240. Suez: nail in the imperial coffin

With the Austrian annexation complete, Hitler could now start eying up his next target, Czechoslovakia again. Although Italy had proved absolutely no help to Britain in trying to stop Hitler’s move against Austria, Chamberlain had given his word to put in place an agreement which would accept the Italian occupation of Abyssinia in return for some Italian commitments in the Mediterranean, over the Suez Canal, and to stop intervening in the Spanish Civil War. Chamberlain seems to have felt that he had to go ahead with this agreement and submitted it to the Commons for approval. With Conservative anti-appeasers rather muted, even Churchill, the opposition had to be led by Attlee. He was Leader of the Opposition, which was now oddly enough a paid post. He had also strengthened his position in the Labour Party, especially since two colleagues, Bevin and Dalton, had forced through a change of policy to stop opposing the government’s plans for defence spending – they felt that such expenditure was increasingly needed in the face of the growing threats from the dictatorships. Attlee also spoke out loudly in defence of the Spanish Republic, especially after a visit there in late 1937. The House of Commons approved the agreement with Italy despite the opposition to it. That in effect turned a blind eye to Italy’s breach of international law in Abyssinia. Now Hitler prepared his next breach of such law. Faced with what seemed to be an imminent Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain travelled out to see Hitler three times, on the last occasion accompanied by the French Prime Minister, Daladier, and the Italian dictator, Mussolini. The resulting Munich Agreement, which allowed Germany to absorb a huge part of Czechoslovakia, on the pretext of protecting the German-speaking minority in those areas, left the country defenceless to future attack. In the parliamentary debate on the Agreement, Churchill emerged as the champion of the anti-appeasement cause, though Attlee too spoke out powerfully against it. But there was relief across the country and in most parts of the House of Commons that peace had apparently been preserved. That left the anti-appeasers swimming against the current of public and political opinion. The peace that Chamberlain had bought would, however, not last long. Illustration: Chamberlain waving the Munich Agreement on his return to England at Heston Aerodrome. ‘Peace for our time’. Public Domain Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

24 Nov 202414min

We start this week with Hitler announcing that there would be no more surprises, though we immediately question whether his word could always be wholly trusted. We go on to look at the way Hitler was building a regime which didn’t just want war, above all against what he saw as a Jewish-Bolshevik menace, but actually needed it as the only way to obtain basic products for the German population, and raw materials that the military machine itself had to have. Meanwhile, British foreign policy was under new management, with Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary in place of the disgraced Samuel Hoare. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, told him he wanted better relations with Germany and when Eden asked how he was to obtain them, he told him that it was Eden’s job to work that out. But then Baldwin stood down, and his successor, Neville Chamberlain, had a different approach. He wanted to run foreign affairs himself, and he was intent on going flat out for appeasement. That finally brought the Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary into a head-on clash, over concessions to Italy, in the hope of securing Mussolini’s assistance. Chamberlain was prepared to recognise that Italy had the right to invade and occupy Abyssinia (Ethiopia today), even though that was a breach of international law. Eden was in favour of appeasement, but not at the cost of unreasonable concessions, and this one he decided really wasn’t reasonable. Eden went. His replacement was Lord Halifax. He’d recently been on a hunting trip to Germany as the guest of Hermann Goering, and came back convinced that the Nazi leaders were reasonable men with whom a sensible set of arrangements could be negotiated. Then Hitler showed that the age of surprises really wasn’t over. He sent troops over the border into neighbouring Austria, to absorb it into the German Reich. There was no resistance in the country, and none from outside either, including from Britain. European great powers didn’t greatly rate the rights of Africa’s native peoples. Writing off the rights of the Abyssinians therefore was no great shock. But this was Austria, a European country, and Hitler invaded and annexed it without the slightest attempt to stop him from abroad. It seemed that appeasers were prepared to step across some red lines in their bid to buy peace through concessions to dictators. Illustration: Members of the Nazi organisation, the League of German Girls, celebrating the arrival of German troops in Vienna. Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

