Preston Red Thread

An electronic journal for all those on the Left in the greater Preston area.

#5 – June 2018

Edited by: Mick Mulcahy, Dave Savage & Michael McKrell

“The task of the media in a democracy is not to ease the path of those who govern, but to make life difficult for them by constant vigilance as to how they exercise the power they only hold in trust from the people.”

Editorial

Our fifth edition has an analysis of contemporary trade unionism from Andy Birchall, some lessons from Vietnam that might be applied in Afghanistan and a look back at Britain's fascist traitors of 1940. Chris Lomax has another excellent brace of radical songs and Alan Dent has a review of a powerful new book on Israel.

The editors hold a wide range of party political affiliations and all are (or were) trade unionists representing members in the greater Preston area. The project is not overseen, directed or funded by any political party or trade union. All decisions are made collectively by the editors. If you want to get involved, by sending us an article or review, please let us know – [email protected].

American Hubris – The Unlearnt Lessons of the War in Vietnam

General George Patton, political reactionary and brilliant general of the Second World War, once boasted that:

“Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle... Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American.”

Well, discounting the stalemate in the Korean War, the resistance of the Vietnamese people to colonial domination (Japanese, French and American) inflicted a military and psychological defeat on the USA, which still resonates three decades later. 2018 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive, both of which had a crucial impact on the Vietnam War and how it was perceived, in America and around the world. That Bush, Obama and now Trump are repeating the strategic errors of the Vietnam War in Afghanistan, reveals the continued dominance of the military-industrial complex, the awful weakness of American democracy and the stubborn refusal of the military elite to admit their counter-insurgency doctrines and dogma were, are, and have been proven to be, wrong.

The Second World War saw the eclipse of the European empires by the USA and the USSR. American industry - so vast it could equip the Allies with huge quantities of war materiel and still steal commercial markets from its British, French and Dutch rivals - now had economic and financial interests across the globe. President Roosevelt, the architect of US intervention in the Second World War, had no illusions as to the nature of Stalin's regime in the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s. But he held out hope for an understanding with the Soviet Union when the war was won. Indeed, the USSR was exhausted by the war, tens of millions of its citizens had been killed and large swathes of the country had been devastated by the competing armies. The notion that the military and civilian leadership of the USSR was so bloodthirsty that they were keen for war in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War must be wide of the mark.

Such was the belligerence of American policy that détente would have to wait until 1969, when it was revealed to Richard Nixon (as it had been to Lyndon Johnson before him) that the Vietnam War could not, militarily, be won. As the Nixon Administration sought ways to get out from under its commitment to South Vietnam, it also decided to try and soothe tensions between the two superpowers and their growing nuclear arsenals. This bore fruit when the USSR proposed a nuclear weapons limitation treaty, an international convention on biological weapons and an anti-ballistic missile treaty (all signed by the USA and USSR in 1972). In 1975 the USSR proposed the Helsinki Accords, which set out economic, political and human rights. US delegates rightly enumerated breaches of human rights in the Soviet Union. But the real divergence was on the superpowers' 'rights' to interfere in the internal affairs of third countries. Repeated American intervention in countries across the globe, especially Latin American and South East Asia, was either denied outright by American delegates or justified on the grounds of 'securing human rights.' When the USSR sent troops to bolster a friendly regime in Afghanistan in 1979, Ronald Reagan exploited the issue to help him win the presidential election of 1980. Thereafter, even the desirability of détente was rejected by Reagan's bellicosity.

The deliberate deceit, of successive incumbents of the American presidency, in preventing honest military and political analyses of the Vietnam conflict from coming to light, was a crime against democracy. And one that has undermined the reputation of the office of president ever since. War aims in Vietnam were often stated as preventing the 'spread of communism' and 'preserving democracy' in South Vietnam. Yet, there was nothing that could realistically be described as democratic government in the South. What there was, was a regime friendly to the American government (indeed Saigon was reliant on the US economically, politically and militarily); a government willing to accept a huge military presence on its soil as part of the USA's global defence of its 'strategic interests.' The parallels with Afghanistan are obvious. The stated reason that successive presidents have given for maintaining the pro-American regime in Kabul have grown over the years: to eliminate the 'safe haven' for terrorists; to restrict the expansion of Iranian influence; to exert influence on different elements of the Pakistani regime; to demonstrate to the Chinese and the Russians that the US still believes in global hegemony.

Yet, the USA did not have the same attitude to Afghanistan in 2001. What has changed? Well, the very fact that there is a significant American presence in Afghanistan means huge profits for the American defence industry. Not only the manufacturers of munitions, vehicles, aircraft and so on but also the Halleburtons and Blackwaters of this world. At the time of writing, there are 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan but 20,000 mercenaries. All need housing, feeding, equipping and paying – by the US government. One conservative estimate is that $100 billion of profit has been made by the various private sector defence companies between 2007 and 2017 (this includes campaigns in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and so on). The establishment of permanent bases in Central Asia also satisfies the rabid imperialists, who see no future for the USA that does not involve it dominating every other country on Earth.

Practically-speaking, the US ruling elite needs enemies for its quiescent population to be scared of, otherwise there is a danger that uncomfortable questions will begin to be asked about the necessity for so much defence spending. Especially when there is so much poverty at home, healthcare is so poor and state education is so underfunded. Between them, therefore, the elite and their flunkeys in the media perpetuate the myth of a constantly endangered USA. In 1957 Douglas MacArthur, a senior general in the Second World War and the Korean War, warned against unnecessarily-bloated defence spending programmes.

“Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”

The USA is deemed to be in a permanent state of war – 'the war on terror,' the war on drugs, the war on crime - with all that that means socially and politically. The call for all 'patriotic' Americans to unite under the flag is heard regularly. The likes of Fox News and the far-right radio 'shock-jocks' denigrate anyone perceived to be criticising the government or the military. Indeed, there is an almost religious reverence for the military in the minds of millions of Americans. How often do you hear, “you servicemen and women are the best of us,” or, “the men and women of our armed forces are America's finest.” And when there are no enemy nation-states to be destroyed, there are always numerous terrorist organisations, some of whom were created by previous disastrous US interventions and or were supported by the US in the past (the sons of the anti-Soviet Afghan Mujahedeen, for example, are now leading the anti-US Taliban).

When détente with the USSR and China was underway in the early 1970s, the American elite were left with the North Vietnamese as almost the sole major bogey-man. Presidential spokesmen reiterated the dogma of the Domino Theory and the necessity to defend 'liberty' in South East Asia. Yet, despite vigorous attempts to demonise the North Vietnamese, anti-war feeling in the American population mounted steadily. Scepticism and war-weariness was fuelled by the widely-disseminated footage of death and suffering in Vietnam, shown daily on TV news channels. Anti-war feeling was bolstered by the powerful testimonies of disillusioned veterans. But it became increasingly obvious, as lack of military progress turned into defeat and retreat in the 1970s, that the American people had been lied-to.

It turned out that South Vietnam was not such a strategic bulwark against Communism after all, and that it was not worth defending with the lives of American soldiers. As also eventually, one assumes, it will turn out Afghanistan is not of such strategic value that it is worth the lives of Americans either. Nixon steadily withdrew American military support from the Saigon regime, knowing very well that the South Vietnamese Army was in no state to fend-off its enemies alone. When the inevitable came, too many of the South's soldiers refused to fight and die for a corrupt and vicious regime, against an implacable foe. Desertions multiplied, the military collapsed and the civilian leadership fled. Nixon washed his hands of the whole affair and denied any US responsibility, for what had been a bloody and unedifying end to America's worst military defeat. The humiliating scenes, at the very end of the war, where countless Vietnamese civilians were clamouring to be taken out of the country, literally scaling the walls of the US Embassy in some cases, were shocking proof of the mendacity and double-dealing that characterised the USA's disaster in Vietnam.

