was reading the local Bristol newspaper, and he was in floods of tears. And he’d been walking around Bristol that day and they said to him, “Why are you crying, Prime Minister?” And he said, “They have such trust in me.” And that’s what they did. They had enormous trust in him. I can’t, Churchill is unexplainable, really. He is a one-off. The charisma, everything about Churchill. The background, his family’s background, everything about Churchill was, all Churchill’s faults, I often say, all Churchill’s positives were needed in 1940. But in some wonderful way, all his negatives were transformed into positives, in 1940. I often say, the guardian angel of Britain waved her wand over Churchill, so that all the things he was criticised for now became so important. The fact that he was very emotional, was important. The fact that he broke down in public, in tears, was important. The fact that he made these grandiose speeches, was important. Everything came to, it was a miracle. And I think I’m using that word in its correct meaning.
Oh, Shelly, I think I’ve answered that.
Oh, that, Vivian, thank you so much. “Thank you for recommending ‘The Oaken Heart’ in one of your earlier lectures.” Yes, I think it’s a great book. Oh yeah, okay. Thanks.
No, we dunno, Harriet, what Hitler’s popularity of Germany was, because no one would ever have taken the figures, for obvious reasons. I’m sorry, we just don’t know that.
Thank you, Marilyn. That’s kind of you. No, they were sent into exile by Britain, they didn’t choose to. He wanted to come back in the war. That’s why they were sent to Bermuda, to get shot at them. They were considered to be so dangerous.
How come those interests in private diaries? No, I’ve not got hold of them. Hang on. They’re there. The things I’ve been quoting, this book, it’s on my blog: “Our History of the 20th Century.” It’s just a list of all these quotations from diaries and things, and it’s just a simple way, with one volume, for me to get hold of it. That all. I dunno how many more I can get through before I, I’m sure I’ve overstayed my welcome. Maybe there’s something that, oh, here we are. Thanks. All those people say, thank you. I appreciate it. All those people who cross swords, I wish we could meet and we were one-to-one. I’d love crossing swords.
Q: Oh, Sherry, you said “If you don’t want to discuss American politics, why did you make those remarks?”
A: Because I wanted to make a comparison. Well, I’m sorry you feel like that. I think the view from outside America is very different from the view inside America. And I’m sorry if that offends people, but from outside America, it looks as though the choices you will have, if it is Biden and Trump, is not a choice. I had an email from an American friend on Lockdown, who said he’s an independent, but he’s always voted, but he doesn’t know that he can vote this time. And I wrote back and said, well, I don’t belong to a political party, but not many people do in Britain. But I’m not going to vote in our general election, because I can’t vote for either political party. But here, I can spoil my ballot by writing across it something like, “not for any of these candidates.” And here in Britain, a spoiled ballot has to be counted. And the number of spoiled ballots has to be published, which means that my vote isn’t entirely wasted. Because if there were a hundred or a thousand of us that support our ballots, it tells you something about the lack of support of politicians.
[Wendy] William, I want to throw the cat amongst the pigeon and say, give Rishi a chance. Just for fun. There you go, I want to create a balance, which is our viewers.
Not for me, not for me. I just feel that, no. Well, that’s another talk for another day. All I wanted to say,
[Wendy] I wanted to create furor our English viewers as well, so we can have chaos on both sides of the continent.
Oh, somebody’s put something serious, but the evil of two lessers equals the next US election. But there’s no agreement on modern politics, in Britain or in the States. “Democracy is at risk in the US, but it seems that William and Wendy seem to be blind to this.” Well, if you missed my other talks, I’ve made it very clear that.
[Wendy] No, no, we understand that. We understand exactly. But this is just, I just want to say, William, I have to come in your defence just to say that Lockdown is a platform. It started off just with family and friends, where people can give their opinion. And honestly,
Absolutely.
[Wendy] A throwaway comment doesn’t mean, if he says something about Biden, that he’s pro-Trump. I mean Trump, who could be pro-Trump? There you go. I mean, he’s also a complete lunatic, deranged, as people have said. So, you know, let’s not have a few, let’s not go on a political debate, because this is really a platform where people can make comments and they don’t need a gun held to their head.
Wendy, you don’t, by any chance, know them both do you, and can get them on Lockdown together?
[Wendy] You know what? I actually have met them both. So, you know, I’m not an expert on American politics. And honestly, the situation today is very sad. I mean, this wonderful, incredible country, doesn’t have, a fantastic leader.
The problem,
[Wendy] Sad situation.
They’re not only president of the United States, but they’re the leader of Western democracy.
[Wendy] Probably the best country. Yeah.
And that’s a problem for all democracies in Western Europe. But, we aren’t going to solve it. I should go and watch some football on the television, I think, calm down after this. But thanks ever so much for everyone who’s joined in. It’s been a really interesting, I hope you enjoyed the talk. You’ll see me on Wednesday with Trudy, and you’ll be so pleased to note that I shall be put firmly in my place on Wednesday. And then I shall be back with you on the 16th of October and the 17th on the Zulu War and on the Boer War, looking at British imperialism. So, very well.