17 Nov 202414min

We’re still looking at 1936, a year packed with so many events that it’s taken two episodes to review the main ones. This week, on the domestic, British front: - The year of three kings, as one died, another abdicated for love, and the third took the throne - The Battle of Cable Street where 100,000-300,000 or more counter demonstrators turned out to stop the British Union of Fascists marching through Jewish districts of East London - The Jarrow March and Ellen Wilkinson, the fiery MP for the constituency, and the campaign to tackle the problems of poverty and unemployment in the world’s greatest enpire And in foreign affairs: • Hitler makes clear that whatever’s wrong, it’s down to the Jews • Then silences anti-Semitism and general oppression for a while, to make a success of the Berlin Olympics, spoiled only by an outstanding black athlete from the US • Despite the attempts of the British government, backed by Churchill, to curry favour with Mussolini, he signs the Axis agreement with Hitler • Labour’s policy on rearmament and on the Spanish Civil War remains incoherent and badly in need of revision. Plus from the left of Labour comes an extraordinary call for defeatism in front of Nazi Germany Lots of exciting stuff, then. And it wraps up the year so we can move on next week. Illustration: Ellen Cicely Wilkinson leading the Jarrow Marchers, Fox Photos Ltd, 31 October 1936. National Portrait Gallery x88278 Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

10 Nov 202414min

This episode is our first look at the exciting year of 1936. It was a time when some British politicians tried to appease one dictator, Mussolini, by taking no action to stop invading Abyssinia, in order to have his support against a far worse one, Hitler. As it happens, the effect was only to let Mussolini get away with occupying Abyssinia, leaving the League of Nations even more discredited, and making Britain and France looking pretty foolish. Indeed, that result only encouraged Hitler, who sent troops into the Rhineland which, though German territory, the Treaty of Versailles had demanded should remain demilitarised. It would have been a great moment to block Hitler without fighting a world war, but neither France nor Britain had the will to take military action. Meanwhile, following a military mutiny and uprising, a Civil War had broken out in Spain. The Western powers and the Soviet Union responded with a non-intervention policy, so that all foreign states would stay well out of the war. The reality was that Germany and Italy provided colossal assistance, including military forces, to the Nationalist side of the war, while the Soviet Union provided limited and heavily conditioned assistance to the Republicans. Britain and France kept the pretence of non-intervention, while Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union were intervening the heck out of the place. In passing, since those three nations were major players in the Second World War in Europe, it strikes me that, just as we should date the start of the war generally to September 1931 rather than September 1939, so we should date the start of the war in Europe to the start of the Spanish Civil War, on 17 July 1936. Meanwhile, in Britain Clement Attlee, new leader of the Labour Party was gradually moving the party towards accepting the need for rearmament. What’s also striking is that, like Churchill, he was looking for some kind of collaboration with the Soviet Union if it came to war with Germany, but even more the United States, which both felt should take the leadership of a Western alliance to defend democracy. Illustration: Italian anti-tank gun at the battle of Guadalajara in the Spanish Civil War. CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Photo by H.G. von Studnitz, from Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2006-1204-500, Spanien, Schlacht um Guadalajara.jpg Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

3 Nov 202414min

Britain and France reckoned they’d secured the support of Italy, in the Stresa Front, for their efforts to contain Hitler. Britain was the first to undermine that pleasant understanding, by signing a naval agreement with Nazi Germany on its own. Even so, the British government did what it could to keep Mussolini’s Italy in the Front, a position shared by Winston Churchill. He was already ringing alarm bells over Germany but, proving how difficult prediction can be, he got Italy (and indeed Japan) completely wrong. Then Mussolini showed his true colours by preparing to launch an invasion of Abyssinia, which is now Ethiopia, to extend Italy’s imperial holdings in Africa. Doing so meant spitting in the face of the League of Nations, even though Italy was a member. But Mussolini could do that with impunity. The League, only as powerful as its members, and above all its great power members, Britain and France, allowed it to be, took no effective action against it. In the face of that spinelessness, Mussolini went ahead with his invasion. That had a surprising impact on the Labour Party, whose annual conference started the day after news of the Italian invasion arrived in Britain. Labour decided that it had no further patience with its declared pacifist leader, George Lansbury. He resigned and the jostling started to pick a successor. Clement Attlee, who’d been Lansbury’s deputy, was given the job on a temporary basis, as Britain went into the 1935 general election. It was a huge win for the Tories but Labour also did well, winning nearly three times as many seats as in 1931. Attlee who’d led the party into that success was boosted by it. Viewed by many as poorly qualified for the job and short of personality, he saw off others who thought themselves better suited, and to the surprise of many, was confirmed as leader. Illustration: Italian officers consulting maps as they advance into Abyssinian territory. Public domain Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