Efforts to persuade US opinion that American troops were achieving success in Vietnam were dealt a severe blow by the Battle of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive of 1968. At Khe Sanh, American forces were surrounded but held off the besieging North Vietnamese long enough to entirely evacuate the US base there of its personnel, if not all of its equipment. The Vietnamese proclaimed possession of the battlefield and, therefore, victory. US commanders opined that they had planned to evacuate the base in any case. Conversely, as a purely military operation anyway, the Tet Offensive was a failure for the North Vietnamese. American forces survived the onslaught on their military and civilian command and control centres and fought-off the attackers. But, it was the fact that the North Vietnamese were seen to be capable of such a huge offensive, one that reached deep into the heartlands of US-controlled South Vietnam, as well as isolating individual American bases like Khe Sanh, that utterly contradicted the government's assertion that the enemy's will to wage war was being worn down. If Hanoi's troops still held much of the South Vietnamese countryside and their forces could assault the US Embassy in Saigon at will, then how could the US be winning the war?

Yet, this is the US attitude in Afghanistan in 2018. The Kabul regime controls a tiny part of the country, the rest is in the hands of a range of indigenous armed groups (leavened with foreign volunteers) some of whom fight each other, as well as the American-backed regime. Columns of armoured vehicles and squadrons of helicopters provide the Afghan Army with the kind of mobility that is needed in such a vast and mountainous country. When they choose to deploy in terrain that maximises their superior fire-power, they can dominate the insurgents on the battlefield. But the futility of a purely military strategy was shown in Vietnam time and again and is being shown in Afghanistan now. In Vietnam, American troops were regularly helicoptered into an area and then tasked with seizing some commanding feature of the terrain, often a hill or ridge. At great cost, American infantry would then take and hold this position. The area was then declared cleared of the enemy and a victory was announced by commanders poring over maps in Saigon. But as American combat soldiers came to realise with much bitterness, as soon as they left the hill or ridge, enemy forces re-infiltrated the area and nullified the American 'success.'

This was seen in Afghanistan, too. In 2006, British troops in Helmand province ejected Taliban forces from villages and towns and held them for Kabul, often at great cost in British and Afghan lives. Then, when handed over to Afghan control, all too often they were lost to insurgents and had to be retaken. In Vietnam, the obvious inability of the Americans and South Vietnamese to control the countryside eventually led to 'body-count' being adopted as the prime indicator of the success of military operations. This militarily stupid decision did nothing to change the facts on the ground. But it induced the further brutalisation of American soldiers, who were told that killing the enemy in ever-greater numbers was the chief indicator of unit success. Unit and formation commanders widened the definition of enemy combatants to allow the inclusion of women and children (the alleged participation in combat of women and children was grossly exaggerated by US commanders), with the result that soaring and eagerly celebrated 'body-count' statistics began to defy belief.

The kind of dehumanisation of the enemy that had been encouraged by the Americans in their war against the Japanese, was repeated in Korea and in Vietnam. It is easier to kill without compunction when you convince yourself your victims are sub-human. The explicit racism is clear to see in contemporary accounts. Rape and murder of civilians by US servicemen in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam during the Vietnam War was all too common. 1968 is also the anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, a particularly nauseating example of unbridled brutality, carried out by US soldiers. But this is not a twentieth- century innovation, of course. It can be traced back to the barbaric institution of slavery in the USA and the various wars and massacres which removed the Native Americans from their ancestral lands. Perhaps it is easier to kill when you are controlling a drone from a comfortable USAF base in the USA? Certainly, there is no reluctance to kill civilians amongst American commanders. Since Trump became Commander-in-Chief the USAF has recorded that 4,361 weapons were used in Afghanistan. The figure was 1,337 in 2016. It is no coincidence that 2016 was the worst year for child casualties in Afghanistan - 3512 - with 923 deaths and 2,589 injuries. But 2017 looks set to exceed even the 2016 figures. In the first half of 2017 alone, there were 987 child casualties (283 deaths and 704 injured).

So, if we can safely dispense with 'body-count,' what are the parameters of success in Afghanistan? The defeat of the various Taliban factions, Al-Qaeda, ISIS and so on? The establishment of a democratic regime in Kabul which governs the bulk of the country? The suppression of Afghan poppy cultivation, which contributes to the international trade in heroin? One of the problems is that when one war-aim becomes demonstrably impossible, politically unacceptable or financially ruinous, then another is promoted to take its place. The notion that the Afghan campaign prevents terrorism in the USA is nonsense, of course, as most of those who commit such crimes are US citizens, or have lived in the US for many years. The Afghan government – like the South Vietnamese republic - cannot be meaningfully described as democratic and its writ does not run much beyond the greater-Kabul area. And as for poppy production, there has been no significant diminution, indeed most estimates suggest the war has raised prices, which has energised and expanded cultivation of the poppy. Those in Europe and North America who are frustrated by the failure of NATO forces to subdue Afghanistan, would do well to remember that it is one of a handful of countries never to be conquered. Alexander the Great, the Persian, Moghul and British Empires, the Soviet Union and now the USA – all have failed.

The alarming fact is that many US generals then and now (as Patton would doubtless have agreed), have never accepted that they were defeated in Vietnam. If only they had been given more troops, if only they had been allowed to bomb North Vietnam and its borders with Cambodia, Laos and China at will, if only the soldiers' morale had not been destroyed by the anti-war movement at home. Then, they say, the generals would have won the war. One of these generals is David Petraeus, commander of American forces in Iraq (2007-2008) and then Afghanistan (2010-2011), he went on to become Director of the CIA (2011-2012). Like many others, his career began in the shadow of the Vietnam disaster. In his day many cadets were taught by officers for whom Vietnam had been the formative experience. 58,000 Americans had been killed (alongside at least hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese as well many citizens from a variety of countries in the region). Moreover, the American military had been humiliated. Petraeus's professional opinion was that US forces in Vietnam had fought the war in the wrong way. He is one of many historians and senior officers who feel strongly that a different approach would have produced a victory. Like the generals currently dominating the Whitehouse and the Pentagon, Petraeus played on his image as a thinking soldier to convince the politicians (most of whom know nothing of the wider world, never mind the intricacies of counter- insurgency warfare) that the 'next Vietnam' can and should be won.

The likes of Generals Mattis (presently Secretary of Defence) and McMaster (presently National Security Adviser) have insisted that attacking North Vietnam more vigorously, including full-scale invasion and the kind of bombing that devastated Germany and Japan during the Second World War, would have brought more positive results than merely trying to retain control of South Vietnam. McMaster also apportions part of the blame for this on the reluctance of the American Chiefs of Staff themselves to insist upon it. The other main contention of the generals is that insufficient efforts were made to 'capture hearts and minds' in Vietnam. Indeed, those civilians that might have supported a South Vietnamese administration that governed more in the interests of its people, saw little to enthuse them in the self-serving generals and ministers who occupied the palaces of Saigon. There was no plan – short, medium or long-term – for any of the vast wealth apportioned by the USA to the Saigon regime, to be used to demonstrate why its citizens might be better off in a capitalist economy. Instead funds were siphoned-off into the bank accounts of war profiteers, corrupt ministers, generals and their lackeys in the civil administration, intelligence agencies, secret police and law enforcement. It is difficult to see how American soldiers and private sector contractors have ever captured hearts and minds in Iraq or Afghanistan. Indeed, the well-evidenced brutality of mercenaries (from the likes of Halleburton) towards Iraqi citizens in 2000s caused huge resentment in Iraq. As did the documented war crimes of US military personnel, supposedly acting under rules of engagement that took proper cognisance of the Geneva Conventions.

This fallacy – that counter-insurgency can overcome the will of a fiercely-independent people, if only the right military resources are made available and exploited with ruthless brutality – is still the accepted policy of the US military and, therefore, its politicians. So convinced are these generals that their theory is universally applicable – and so desperate are they to finally prove that their predecessors in Vietnam were cheated of victory - that there are now scores and scores of US-led or US-backed counter-insurgency campaigns underway across the globe. Essentially, these are experiments designed to prove a theory. Indeed the new doctrine is now compulsory reading at American military colleges.

The glaring fact that US decision-makers will not or cannot accept is this: that in most if not all of these conflicts, the corruption, repression and bad governance of regimes (often installed and or supported by the US) are often themselves the chief drivers of discontent and violence in those same countries. Political solutions – power-sharing governments, autonomy for regions with different ethnic or religious majorities, UN peace-keeping measures, international mediation – all are rejected. This is because the generals of today, like those in Vietnam, always see victory around the corner. A 'surge' of troops here, another dozen drones there, or the use of ordnance previously deemed unsuitable for counter-insurgency, all are seized-upon as the next step that will finally bring the insurgency to an end.

