We Will Remember Them

The National Memorial to the Bevin Boys is as welcome as the Irish pardon of those who joined in the fight against Nazi Fascism, an interesting and important precedent on which see below. Other people may have had other motivations. But theirs can only have been that.

The Bevin Boys were sometimes mistaken for conscientious objectors. But we do need a National Memorial to those who performed non-military service during the morally ambivalent and culturally catastrophic First World War. We also need a National Memorial to the ILP Contingent that went to Spain in order to fight Falangist Fascism, only to be murdered there by the agents of Stalinism.

There is now a small plaque to that Contingent 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.

Britain was not at war with either side in Spain. But, although Churchill maintained that a Dominion's neutrality was illegal, nor was the Irish Free State at war with either side in the conflict the anti-Fascist participants in which from that country have, effectively, just been declared national heroes. The ILP, it is worth mentioning, kept parliamentary democracy alive during the Wartime Coalition, although its three MPs were refused the sole use of the Opposition benches in the House of Commons.

And we need a National Memorial to those who were bombed out of British Palestine by the founders of modern terrorism in the years after the Second World War, and at least arguably before and during it, since, unless we are saying that Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir were fighting for or alongside Hitler, then that was not in itself the War. To those British Fallen, there is no monument anywhere in the world. That is literally a national disgrace.

It might be possible to seek to have all three of them in the same place, most obviously as the three parts of a single structure. That place could only be somewhere in the Promised Land between the Tyne and the Tees. Not least in view of the fact that one of those to the International Brigade is in Newcastle, looking in but unable to enter, like the dying Moses.

With a County Durham MP as a former and Shadow Defence Minister, it would seem most obvious to offer to erect this three-faced monument somewhere in his constituency, inviting him to participate in the three ceremonies on appropriate anniversaries.

Might the Durham Miners' Association even already own a site somewhere in the Stanley or Chester-le-Street area? An available site, there or anywhere else, really would get the money flowing. Not least from states maligned in the narrative of neoconservativism. In which case, about the Ushakov Medal...

Since it would certainly not be taking place in Sri Lanka, which as much as Burma as an example of the fallacy of the strange Western assumption that Buddhism is pacifist or at least inherently peaceable, the initial unveiling ought to be performed by Her Majesty the Queen.