we shall fight on the beaches
But no-one mentioned fighting in the mines. When asked last week for a one-word answer as to whether Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was a hero or villain, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, answered the latter, citing the wartime Prime Minister’s sinister role in dealing with striking miners in 1910. Admittedly, it was neither Mr McDonnell’s wisest nor finest hour but a more honest and unbiased view of the ‘greatest Briton’ (2002 BBC2 poll) sheds some light on where he was perhaps coming from.
The Tonypandy riots saw British troops sent to ‘control’ striking miners who had upended shop counters and caused upset at mine owners’ property in the promotion of the dispute. Churchill subsequently used both the police and the military to break the strike at Tonypandy, a shocking order and worryingly reminiscent of the earlier Peterloo Massacre where cavalry charged a peacefully demonstrating protest crowd who were requesting the reform of parliamentary representation, killing fifteen outright and injuring as many as 700.
However, the flip-side is that through his rhetoric, hubris, leadership and diplomacy, Sir Winston managed to bring the US into the second world war and was clearly instrumental in defeating both Nazism and fascism. It is also undeniable that he was a fascinating character: a chancer, opportunist, alcoholic womaniser, manic depressive, an unabashed self-publicist, great charmer and no mean artist, and for once, I’m actually with Mrs May on this when she commented “The British public will reach its own judgement on this characterisation of Sir Winston Churchill.” Surprisingly, so was John McDonnell later in the evening when he expanded on the earlier naïve one-word answer “Churchill was obviously a hero during WW2 War but there was another side to him”.
The real issue at stake here has precious little to do with Winston Churchill and whether he was truly a hero or villain, it has far more to do with the gross simplification of our politics to a simplistic, unrealistic, binary decision: villain/hero, in-out, black/white, right/left, north/south, good/bad et al. I do believe there are situations where such an impactful and decisive answer can be of tremendous value but most necessitate a more nuanced approach where all the information is available and studied. To ask anyone to make a choice between hero or villain is ridiculous at best and the shadow Chancellor should have known better than to fall for such a cheap trick.
PS Having, over recent months, watched all four series of the BBC’s Peaky Blinders, it would seem our Winston, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, played an equally Machiavellian role within the machinations of inter-war politick within the Black Country, but that would be as spurious, or ridiculous, as the much later BBC poll result…