And the ignorant and bellicose politicians swallow it nine times out of ten. Partly because the majority of them are in hock to the defence lobby and partly because they face such feeble opposition. They have no opposition in the Congress, most – whether Democrat or Republican – support each and every war as a matter of 'loyalty.' There is little effective opposition in the country, independent trade unions are neutered and struggling to survive. While the small socialist groups have a voice they have little influence on the political machine. The anti-war and anti-capitalist campaign groups are effectively refused access to mainstream media and rely on social media to get their message across. There is, too, an absence of concern about the revolving-door enjoyed by generals who move smoothly between the US armed services, presidential cabinets and private defence firms. If a British general were to retire, join a defence corporation and then become a minister with responsibilities for defence matters (presumably via a peerage), it would at least raise eyebrows. Not so in the USA. Indeed the former generals appointed by Trump as cabinet members were welcomed with relief by many. It is hoped that such confident characters will be more likely to rein-in their ignorant, volatile and narcissistic president. Yet, this depressing state of affairs, if allowed to deteriorate further, will destroy democracy in the United States of America. It was a former general, who become president in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower, who warned against Americans allowing themselves to walk into this nightmare.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

One former soldier, and adherent to the US anti-insurgency dogma, visited Vietnam decades after the end of the war. In an extended talk with a former North Vietnamese officer, the American insisted:

“'You never beat us on the battlefield.' Colonel Tu was the officer's name: 'That may be so,' replied his former enemy, 'but it is also irrelevant.'”

And this is another of the great unlearnt lessons of Vietnam: that where a determined guerilla force is supported by an oppressed civilian population, it can only be defeated when it agrees its cause is lost. No matter the scale of the military might of a great power, its ability to win conventional battles against a lesser opponent is no guarantee of success in a counter-insurgency war. Indeed, the more death and destruction that is doled out by the militarily-stronger power, the more resentment and hatred is produced and the more the population come to support the insurgents and despise their persecutors. What myths will be disseminated to defend the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan? They will probably look very similar to those deployed in the wake of the defeat in Vietnam. There must be – and in the end there almost always is – a political solution to such conflicts. Only when American democracy is renewed and invigorated by democratic socialists, to the point where the people are capable of overcoming the power and influence of American capital, will we see an end to these cruel and devastating imperial wars.

Dave Savage was a Trade Unionist (in Preston) and a Labour Party Branch Secretary (in South Ribble) until the latter half of 2018. He is presently living and working in London.

This article first appeared on the Sodalis blog in January 2018.

Readers can view other contributions to Sodalis at: https://sodalissite.wordpress.com/

The Crisis of Contemporary Trade Unionism

Contemporary trade unionism can only be understood in the context of the deepest and longest economic crisis since before the Second World War. The forces arrayed against labour, and therefore labour unions, are rallying to serve the interests of capital at the expense of all else. Even Keynes is left on the shelf in favour of neo-liberal ideology. And so the very policies that might perhaps rescue capital and its own fundamentally flawed economic, political and social system are ignored.

In the past decade we have seen ever more people forced into insecure work as a direct result of Conservatives policies of false austerity. Even as that mouthpiece of profit- maximisers, George Osborne, continued to insist “we are all in it together,” the Tories presided over a huge rise in zero hours contracts and part-time and temporary working. Many of these workers, despite being employed, are compelled to use food banks. Under successive governments such workers have been forced onto benefits or to live on charity. The economy, therefore, has failed to benefit the reserve workforce. At the same time, the establishments have become ever richer, with their arrogance displayed on a daily basis.

In these economic and political circumstances, vulnerable people need one another and the Labour Movement more than ever. The unions should be attracting workers like never before. The economy has changed drastically under neo-liberalism, yet the skewed relationship workers have with capital is ever starker. No matter what sector of the economy people work in, the relationship between Capital and Labour remains essentially the same. It is, fundamentally, about the relationship between those who own and control essential parts of the economy and the rest of us that work for them. Neo-liberalism has also placed ever more people in debt, debt that many will be fortunate if they are able to pay off over a whole lifetime. Debt that keeps people working two or three insecure, badly-paid jobs, to avoid the catastrophe of losing everything should their income fall below a certain level.

This economic relationship perpetually places those who labour in a very vulnerable place. A powerless place, indeed, unless labour - those people who are part of the labouring class - come together and act in the collective interest of all. Until workers join together in unison, in common cause, to ensure we have a greater redistribution of the wealth that labour creates. Unions are a positive force for good. If unions hadn’t been invented, if the people who came before us hadn’t struggled - against employers, their agents (in the form of managers and supervisors) and their representatives in Parliament. Then, it can be argued, people under such pressure would have come together anyway, to form the kind of organisations that allow them to freely associate, in their struggle for a better deal under capitalism.

So, if people do join a union, what do they receive in return, what do they get for their money, stopped out of wages every week or month? If people are in some sort of trouble, or have an accident, the union will be there for you, helping you with the case. The union also has a legal helpline that people can call with regards to issues beyond the workplace. Most unions offer discounts on car and home insurance and in high-street stores. They will help with a PPI claim, provide courses and information on some of the workplace issues, including on how to cope with redundancy and retirement. It will even supply you with a union card, lanyard and a badge to say you are part of the union. There will be a stress ball to help ease the daily pressure of working life, T-shirts and mugs with the union's logo.

But a union, of course, is much more than this. It is a workplace democracy. Members, in theory at least, elect union representative to take up issues at work with the employer and to play a part in the democratic structures that decide union rules and set policy. Union representatives are trained to help organise and support members in the workplace. A wide range of learning is available, with courses across a range of subjects, including Employment, Health, Safety and Welfare Law. Unions negotiate with employers on a range of terms and conditions of employment, like holidays, sick pay and pensions. Any member can stand for election and become a union representative. This workplace activity, however, has become ever more difficult in recent decades, with employers reluctant to release people for trade union duties.

One major area where change is needed, is the necessity to restructure our union movement to ensure workers in different economic sectors have equal participation. It is encouraging that unions have now made membership available for those outside of formal work. And these sections need to be energised, so that unions become as much about community organisation as they are about workplace organisation. The union employs people itself, to ensure that members’ interests are served beyond the workplace. These employees are designed to be there to support elected representatives, especially in disputes where the law greatly restricts freedom of association. Here lies the main issue. Since the anti-trade union legislation of the 1980s, 1990s and 2017, unions have been greatly restrained from doing what it says on the tin. It is very difficult (beyond casework) to act, or react, in the interests of those who join the union movement in the workplace. It is very difficult to call industrial action without the help of the legal profession, who very tentatively lead representatives and members through a morass of legislation. Legislation which is designed to give the employers a cool-off period, a chance to manipulate members into not supporting their union when a dispute arises. Perhaps, our union banners should read: 'United We Stand Divided We Fall...After A Long Drawn Out Legal Process That Will Eventually Allow Us To Do What It Says Here!'

In many workplaces struggles are immediate and employers are daily, no hourly, abusing their employees. Such abuse requires an immediate challenge, one that says: ' if you talk to or treat people in the way you are doing, we will stop the job.' That says: 'if you don’t listen and negotiate with us, we will go to other areas of the business and ask them to support us, in our endeavours to redress this injustice.' The term solidarity means if people are is struggle, to protect or improve their terms and conditions or employment, and these people demonstrate outside another workplace, then other workers do not go into work. They respect the picket and struggle together, standing in solidarity with those who face injustice. This solidarity action, known as secondary picketing, is also illegal. People join unions for one basic reason, when their employer or one of their agents abuses them, the union stands up and out says: 'stop this or there will be consequences.' Not the kind of consequences that involve protracted personal cases and interminable legal action. Unions need to be ready to say to employers that there are consequences for workplace injustice, that where there is an immediate problem, there will be an immediate response from the union - “this stops, or we do!”