27 Okt 202414min

In the mid-1930s, there was still widespread hope across Britain that a major war could be avoided. That could be achieved, many believed, by international negotiation towards disarmament, and by collaboration to enforce the decisions reached. A body existed to achieve just that: the League of Nations. It called a major conference, chaired by Arthur Henderson, former British Foreign Secretary, former leader of the Labour Party. It set out with plenty of great intentions but achieved nothing. Too few countries were prepared to trust others enough to make the cuts in their armaments that might have made a real difference. Meanwhile, another British politician, this time a Conservative, Lord Robert Cecil, one of the architects of the League of Nations and president of the British association dedicated to supporting it, the League of Nations Union, was campaigning for international collaboration to give real force to decisions of the League or elsewhere, so that breaches could be genuinely and effectively punished. He organised an unofficial referendum in Britain, the Peace Ballot, completed in 1935, that showed how massively the British people supported efforts for peace. Sadly, though, that year, 1935, would be the peak of such efforts. Thereafter events would drive the world increasingly towards another war. Indeed, one of those events had already happened, as early as in September 1931: the Japanese invasion of the Chinese territory of Manchuria. Someone like the outstanding political cartoonist David Low would go so far as to identify that moment as the true start of the Second World War. That notion, with which this episode starts, rather suggests that efforts to prevent the Second World War reached their peak, only to fall away afterwards, when it could be argued that, actually, it had already started. Illustration: The Doormat, cartoon of 1933, by David Low. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

20 Okt 202414min

We start this episode with the unveiling of the statue of Edward Carson at Stormont Castle in Northern Ireland. It rather makes the point that a man who helped organise an armed force against British law, and even to call on British soldiers to mutiny rather than fire on rebels – no doubt because to him and his friend they were the right kind of rebels – could get away with such behaviour if he had the backing of the right circles of power back in England. Not just get away with it, in fact, but be honoured with a statue. From there, we move to India where a man like Gandhi kept finding himself being gaoled by the British authorities for actions far less noxious than Carson’s. A brown-skinned Hindu simply couldn’t be allowed to call on action against the rule of the British government, even if that action was far less subversive of the law than what the white-skinned Protestant Carson had championed. As it happens, the National government in Britain was beginning to consider the possibility of granting a little more autonomy to India, though nothing like as much as enjoyed by white-ruled holdings, such as Australia or Canada, which enjoyed Dominion Status, giving them almost independence. That was far too little for Gandhi, or for Clement Attlee and his Labour Party. On the other hand, it was far too much for Winston Churchill. He fought the government all the way to the point, by the end, of becoming something of a figure of fun in the House of Commons. No one proved that better than his chief tormentor, Leo Amery, despite being a fellow Conservative and a contemporary of his at Harrow school. He used mockery against him in a way that Churchill himself might have been proud of had he used it himself. But the real danger for Churchill was that he was perilously close to becoming a bore. Illustration: the Carson statue outside the home of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Stormont Castle, outside Belfast. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

13 Okt 202414min

It was a terrible time for Labour, down to just 52 MPs and having to choose a new leadership from a narrow pool from which most of the brightest lights, in the view of many but above all their own, were excluded. The Tories were on top of the world, with a clear majority. MacDonald still led the the National government, but in complete dependence on the Conservatives for his survival in office. A sharp change in direction of economic policy ended the linkage to the gold standard and introduced tariffs on imports. Both initiatives started to improve things, with growth back and with some strength. But the poor remained desperately poor. Illustration: composite of the Labour Party leader, George Lansbury, and deputy leader, Clement Attlee, chosen by default because the obvious candidates weren’t available. Both photos from the National Portrait Gallery: Attlee by Walter Stoneman, 1930, NPG x163783; Lansbury by Howard Coster, 1930s, NPG Ax136093 Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

6 Okt 202414min