A Symbolic Bonnet?

I was brought up, long ago, with the constant admonition: 'do not mock the afflicted!'

I usually avoid doing so; but sometimes it seems that a voluntarily-adopted affliction makes an important point about the person who has adopted it. I increasingly feel this about the prime minister's selection of clothes. I recognise that she is tall and slim: as many leading models are, so there is an amplitude of clothing for women of means who are of those dimensions to choose from. Mrs May's choices vary between the odd and the wildly eccentric; and yesterday at the Cenotaph I thought that she established a new, abnormal norm. The black bonnet that she had selected - possibly it was even designed for her - looked like something that a war widow of 100 years ago would have dressed her teenage daughter in for a remembrance event: yet it was also vaguely reminiscent of a German army helmet. Yesterday it simply looked anachronistic on a grown woman.

But for me it also epitomised her situation. She gambled on winning enough seats in the Commons for the Conservative Party so that she could discount the ten-to-twenty headbanging Brexiteers who for various reasons - including pure stupidity - want to risk national economic ruin by interpreting the referendum result of 2016 as authorising the government to leave the European Economic Area altogether, on a cliff-edge date at the end of March 2019. As she totally misjudged the one-woman campaign that she ran, she lost her majority; since when the headbangers [and the DUP] have dominated her field for policy options. She has retreated into a psychological bunker, from which - so it is rumoured - she continues to radiate confidence that all will become well in the best of all possible worlds: sometime. And meanwhile, as M Barnier has said, the clock on the exit door is ticking.

Yesterday the Sunday Times - never known as a Labour-supporting vehicle - gave a prominent page to an article in the name of Jeremy Corbyn [which was, therefore, at least authorised by him]. In it he presaged a shift of parliamentary arithmetic, implying his recognition of the fact that while virtually all members of the Commons accept that the referendum result [though many of them think it unfortunate] must  - at least, minimally - be implemented. But he also accepts that an overwhelming majority of members have come to recognise that to leave the Common Market and the European Union in a simple step would be a calamity for the country.

To demand a general election - which may become necessary if Mrs May is defeated by the defection of any section of her party - would mean that the current crop of MPs have abdicated all responsibility. It is deeply unclear what the result of a general election would be: but the most probable outcome would be a small renaissance for the LibDems, the Scots Tories at least holding their position, no change in Ulster, Labour gains in Scotland [but the Nats still in the lead] and no clear result from England. Labour might just be the biggest party, though the Tories have an equal chance of that; so the construction of a coalition would be a slow and painful business: while the Europeans could fold their arms and enjoy the British discomfiture and the tick of the clock.

The last time when Britain was in a comparable situation was in June, 1940; when a paralysis of government [albeit, with a strong Conservative majority] faced an existential threat. Talk of coalition was in the air; and Labour had already made clear that they could not support a Chamberlain-led government: though they also accepted that the Tory majority required that any coalition was led by a Conservative. In the crucial debate, as a government supporter spoke for the government, a fellow member challenged him to "speak for England". The government left the debate with a clear majority, but the loss of confidence in them was equally clear. Chamberlain - a sick man - resigned, and the amazing, anachronistic career of Winston Churchill reached its apogee.

Corbyn is no Churchill: he is no patriot, he has supported obnoxious alien regimes acting on the lines of the traduced anti-patriots of whom W S Gilbert wrote they admire "all centuries but this one, and all countries but their own". Corbyn's recent adoption of statesmanlike utterances - at odds with his career-long posturing - is utterly unconvincing: but if he were to prove capable of keeping to manifesto promises [and capable of keeping his close associates within those bounds] he might be useful in the hour of crisis. 

Remembrance

Yesterday and today the British commemorate the people killed and injured in military campaigns: the official ceremonies are usually focused on those who were serving the crown in the armed forces and the police, fire and ambulance services [as in the London bliz and in Northern Ireland], but allied and associated units are also remembered as thought appropriate. In Australia and New Zealand 11 November stands coequal with Anzac Day, when those two countries recall the carnage wrought upon the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps [hence, the Anzacs] under incompetent British generalship at the invasion, siege and retreat from Gallipoli in the First World War. That tragedy is regarded as the episode that made both Antipodean countries aware that being loyal to the British crown - or even to the British Empire - was not the permanent best bet for the future of their peoples. So far they have stuck with the monarchy, but it is very widely anticipated that on the death of the Queen both countries will take the opportunity to review their constitutional position.