The inability of unions to organise instant redress for workers leaves them feeling vulnerable, aggrieved and constantly manipulated by their employers. Up and down the country, in a huge variety of workplaces, there is a massive gap between the employers' ability to inflict injustice at will, and the inability of the workers to redress their grievances with the same rapidity. It seems the unions are placing a massive effort into electing an alternative Labour government. A government for the many, not the few, with progressive policies, including the repeal of the anti-trade union legislation. But what if Labour fails to be elected? The establishment, unsettled as they are, seem to have a winning formula, that is supported by the agents of capital, individuals and groups who plainly understand where their own interests lie and are ready to pull out all the stops to protect them. If this happens, and unions fail to take direct action against anti-trade union legislation, and in the interest of members and the wider population, then what next? The Labour movement needs to act collectively to ensure repeal. Only then, when people can freely associate (under Article 11 of the Human Rights Act), will unions have real value again. A value that allows people on the ground to organise and build a power base that can meaningfully challenge the abuse workers face in their daily lives. A value that no amount of money can buy. That value is solidarity.

Andy Birchall is a former activist with the NUM, UCU and Chorley TUC. He is a life-long member of the Labour Party, a Branch Secretary of a Unite Branch in Wigan and an active NHS campaigner.

Review

State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel Thomas Suarez Olive Branch Press ISBN 978-1-56656-068-9

The Israeli claim to Palestine rests on four precepts:

God promised the land to Abraham;

Jewish people settled and developed the land; the international community granted political sovereignty in Palestine to Jewish people; the territory was captured in defensive wars.

All four are dubious. In 2018 can we accept that god grants legal title to anything? The right to freedom of belief is a fundamental human right, but that a possible deity can be claimed as indefeasible proof of a right to ownership is inadmissible, for the obvious reason that the claim can’t be granted any objectivity. A woman may claim the fairies at the bottom of her garden have granted her the right to a piece of the earth, but why should the rest of us accept it? That some Jewish people settled and developed some of the land is uncontroversial but across the three thousand years of the Israeli claim, a significant variety of people were involved in the same way. If Israel claims the support of the international community, then logically it should comply with the rules that community agrees. Hence, it ought to withdraw its illegal settlements and lift the siege of Gaza. The wars and conflicts by which Israel gained control of the land it now occupies were by no means exclusively defensive.

This book examines in thorough and excruciating detail the terrorism which brought Israel into existence. Suarez has unearthed some previously ignored documents in the British archives which establish the historical accuracy of his thesis: that far from being isolated incidents carried out by a few rogue elements, Zionist terror was co-ordinated, sustained, planned, conscienceless and sustained beyond the establishment of the Israeli State. If you’re unfamiliar with Irgun, Lehi, the Haganah, and more organizations convinced that the brutal slaughter of anyone who stood in their way (including Jews) was legitimate in the campaign to seize the land granted by god, this book will enlighten you.

Partly the book is a catalogue of the barbarism. Suarez has chosen to do this, presumably, to make clear the evidence is incontrovertible. Some of the atrocities are famous: the bombing of the King David hotel in Jerusalem on 22nd July 1946 by the Irgun, for example. Others, though no less vicious and motivated by an insane conviction of rectitude, might have slipped from public notice but for this book. The Irgun was active between 1931 and 1948. Its philosophy, if that’s not too elevated a term for a belief in thuggery, was the Revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky, who believed every Jew has the right to enter Palestine and only armed force could ensure a Jewish State. Lehi, often known as the Stern Gang after its founder, Avraham Stern, was born in 1940. Its aim was the establishment of a “new totalitarian Hebrew republic”. It sought alliance with both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and thought Britain a greater threat to the Jews than the Nazis. After 1942 it sympathised with Stalin and in 1944 declared its faith in National Bolshevism. Yitzhak Shamir, who became Prime Minister of Israel in 1983 was its erstwhile leader. The Lehi underground newspaper The Front declared: “Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat…We have before us the command of the Torah: Ye shall blot them out to the last man. Stern set out eighteen principles of rebirth of the State of Israel. The ninth was: Constant war against those who stand in the way of fulfilling the goals.

Those who stood in the way included Jews. The die-hard Zionists wouldn’t accept, for example, that displaced people who were victims of the Nazi holocaust should choose any destination after liberation other than Palestine. Sacrificing Jews in the cause of Zionism was perfectly admissible. As Suarez points out, if Zionism is identified with being Jewish, then Zionist terror encourages exactly the anti-Jewish sentiment violent Zionism feeds on. All utterly self-righteous creeds when put into practice end up devouring their own children.

The State of Israel, as it has existed since 1948, couldn’t have been brought about without extreme violence. A homeland for victims of the holocaust did not imply what Israel became. Even the misguided Balfour Declaration recognised the rights of the inhabitants of Palestine. As Suarez observes, the Palestinians were slow to respond to Israeli brutality. The Israelis required them to become violent. It was a specifically pursued policy and obviously still is. The Israeli double-bind is simple: either the Palestinians submit, in which case they will be wiped out, or they resist, in which case they are terrorists, who must be wiped out.

A few examples of the psychopathic violence of the Zionist terrorists (every bit as demented as that we see today from so-called Islamic State) will give a flavour of the outrages enumerated in detail: on 22nd August 1949, Israeli soldiers kidnapped a Bedouin girl, aged about fifteen. They took her to an IDF camp, stripped her and made her stand under water pipe as the soldiers rubbed her with soap. She was then raped by three soldiers. Her hair was shorn and her head washed in kerosene. She was gang raped over a period of three days. Then they dug her grave in front of her and shot her. When this atrocity came to light, the Israelis claimed it was an exception and the soldiers involved untypical of the IDF. Suarez points out, however, that Ben-Gurion’s elite Palmach was well-known for murder and rape. In November 1940 the passengers from three illegal immigrant ships were transferred by the British to the Patria which was to take them to safe haven in Mauritius. At 9.15 on the morning of 25th November, an explosion blew the ship apart. It keeled over within fifteen minutes killing some 267 people, more than 200 of them Jews seeking refuge from the European war. The bombing was carried out by the Haganah (forerunner of the IDF) under the control of Moshe Sharett, later to be Israel’s Prime Minister. The Zionists spread the lie that the passengers had blown up the ship themselves in distress over being unable to enter Palestine. Thus, an evil act of Zionist terror was spun to into Zionist propaganda. On December 18th 1947, after the UN had passed Resolution 181(the partition of Palestine), Palmach attacked the picturesque village of Khisas, a mixed Christian-Muslim community. The assault began at 9 pm. Houses were blown up, burying people in their beds. 15 Palestinians, including 5 children died. The operation was led by Yigal Allon, a future IDF general and Israeli statesman. The villagers were unarmed. They posed no threat. It was later revealed that the Palmach was aware of the benign nature of the settlement and engaged in the attack for “experience”.

The Zionist leadership saw partition as a mere temporary expedient. As early as 1937, when partition was first suggested, Ben-Gurion had reassured the Zionist Executive that “in the wake of the establishment of the State, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” The Zionist project has never accepted the idea of a Palestinian State on the land it considers to have been its birth-right for three millennia. Prior to partition the CIA warned that Zionists would never accept it. The Arab representatives at the UN, on the other hand, based their claim to a Palestinian State on the high-minded principles agreed internationally after the First World War: rejection of conquest, the right to self- determination, democracy. The Zionists engaged in fierce and base propaganda of dehumanization of the Arabs, as conquerors always must.

Israel has had twelve Prime Ministers. More than one is implicated in terrorism. It’s current Prime Minister has written that “nothing justifies terrorism.. it is evil per se.” He’s right. The terrorism which brought the State of Israel into existence was evil per se. It was perpetrated out of conviction based on the four precepts cited at the start of this review. As Suarez argues, the Israeli claim to Palestine is based on racial purity and messianic entitlement. There is no solution to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians (some Israelis deny that such a thing as a Palestinian people has existed, does exist or can exist) without a renunciation by the Israelis of both racial purity and messianic entitlement. They are regressive, outdated, intellectually and morally flawed concepts.

There is much more to say about this indispensable book. It leaves no doubt that violent Zionists had no qualms about employing terrorism in order to fulfil their aims. That is as vile and morally abject as the actions of Islamic State .Apparently intractable conflicts can be resolved. The violence in Northern Ireland was brought to an end by compromise on both sides. Whether the partition of Ireland was a crime against the Irish people may remain a potent question, but the willingness to accept existing realities and to make peace the only worthwhile aim brought a settlement. The same can happen between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but just as Ian Paisley had to ditch his rhetoric of no surrender, so the Israelis will have to let go of messianic entitlement.

