Remembering The Lancastria

Or ever having heard of it. Today's seventieth anniversary is going almost entirely unmarked. The cult of Churchill lives on, despite, as much as anything else, his loss of two of the three General Elections into which he led his party, his loss of the popular vote at the third one, his return to office only with the support of the National Liberals, and his removal in the course of that Parliament by his own party, which went on to win the subsequent Election comfortably. His Lancastria and numerous other disasters were manifestly not lost on the general public while he was alive.

We are mercifully living through the beginning of the end of the Soviet-style use of the cult of the War, based on totally false ideas about why we fought it, as the cover for all the things that in fact resulted from our involvement in it: loss of global role, economic and cultural dependence on the United States, collapse in moral standards, and so on. Invoking 1940 should never again be able to drag us into war against any and everyone. Thank God for that.

However, the rearguard action has begun. Who, exactly, is to be put in charge of Michael Gove's new History curriculum? One rather suspects that it will not be Mark Almond, John Laughland, Geoffrey Wheatcroft or other conservatives, but the likes of Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts. Ferguson does at least hold a doctorate and occupy a Chair. Roberts is merely too rich to need to work, but, being based in London, is also more likely to be involved in this project.

It is easy to mock Roberts because his books contain repeated misspellings of the same place names, they assume that historical figures with the same name were the same person, they repeatedly refer to the Red Army marching eastwards across Europe, they suggest that Amritsar is in the south of India, and they are much admired by that noted polymath, George W Bush.

But the buffoonery is only the half of it. Roberts denies any distinction between the British Empire and the United States, which would certainly come as news to Americans. He therefore sees global American hegemony as the British national interest, which should certainly come as news to Britons, but sadly would not to a very great many. He propagates the Churchillian myth of "the English-speaking peoples", devised to justify the loss of British prestige as part of the price of American entry into the War in Europe. He also puts about the fantasies of Margaret Thatcher's Euroscepticism, Unionism, moral and social conservatism, educational traditionalism, and concern both for British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands and for the necessary capacity on the part of the Royal Navy.

And, somewhat incongruously, he campaigns, through the Springbok Club, for the restoration of apartheid South Africa, as well as, with Gove in the Henry Jackson Society, for a single EU defence "capability" under overall American command but day-to-day German control. Liam Fox and his "Special Adviser" (CIA handler) Luke Coffey are making it increasingly clear that this will involve the abolition of all three of the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, leaving only something along the lines of the Israeli Defence Force, or the United States Marine Corps without the elite status or the other Armed Services. After all, that is what America wants, and aren't we, as English-speaking people, Americans too, America being just the continuation of Imperial Britain in the world...?

We have been warned.