It is absolutely incredible that the Queen still reigns in Australia and New Zealand - obviously, under total constitutional restraint - 101 years after the disaster of the Dardanelles became apparent. It is incredible that Britain and Northern Ireland settled down in 1919 to live under a constitutional settlement that was temporarily patched up until the Irish Free State could be set up in the 'twenties without full-scale war between the Republican/Fenians and the Ulster protestants: a conflict in which the British army, navy and newly-minted Royal Air Force would have been of ambiguous loyalty.

I have mentioned in recent days that the headbanging Brexiteers will not have their way because the Irish question will prove intractable. Peace in Ireland can only be maintained - 99 years on from the first Armistice Day - by keeping the Good Friday Agreement and all that stems from it. Edward Heath combined his failed attempt at peace in Ireland [epitomised in the Sunningdale Agreement] with Britain and Ireland joining the European Common Market together in the expectation that the two would eventually surrender their statehood to the 'ever-closer Union'. John Major led huge steps towards peace in Ireland based on keeping the UK tightly within the Union [as it had become with the agreement - however completely understood - by Mrs Thatcher]. Then the apparently fresh, young Tony Blair was able to bring the process to a very satisfactory conclusion entirely within the EU context. Ireland has always been a major constraint on British policy, and anyone who dismisses that issue as unimportant in the run-up to 'serious' Brexit negotiations is in for a very major shock.

Returning to the main point of today, we can note that the monarchies which had obviously been defeated in the war - the many sovereign German princes, the Empire of Austria and Kingdom of Hungary, and [in effect] Russia - were wiped out; and red revolutions were attempted in Vienna, Budapest, Munich and Berlin. Soldiers with their weapons in hand put down the risings in central Europe, while the navy and the army mostly sided with the workers in Russia to permit Lenin to grab power.

But in Belgium, where much of the country had been devastated by the war, the king returned as a national hero. In Britain during the war there had been rumblings about the king being a German - which, in ancestral terms, he was - leading to the proclamation of Windsor as the royal family surname. The king loyally supported his ministers, while intervening to keep crass generals - first French, then Haig - in supreme command even though their stupidity could not be concealed. Haig accepted assurances that the third major assault on the Somme, known as the Battle of Paschendael, would succeed because such an efficient artillery barrage would be launched before troops were sent 'over the top' that all the barbed wire in front of them would be destroyed and 'not even a rat' would be able to survive the gunfire. The men went over the top, the barbed wire was in place; and as soon as the artillery barrage was lifted the Germans restored their machine-guns to be ready to slaughter the British, Canadian and Indian infantry who were sent forward. Then came the rain, and the churned-up ground turned to deep mud; but Haig sent more and more troops forward for four months, until the Canadians' capture of a small ridge of land enabled the idiots at HQ to proclaim the battle a 'success'. That was just one of the most conspicuous, crass, wastes of human lives that went on from Mons in 1914 until November 11, 1918.

Almost every street and every extended family in the United Kingdom - including, then, Ireland - suffered casualties. Yet the regime, the politicians, the generals and the king were exonerated from blame: individual generals were the subject of loathing from conscripts whose companions had been killed, injured and deprived of their reason as a result of the commanders' stupidity and arrogance, but the regime was not seriously challenged on the mainland of Britain. However, the losses of the war - in men, industrial output wasted, foreign debts incurred and international power - could not be ignored. So a huge propaganda effort, such as had never before been seen, was launched: with massive effect. A temporary 'Cenotaph' - a tall plinth for a coffin - was erected in Whitehall for the first anniversary of Armistice Day, and 'the Glorious Dead' were honoured as national heroes. A couple of years later the 'unknown soldier' was disinterred from a war grave in France and moved to Westminster Abbey, so that every bereaved mother could imagine that her son would ever after be honoured by kings, princes and politicians. That could only continue if kings and princes were kept in place; and so the regime was more deeply cemented in national sentiment than ever before.

This is a spectacular achievement, adopted throughout the Empire and the United States; and with a similar set of events in France and Belgium. Its force in maintaining the socio-economic order is rarely recognised: but the Irish dimension is again being exposed.