In response to the recent events in Gaza, the long-serving Labour MP Louise Ellman was quick to blame Hamas: they encouraged violence; they goad people to attack the fence. It is beyond controversy that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, but Zionist leaders are on record as saying that terrorism by the Palestinians serves their cause. If supporters of Israel are to condemn terrorism, let them condemn the Irgun, Lehi, the Haganah. Then the world will know they are serious about peace.

There have been instances of unacceptable anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and a recent furore. Mrs Ellman takes what could perfectly reasonably be seen as an anti-Palestinian view. Her position is deeply biased. She excuses Israel its faults and heaps all blame on those who, as Suarez argues, have never laid siege to Israel, controlled who may or may not enter Israel, blocked Israeli students from pursuing their education, commandeered Israeli aquifers, decided who Israel’s leaders may be, forbidden Israelis from eating lentils or using shampoo. Why isn’t there a furore over that? Why are there no calls to expel anti- Palestinians from the Labour Party?

Alan Dent is a former Branch Secretary of South Ribble NUT

Peace at Any Price – Britain's Traitors of the Second World War

The myth of 1940, that a united and defiant Britain kept the flame of resistance alive when all others either stood aside or had been conquered, is still glibly promoted by right-wing historians. Too many are unwilling to sully the legend of Britain's 'finest hour' with a clear-eyed assessment of the rank disloyalty, sedition, subversion and abject betrayal that marked out Britain's upper-class traitors. There were working-class traitors, too, of course, which could most obviously be found in the British Union of Fascists. Yet, vastly more dangerous than these tinpot Nazis were the views and activities of the various cliques and conspiracies of rich and powerful people. From their grand homes, palaces, gentlemen's clubs and exclusive restaurants, their tentacles reached deep into the power-structures of Whitehall and Westminster. If they had had their way, Britain would have ceased to fight Nazi Germany in 1940. The appalling consequences of such a capitulation draw us into an exercise in the counter-factual. But it is not invalid to describe the likely consequences of such a decision on British and world history. And it is a question that deserves to be more widely discussed today, so that we learn the lessons. Britain did continue to defy the Nazis after 1940. But it was in spite of the concerted actions of influential and powerful people, who placed their own extremist views and the preservation of their wealth and status, above the survival of Britain as an independent democratic country.

First of all, Britain wasn't really alone after the fall of France in 1940. When Britain declared war in September 1939 she did so alongside France, of course, but also on behalf of a vast and powerful Empire. The self-governing countries, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, were consulted on the declaration of war. Others, such as the indigenous representatives of British subjects in India, were not. For Churchill it was sufficient that the British viceroy assured him that the resources of India would be made available for the war effort. But there was no unity on support for the war within India. Indeed, many mainstream Indian politicians were still asking the British government to clarify its war aims and commit to a timetable for Indian independence, months after the declaration of war. Yet, India still provided hundreds of thousands of troops for the British Army and was a bulwark against the Japanese. Vigorous Japanese attempts to conquer Bengal in 1944 were frustrated by British-led Indian forces and the region eventually became a springboard for the reconquest of lost British South East Asian possessions. Its infrastructure sustained the British naval presence in the Far East, allowing it to be built-up significantly, as victories in Europe allowed increasingly more ships to be sent east. This strategic lift capability enabled British troops to recover the various Dutch, French and British colonies surrendered by the Japanese in 1945. These were then taken over by British forces, sometimes violently, from indigenous nationalist or communists forces and returned to European rule. Australia provided troops for the war, too, as well as a secure and welcoming base for American forces, which remained part of the US Navy's immense supply system until well after the war. Canada provided a substantial military contingent for the Anglo-American invasion of France in 1944, as well as making a large-scale and crucial contribution to defeating German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. It is clear, then, that the United Kingdom was not fighting alone. The British Empire contributed significant and growing military and industrial resources to the defence of Britain, the conquest of North Africa, the invasion of Italy, the reconquest of British colonies lost to the Japanese, the invasion of north-western Europe, the defeat of the Japanese field armies in Burma and the defeat of German forces in Western Europe.

To what extent was there unity in Britain in 1940? Mass Observation – a highly effective social research organisation - consistently reported that a majority of working-class citizens were in favour of continuing the war (though they were often highly critical of government). There were the ideologues of the BUF, of course, but there was no popular wave of subversion of, or sedition against, Churchill's coalition government with the Labour Party. An imitation of Mussolini's Fascist Party, the BUF was led by an aristocratic MP who had first abandoned the Conservative Party to join the Labour Party and then left Labour to form the New Party, before giving this up and embracing fascism. Whilst there was no comprehensive study done of the views of Britain's upper-class, some of the wealthiest and most influential Britons were to be suspected of, and or found guilty of, treason during the Second World War.

Treason was a serious crime under British law, of course, one which normally carried the death penalty in the most egregious cases - though most of those found guilty in court in wartime were imprisoned, or interned if they were caught red-handed but not deemed suitable for public prosecution. Some were guilty of deliberately passing secret information to the enemy, others encouraged sedition and or subversion at home or abroad. Then there were those who conducted secret negotiations with the enemy, or deliberately adversely affected Britain's war effort in some other way. The guilty, therefore, were not just an insignificant number of disaffected working-class folk, whether members of the BUF or not. Rather, they were also wealthy aristocratic landowners, civil servants, serving and retired army officers, Members of Parliament (Lords and Commons), diplomats and businessmen. Given the wealth, power and influence of such people, the effect of their treason far outweighed the often petty activities of the rank and file members of the BUF.

For many traitors their support for Hitler was necessitated by their visceral hatred and deep-seated fear of Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. The revolutions of 1917 were recent history in 1940 and many industrialists, landowners, bankers and so on, saw Hitler as just the kind of leader that was needed to maintain Germany as a formidable counter-weight to the Soviet Union. Such indeed were the warped views of the Right Club, a coterie of men and women from the upper echelons of British society. Meeting in exclusive London nightspots or country homes, the Right Club espoused a severe anti-Semitism, alongside a hatred of Communism and open admiration for Mussolini and Hitler. Churchill's personal adviser on diplomatic matters, Sir Robert Vansittart (who had been edged out of his official position at the Foreign Office in 1938 because of his anti-appeasement views), knew only too well that German requests for an armistice would come thick and fast following the defeat of France in May 1940. And when they did, they were promoted by powerful and influential British figures. This despite parliament and Churchill's public insistence that the British government would entertain no negotiations, talks or parleys with Hitler's Germany. Vansittart commented:

“All our loose-thinkers are on the scent. These people range from bishops and Quakers to cowards and cranks, from capitalists to communists, from peers to ordinary dyspeptics.”

So, via diplomats and officials in neutral countries - including the Vatican, Sweden, Turkey and the USA - the die-hard appeasers, the pro-Nazis and the anti-Semites went to work to divine the details of Germany's terms for a peace deal and then fight hard to foist them on the British government.

The Duke of Bedford co-founded the People's Party at the outbreak of war and called for an immediate end to the war thereafter. In February 1940 he visited Dublin to discuss peace terms with enemy diplomats at the German Embassy. Bedford was considered sufficiently disloyal that he was kept under surveillance by MI5, though on balance it was decided his arrest would be counter-productive. Tory politician Lord Brocket (heir to a huge brewing fortune) was a known Nazi sympathiser. Indeed, that was why he was used by the senior appeaser, Lord Halifax (Foreign Secretary, 1938-1940), to communicate covertly with the Nazi regime. Brocket also exploited his wealth and influence to promote a compromise peace in defiance of the official government position. As did the Duke of Buccleuch (brother-in-law to the king's younger brother and a serving RAF officer) and Kenneth de Courcy (a wealthy tobacco merchant, confidant of the then Edward VIII and former secretary of the right-wing Imperial Policy Group). Both these men used their extensive connections to promote an immediate end to the war, if necessary on terms beneficial to Germany. Richard (Rab) Butler, a British foreign minister, alongside his chief Foreign Secretary Halifax, continued to pursue peace with Germany in breach of Churchill's publicly-stated policy of no negotiation. Eventually, Churchill and his Labour deputy, Clement Attlee, tired of such rank disloyalty and insubordination and, by the end of the year, Halifax had been dispatched to the USA as ambassador and Butler had been sidelined with a move to the Ministry of Education.

