Monuments In The Area Concerned

"You break the two Golden Rules of Blogging," one of my regular readers inside the Palace of Westminster told me over a good pub lunch when I was last in London. "You mention the gays, and you mention the Jews."

The Hungarian anti-Semitic attacks that Giles Fraser describes disprove his point. Neither the existence nor the policies of the State of Israel do anything to deter this sort of thing. Israel is not an idea. Israel is a country. Americans, especially those who are particularly fierce Zionists, are also prone to a similar error. Not all Jews are Israelis, and not all Israelis - fewer and fewer, in fact - are Jews.

Meanwhile, Harry's Place, for which I have written above the line in my time, is vexed at the content of documents released under the Thirty Year Rule, detailing the scepticism of Lord Carrington and of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office when it came to the allocation of Crown property for a National Holocaust Memorial within a few hundred yards of the Cenotaph.

Imagine this if you can, but they saw it as nothing to do with Britain, and as likely to offend key allies and trading partners, which, in view of the first fact, might have interpreted it as in reality a comment on something else altogether. I know. The very idea.

Britain's main contribution had been Churchill's refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz, a refusal which much later moved Menachem Begin to inform Margaret Thatcher that her country and her hero had caused the deaths of two million Jews. He himself had armed Argentina during the Falklands War, only months before the controversy over this proposed monument ostensibly to one thing but really to another.

However, the promise of it had been made to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, in those days a hopeless bunch of zealots, and to the Zealot-in-Chief, the then Labour MP, Greville Janner. Janner, the second generation MP for the same seat as well as a second generation President of the Board of Deputies, spent many decades screeching "Anti-Semitism! Anti-Semitism! Nazi! Nazi!" at anyone who dared to question, for example, how he had made his own considerable pots of money.

Janner is still alive in the House of Lords. As is the man who had improperly made that promise, and whom Harry's Place praises for having made common cause with Thatcher in order to deliver on it. Michael Heseltine.

I wonder if Heseltine was wearing his Guards tie on Any Questions last night? He has worn it on many more days than he ever served in the Welsh Guards. After multiple deferrals, he was finally called up in the very last year of National Service. But was let out again after a few months because the Conservatives, or technically the National Liberals,  needed him to fight the no hope seat of Gower. He was then let off the rest because his business career was deemed to have been so important. He was 26.

Heseltine had been old enough both for Korea and for Suez. But he never served in either, due to his family connections. Oh, and he wears the tie incorrectly, with the red stripe across the knot, which is wrong. It used to be worn correctly, and far more honourably, by Tommy Cooper.

However, Heseltine does have an opportunity to earn it, even now, more than 50 years later. In 1947, the Welsh Guards were deployed to British Palestine, where they remained until being bombed out by the founders of modern terrorism, people who had tried to do a deal with Hitler at the height of the War. On one of them, see above.

No memorial exists, anywhere in the world, to the British victims, on British territory, of those pioneering terrorists. In his Welsh Guardsman's tie, and with his history of agitation for memorials as near as possible to the Cenotaph, what is The Lord Heseltine CH going to do about this national disgrace? For that matter, what is the Trident-waving Commonwealth War Graves Commissioner, Kevan Jones MP, going to do about this national disgrace?

Heseltine implicitly agreed with Jones on Any Questions, something of which one hopes that the latter is exactly as proud as he ought to be. But Peter Hitchens called for the money to be spent on the real nuclear deterrent, civil nuclear power, "since we were stupid enough to abandon coal," an obvious, and richly deserved, dig, so to speak, at Heseltine. And Diane Abbott called for it to be spent on essential kit and provisions for the existing Armed Forces.

In that order, those two positions are fully compatible with each other. Nor would there be any difficulty in finding out of that supply the cash needed to erect the Palestine Memorial. As near to the Cenotaph as possible. What say you, Michael Heseltine and Kevan Jones?

And with it, as the North East and especially historic County Durham, still defined as such for the cricket at which we are rather good, burnish our not inconsiderable anti-Fascist credentials, how about a memorial to the ILP Contingent, who went out to Spain to fight the forces of Fascism and who were murdered by the forces of Stalinism once they got there?

There is now a small plaque in the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. But nothing to compare with the Soviet-directed International Brigade's considerable monument, at which an annual ceremony is held, on London's South Bank, together with at least four more memorials in England, three in Scotland, two in Northern Ireland, two in the Irish Republic, and one in Wales.

Including one in Newcastle. If Newcastle has one to that, then where better than Sunderland to have one to this? As near as possible to the entrance to the Stadium of Light, facing it as a constant reproof. Perhaps paid for and maintained, at least in part, by the Durham Miners' Association. And certainly unveiled by the MP for nearby North Durham, a former Defence Minister and still a Commonwealth War Graves Commissioner, by then possibly a serving, very probably an impending, Secretary of State for Defence.

Mirroring the action of a former occupant of that Cabinet position in unveiling the National Memorial to the Fallen of British Palestine. Itself mirroring on the other side, but exactly one yard closer to the Cenotaph, the last, ostensibly worthy enough but essentially foreign and highly politicised, monument that he had secured in the vicinity. And unveiled by him while he was wearing his Guards tie. Of course.