George Bell, Fifty Years On

The weekend saw the fiftieth anniversary of the death of George Bell, Lord Bishop of Chichester, close associate of those Germans who plotted to kill Hitler (a plot which, but for the lack of British support, would have shortened the War by a yea and prevented Stalin from taking over half of Europe), staunch defender of trade union rights and of council tenants, and outspoken opponent of the carpet bombing of German cities.

The British urban working class being Blitzed strongly supported the Coalition. Many were working-class Tories anyway (that was how the Tories kept winning elections in the Twenties and Thirties, as later in the Fifties), and the rest were also fully signed up to the war effort, and accepted the Government as fundamentally legitimate, for so it was.

By contrast, the German urban working class were overwhelmingly Hitler's Social Democratic opponents (there is a strange popular myth that Nazism in Britain was a working-class movement, but it was no such thing), his principal opponents other than Soviet-backed enemies of the Republic itself, who were later to be given half of Germany due to Britain's failure to back the July Plot. They were living under the Nazi dictatorship and they hated it.

Bu to what were they reduced? Unhinged mothers carrying the shrivelled corpses of their bomb-baked children around the country in suitcases. Immense clouds of bluebottles gathering on the rubble as the thousands of dead decomposed. That sort of thing. None of which shortened the War by one second. Quite the reverse, in fact.

At the Nuremburg Trials, the terms of reference had to specially written (as such things always are, of course) in order to preclude any German come back over this. Even then, even we ourselves thus at least implicitly acknowledged the wrong that we had done. And at the time, one voice gave detailed articulation to the character of that wrong, including right there on the floor of the House of Lords.

That voice belonged to a close associate of the July Plotters, and a staunch defender of trade union rights and of council tenants: George Bell.

Of whom, for all the endless teaching of all things Hitler in schools and parading of it in the media (especially on television), most Britons have never heard. Of course.