De Courcy's influential Imperial Policy Group (he had been its Secretary) had included military officers as well as industrialists, bankers and landowners. It had been dissolved on the outbreak of war but De Courcy retained informal contact with many members. The generals and admirals, of course, came largely from the upper classes and their views would have reflected those of their civilian counterparts. Many would have been mere ordinary Conservatives or die-hard Tories, who feared war with Germany would so weaken Britain that she would be unable to resist Communism at home or the Soviet Union abroad. But there were also those who were sympathetic to, and members of, organisations such as the pro-Nazi Right Club.

Indeed, Major-General JFC Fuller – a decorated army officer and noted military thinker – was a senior member of the BUF and a confidant of its leader, Mosley. Despite his outspoken opposition to the war with Germany, Fuller was not arrested. Lord Sempill, a former RAF officer (whose father had been an equerry of King George V), passed significant intelligence on British military equipment and tactics to the Japanese. His lengthy career in treason had begun in the 1920s but, given his social status and royal connections, Sempill was forgiven and rehabilitated, on the assumption he would sever his nefarious links with Tokyo. But Sempill continued to betray his country throughout the 1930s and into the war years. Even when the Japanese attacked Hong Kong and Malaya in December 1941 he was still brazenly sending the Japanese intelligence. When eventually his office was searched and his phone tapped, there was irrefutable evidence that Sempill had abused his wartime appointment (as an air warfare expert at the Admiralty), to reveal to the Japanese a detailed synopsis of the Allied strategy against the Japanese, as well as a stream of other classified information. The Japanese put Sempill's work to good use in their efforts to destroy British and American military power in the Far East. His treason undoubtedly cost lives, most of them innocent civilians who would be killed in the fighting and still more under Japanese occupation. Yet, disgracefully, Sempill's connections to royalty and the influence of his friends in the government, again saved him. He was not imprisoned, or even arrested. Instead he was forced into an early retirement.

A more junior figure, Patrick Heenan, a British Army intelligence officer stationed in Singapore, was convicted of spying for the Japanese in 1942. Heenan died before he could be executed. Killed, it was rumoured, by his jailers. Army officers, including very senior ones, had form, of course. In 1914 the Curragh Mutiny had seen a host of senior officers in Ireland pre-emptively refuse to carry out certain orders from London. Specifically they refused point-blank to disarm the private armies established by Orangemen and other extremist Protestants to violently prevent the introduction of Home Rule for Ireland. In the Great War, Field-Marshal Haig consistently misled the War Cabinet, failing to admit the scale of battlefield failures and covering-up the British Army mutiny of September 1917 (as well as those mutinies amongst Egyptian and Chinese members of the Labour Corps in the same year, which were put down with appalling violence). The 22nd Earl of Errol, a commissioned British Army officer, was appointed Military Secretary for East Africa despite being a member of the BUF. His openly pro-German position (alongside his boorish personal behaviour) caused so much embarrassment and resentment in British circles in East Africa that, it was rumoured, MI6 had him assassinated in 1941 (though this was and is denied).

Members of the pro-Nazi “peace at any price” Right Club included the 5th Duke of Wellington, the Tory MP John Mackie, Lord Redesdale (a major landowner), Lord Lymington (former MP and landowner), Arnold Leese (a former army officer) and the fabulously wealthy Duke of Westminster. The Right Club (whose anti-Semitic motto was “Perish Judah”) was headed by Captain Archibald Ramsey (a rabidly anti-Semitic pro- Nazi Tory MP) who abused parliamentary privilege to help facilitate one of the most dangerous intelligence leaks of the war. Indeed, it was the actions of the Right Club's Tyler Kent, an American cipher clerk at London's US Embassy - with access to the most top secret communications between Churchill and US President Roosevelt – that persuaded Churchill to take the extreme step of mass internment of aliens. Ramsey fostered a close working relationship between Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff (a British member of the Right Club), who herself had access to enemy intelligence officers in Berlin via that infamous British traitor, William Joyce (popularly known as Lord Haw-Haw).

Churchill's alarm was understandable. Had the secret agreements with Roosevelt been published it would have greatly strengthened the hand of the isolationist bloc in Washington and made an American entry into the war that much less likely. Both Kent and Wolkoff were dealt with quietly but legally, the Americans being as shocked by the security failure as Churchill. MI5 had infiltrated the Right Club and the BUF but they could not be entirely confident that the Kent-Wolkoff relationship was unique. Indeed, MI5 knew that Ramsey and the BUF leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, were in close contact and that many Right Club members were also in the BUF. Given the clear willingness of a minority of BUF members to take on subversive activities, it was not entirely unreasonable that many in government continued to believe that there was a not insubstantial 'Fifth Column' in Britain. So the BUF was banned in May 1940, with Mosley and 740 other fascists interned. Ramsey, and many other Right Club members, were arrested and imprisoned in the same month. The revelation that two civil servants were jailed in 1941 for attempting to pass classified information to the enemy, can hardly have steadied nerves in MI5.

But why continue the fight against Hitler in 1940, when – to many observers - victory seemed all but impossible? Were Buccleuch, De Courcy and Fuller right to see the USSR as the greater threat? Well, to the ancient British goal of preventing one European power from dominating the Continent, and so posing a greater direct threat to the British Isles, was added the danger posed by Nazi Germany to the global imperialist status quo (a state of affairs that hugely benefited the French and British Empires). But beyond all this was the clear and present danger posed to the remaining democratic and unaligned states by global fascism. Whether Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and their satellites in central, southern and south-eastern Europe. Or the militaristic, tyrannical and savagely violent Japanese Empire. An empire whose army in China and Korea encouraged a barbarity in its soldiery that shocked the world (and still does – if you doubt me, consult Knights of the Bushido, A Short History of Japanese War Crimes, Lord Russell of Liverpool, Bath, 1958).

Hitler calculated that Britain would withdraw into its island fastness, and concentrate solely on securing its vast but vulnerable empire, only when the 'Sword of France' was knocked from its hand. So, when the huge French army was swept spectacularly from the Allied order of battle in 1940, Hitler expected a defeated but pragmatic British ruling elite to sue for peace. Hitler wanted the British to return those German colonies lost after the Great War. But, much more importantly, he desired a guarantee that the British would not dispute the European conquests made by Germany since 1939. Intimidatingly, behind the peace offer was a threat. If the British would not parley, then an amphibious assault – Operation Sea Lion - would be launched across the Channel.

Those in the highest social circles, with access to intelligence reports and the latest thinking of Britain's strategists, could find reason enough to fight on in 1940. The plans laid for the occupation of a defeated Britain were detailed and wide-ranging. They were also terrifying. Any peace treaty or armistice agreement would undoubtedly have exacted crippling concessions from a British appeasement government. The military had plans for the disassembling of the British Army and the absorption of its best equipment into the Wehrmacht. Likewise the German Navy was keen to seize as much of the Royal Navy as possible; strategically, an enlarged navy would give Hitler the ability to launch powerful amphibious assaults, against Soviet Russia or even the eastern seaboard of the USA. The Luftwaffe, too, would have spent many happy months exploring the aerodromes and research facilities of the RAF. So far, so predictable.

But it was not just military objectives that concerned German leaders. Workers were needed for the German war economy and the occupation plans directed that the entire able-bodied male population between eighteen and forty-five years of age should be shipped to the Continent, for employment in Europe's fields, factories, mines, workshops, ports and so on. We know, from the actual experience of forced labourers in the Second World War, that conditions were often extremely harsh and a significant proportion of such men did not survive the war. This labour provision was harsher than those imposed on other defeated countries in the Second World War. And it raises doubts as to the future efficiency of Britain's industrial and research facilities, if its skilled men were sent en masse to Europe. But that would have been a problem for the Germans to solve.

So, the analysis so far suggests that a gentleman's end to the war with Hitler was a dangerous pipe-dream. Indeed, it’s not as if even those British appeasers who lacked high-powered connections in government or military, had no notion of what would befall a defeated power of the size, status and wealth as Britain, at the hands of the Nazis. A pro-Nazi British government may well have been all too eager, like Petain's Vichy regime, to placate Hitler and prevent full military occupation, by caving-in to successive demands for ever greater subjugation to the vicissitudes of German political and economic wants and needs. Indeed, Vichy France's craven attitude availed them nothing and they were occupied by the Germans in late 1942. Would Britain have been any different?

There was plenty of evidence of what being dominated by the Nazis meant. In Germany, tens of thousands of trade union, socialist and communist activists had been arrested, killed or dispatched to concentration camps, their organisations outlawed and smashed. German Jews had been treated with increasing brutality since the mid-1930s, their systematic maltreatment well-known in London, Paris and Moscow. Such German oppression had, of course, been extended enthusiastically to the conquered nations of Europe. Poland was singled out for appalling treatment, its priests, army officers and intellectuals were to be liquidated and its population reduced to ignorance and abject servility. Detailed reports of these Europe-wide crimes were brought to London regularly by those escaping the brutality of the German occupation forces. There were also reports from British intelligence officers, resistance fighters, international charities and sympathetic neutrals. The process of hate-filled murder and destruction in Occupied Europe began in late 1939 but it had been trialled and tested in Germany. A defeated Britain would have suffered in similar, horrifying ways.

The 20,000 members of the BUF, and the upper-class right-wing anti-Semitic cabals, might have shrugged with indifference at the grisly fate of their political enemies on the Left and a race of people (the Jews) they despised. Yet, even a few of these die-hard extremists might have baulked at Nazi plans to replace the anointed British King (George VI). The replacement was a man who had been identified by MI5 as anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi. A man who had been deemed such a threat to Britain's national security that an undercover Special Branch officer had been secreted into his personal entourage: the Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward VIII.

Indeed, Hitler personally dreamt-up a plan to 'kidnap' the Duke of Windsor. Windsor had left his sinecure with the British Expeditionary Force in France when it became clear the German invaders had defeated the French armies. He travelled to Lisbon (in neutral Portugal) via Fascist Spain (officially neutral but cooperating with the Germans on intelligence and other matters) to book a passage home to Britain. The German plan was to get Windsor close to Spanish territory on some pretext or other, from whence the Spanish secret police could whisk him safely over the border. Windsor was not entirely against the notion, according to the German ambassador and the Spanish authorities (their reports are quoted in various published accounts of this episode). Indeed, his attitude had been influenced by German, Spanish and Portuguese insinuations that MI6 intended to quietly assassinate him and his wife when they were safely out of Europe. The German Embassies passed on to Berlin the Spanish and Portuguese government's carefully compiled transcriptions of Windsor's pontificating: whether his admiration for Hitler, his antipathy to Churchill's government's refusal to sue for peace, or his resentment at the King's refusal to award his wife royal honorifics (she was never allowed to use the title Royal Highness).

Furthermore, Windsor told anyone who would listen that if he had been king it would never have come to war with Germany, and that a few more months of severe bombing would force the British people to demand Churchill make peace with Germany. Thus encouraged, Berlin formally authorised the German Embassy to inform Windsor that the Nazis were prepared to return him to the British throne. And, even if this proved unacceptable to him, he was to be given access to fifty million Swiss francs, in return for cooperation in the “establishment of good relations between Germany and England.” We cannot know whether or not Windsor had a pang of guilt at his extensive liaisons with the Nazis and decided to reject the German offer. What we can be sure of is that Churchill, armed with damning MI5 and Special Branch reports, ordered Windsor to a far-flung colonial post where he could do little or no harm – as governor of the Bahamas. The proposed appointment dismayed Windsor and he resisted it. So, to ensure his co-operation, Churchill despatched Windsor's trusted lawyer to Portugal to inform him in person that, as a serving army officer, he would be arrested and hauled before a court-martial if he did not comply. Windsor crumpled and endured his luxurious exile in the Caribbean with a characteristically petulant resentment.

As German occupation planners realised, a quisling Prime Minister may well be needed, as well as a pliable royal figurehead. And so they considered co-opting the warlord of the Great War, David Lloyd George. But there were a number of senior politicians, generals and admirals who might have been prevailed upon to lead a collaboration government. Such ministers would have had much to do under German direction. In addition to the exile of most British males to forced labour on the Continent, Britain was to be comprehensively plundered, with the work supervised by a dedicated Military Economic Staff, England. Gold and silver bullion, precious and industrial metals, works of art, modern industrial plant, merchant shipping, civilian vehicles, animal livestock, foodstuffs and luxuries of various kinds – all would gleefully have been commandeered for German use in Britain or sent to the Continent. In case of resistance – whether violent or not – hostages would be taken and executed, as a deterrent. Captured resistance fighters were to be interrogated, tortured and killed, of course. But execution was to be the punishment for a variety of other offences, too - acts such as harbouring resistance fighters, failure to quickly surrender firearms or radios. But death also awaited, for example, those caught posting posters or placards deemed unacceptable by the German authorities.

To enforce the decrees of the military government, the army was to be assisted by Himmler's SS. Reinhard Heydrich, who would later earn a reputation for boundless cruelty in occupied Czechoslovakia, was earmarked to lead the British branch of the RSHA (Reich Central Security Office) - which controlled the Security Service as well as the Gestapo and the Criminal Police. His reign of terror would have seen an enormous bloodbath in Britain. Six Einsatzgruppen (large units of well-armed and ruthless men, dedicated to searching, killing and destroying) were earmarked for Britain. The Einsatzgruppen had been active in Poland. But their appalling litany of atrocities would reach new depths as, in the wake of the fighting troops, they proceeded to systematically brutalise and terrorise the populations of the Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic States and Western Russia.

The initial priorities of SS-GB were to destroy all British organisations deemed anti- German and arrest all those on the Special Search List, GB. The initial list had 2,300 names. Alongside the usual trade unionists and Left politicians were government ministers, civil servants, journalists, authors and academics. Gestapo planners seemed to have gotten a little carried away in their estimation of the role played by certain institutions. British public schools, the Church of England and even the Boy Scouts were to be categorised as 'dangerous organisations' and treated with appropriate harshness. So much so, that the founder of the Scouts – Lord Baden-Powell – was to be amongst the first of those to be arrested and processed by the Einsatzgruppen. Also itemised were German and European political refugees who had fled the Nazis and even 'undesirable' American citizens (the USA was neutral in 1940) were to be rounded-up.

But parliament and government were settled on a policy of fighting on, until the USSR and or the USA could be brought in to finally outnumber and 'outresource' Nazi Germany. And, as we have seen, with good reason. In 1940, the first order of business was to thwart Operation Sea Lion. British planners decided that the Germans would need to achieve naval control of the Channel, and or aerial dominance over the proposed beachheads, if their assault troops were to get ashore in sufficient numbers. Given the strength of the RAF and especially the Royal Navy this was in no way assured. British military resistance to a German invasion in 1940 was to be ferocious and unremitting. The RAF and the Royal Navy were to be thrown into all-out attacks on the landing forces, whether at sea or in any lodgement gained on land, regardless of the cost in men or machines. Controversially, poisoned gas was also to be used against any German beachhead and a system of pumping out to sea, and then igniting, oil in the path of the invaders was made workable. There was to be no precipitate surrender, if the conventional forces were defeated or capitulated too soon, well-armed and well-trained guerillas had been secreted with a license to kill, maim and terrify German soldiers and burn, damage and destroy German installations and equipment. Their careers would be short-lived, all new, but Churchill's intention was clear.

“The massacre would have been on both sides grim and great. There would have been neither mercy nor quarter. They would have used terror, and we were prepared to go all lengths.”

Indeed, if it had succeeded, Hitler would have insisted on a hefty price for British resistance to a German invasion. The casualties incurred in any invasion would almost certainly have been significant (take Crete in 1941 as an admittedly inexact comparison) and public opinion in Germany would have demanded retribution.

What gave Hitler pause, despite the obvious gains to be made by disarming and ransacking Britain, were his fears as to what consequences would follow for the wider British Empire and, therefore, the balance of imperial forces in the world. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, perhaps even India, might have rallied to a provisional Free British government based in Canada and, perhaps, supported by the USA. But could poorly defended colonies in Asia and Africa have defended themselves - even if they had wanted to – from the deprivations of the Axis powers? Illustrative here is the occupation of French Indochina by the Japanese following France's defeat in 1940. This brought Japanese military strike forces significantly closer to the border with British Malaya, just the kind of under-defended, resource-rich colony they coveted. Hitler would have demanded a puppet government maintain control of those colonies that it suited Germany for them to retain, much as the French and Dutch governments did. The consequences of Japanese control of India, Italian control of North Africa and Egypt, even German control (via an intimidated and submissive Turkey) of the Middle East, would have greatly worsened the strategic picture for the USSR and the USA when it was their time to face the might of the Nazi war machine. Might not, then, the occupation of the bulk of the British Isles by the Germans have only encouraged the USA to arm, supply and lead Britain's Empire under the Free British flag?

Finally, the very real prospect of famine faced the British people, were Germany to conquer mainland Britain in 1940. Germany could not expect Britain to continue to receive precious resources (including foodstuffs) from Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the British Caribbean or British colonies in Africa or Asia. Almost certainly a Free British naval force would have fled to Canadian ports, to continue the war against Germany (as did the Free French, Free Poles, Free Dutch, etc.) and do its best to establish a blockade of German-occupied Europe. An American government, scared by Germany's ever-growing power, may well have succoured such continued defiance - and even declared war itself, once it realised that conflict with Nazi Germany was all but inevitable. Indeed, after the war, one very senior German officer voiced his worries in 1940 that for these and other reasons Germany would have struggled to feed the British people. Especially if Germany was fighting a land war against the USSR (as Hitler intended) and a naval war in the Atlantic against the USA (which in history Hitler rashly entered into, in support of the Japanese).

But advocates of an immediate peace argued not only that war was unnecessary, but that a settlement with Germany would bring positive benefits to the British Empire. So, what was the likely fate of Britain following a peace deal with Nazi Germany in 1940? Apart from the obvious answer that Hitler's appalling crimes against the Jews (and his development of atomic weapons, jet aircraft and ballistic missiles) would have continued apace, it is entirely fair to presume that Hitler would have driven a hard bargain in any armistice negotiations. True, Hitler had always maintained that he would let the British Empire alone, if only its leaders would give him a free hand in Europe. In fact, Hitler admired Britain's centuries-old domination of India (his favourite film was the The Lives of a Bengal Lancer) and he saw the lands of the western Soviet Union as the region where Germany could best acquire a similarly quiescent empire.

But the crucial and reasonable supposition is that such a German-enforced 'peace,' with Britain allowed to retain its navy and, therefore, secure its empire, would not have lasted long. For all Hitler's protestations of admiration for the British Empire, his realpolitik case for allowing it to continue to exist was based on the pre-war evaluation that the German Navy was far too small to maintain control of it, even if it were ceded to Germany in a peace treaty. But as German naval and military power grew stronger, supercharged by resources from the conquered countries (the seizing of the bulk of the French fleet might have proved crucial), so would Hitler's strategic ambitions have grown. Both British and Americans would have been foolish, therefore, not to have both built-up their military and naval capacities and seek a mutual alliance that might deter Hitler. Indeed, in a worse- case scenario, where the Americans had retreated into isolationism and the USSR looked on, Britain might have found itself overwhelmed quite quickly. Its imperial resources shrinking as colonies were overrun by the Japanese or took the opportunity to declare independence. Its life-blood sea-lanes cut to ribbons by U-boats; Gibraltar and Egypt lost to Italo-German forces; the Japanese on the rampage in the Far East. Unable to feed the population and lacking the means to carry on the war, how would Britain have survived?

And this is where the importance of Britain's staying in the war can be seen as the pivotal period of the Second World War. Even without victories, the British Empire's holding its own and remaining in the war meant the Italians and Germans were restrained strategically. Despite numerous, sometimes humiliating, defeats British Empire forces deterred an invasion of Britain and kept open the crucial sea-lanes across the Atlantic. Thereafter, the British could safely build-up Canadian, and later American, troops with a view to using the British Isles as a springboard for offensive operations on the Continent. Germany, therefore, had to keep significant troops in France once they concluded a major Allied landing was feasible. British control of Egypt and the Levant denied the Axis the amazing prize of Middle East oil and minimalised any prospect of joining up with the Japanese in Central Asia. British material support for the USSR in 1941 and early 1942 via the Arctic convoys, whilst not essential, was most welcome and strengthened the Soviet will to fight.

Stalin certainly benefited from Britain fighting on, whether from the intelligence the British government volunteered to Moscow, or the information procured for the USSR by the network of Soviet spies in the British government and intelligence agencies. Soviet forces would kill seven out of every eight German servicemen during the war. The Red Army would, therefore, carry the chief burden of defeating Hitler. Britain staying in the war long enough to see the USSR and then the USA join them, ensured Nazi Germany was doomed. It meant there would be no Nazi-Fascist domination of the world, there would be a curtailment to the sickening Holocaust, there would be no German atomic bomb and there would be the restoration of democratic government in Western Europe. Britain's traitors put all this at risk. Some, especially those who had seen the horrors of the Great War and wanted to avoid their repetition, might have had the best of intentions. The majority hated Communism – and the threat it posed to their status, wealth and power – they despaired that the democracies would ever be up to the task of preventing its spread to Britain, and they saw Fascist Italy, and especially Nazi Germany, as their saviours.

Constitutionally, then as now, British Prime Ministers wielded political patronage on behalf of the monarch. This patronage is vast and gives the British premier immense power. That is why Prime Ministers have a huge stake in maintaining the viability, indeed the popularity, of royalty. So that they can continue to govern Britain using this 'Crown in Parliament' system. That the royal family, especially the monarch, has some influence over who receives such patronage, chiefly in those areas which touch on the royal household, is obvious. Even the honours system, in perpetuating an intricate hierarchy of status fussed over by the rich and powerful (and their admirers), produces perverse responses in individuals eager to get a rung higher on the status ladder.

In 1940 so many of Britain's Establishment moved in these circles of patronage, they were so inter-connected by the old school tie, shared vested interests and political worldviews, that those adamant on an immediate peace with Germany were able to bypass the official constitutional procedures. Seeking preferment for themselves or their favourites was a commonplace. But promoting their own foreign policies and anti-democratic political beliefs in time of war (in defiance of stated government positions and votes in parliament), establishing cliques, conspiracies and cabals to materially support the enemy – all this was deplored by the Churchill government as undermining the war effort. Some guilty individuals were, as we have seen, dealt with. But, given its desire to use the very same system for its own ends, no drastic action was taken against the system. So many of these traitors were unaccountable, unelected, their very real power and influence derived from financial wealth, social connections and ties of blood, marriage and patronage. One clear lesson from this episode in our history is that the corrupt edifice of the 'Crown in Parliament' - that gives British Prime Ministers such vast powers – needs to be completely dismantled and replaced by elected representatives working to a written constitution and accountable directly to parliament. The other obvious lesson is that democratic government is fatally weakened when too much economic and financial power is held by a few unaccountable private individuals. But that brings us on to what kind of socialist programme would best transform Britain for the better. And that will require a whole new essay.

Dave Savage was a Trade Unionist (in Preston) and a Labour Party Branch Secretary (in South Ribble) until the latter half of 2018. He is presently living and working in London.

This article first appeared on the Sodalis blog in September 2017.

Readers can view other contributions to Sodalis at: https://sodalissite.wordpress.com/ Review

A Few More Protest Songs *

1) I Ain't Afraid. By Holly Near.

I have sung this a couple of times at my local folk club, normally after some terrorist attack, a glorious challenging song. Holly was once asked in an interview , this is a very brave song indeed. Because you name a certain number of groups of people, who might get very angry about this and you could put your life in danger. Her answer “well they can only shoot me once.” https://secondhandsongs.com/work/180736

I put that version up first as I feel it’s important to listen to the words, now listen to the song and sing out: http://unionsong.com/u202.html

2) Song of the Lower Classes (words by Ernest Charles Jones)

This is my second choice for this issue. In 1845 Ernest Charles Jones joined the “Chartist Agitation,” quickly becoming its most prominent figure and vigorously carrying on the party's campaign on the speaking platform and in the press. His speeches, in which he openly advocated physical force, led to his prosecution. He was sentenced in 1848 to two years' imprisonment for rebellious speeches. You can hear his words here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGtO60EzC6Q

And then the glorious hymn here:

https://windborne.bandcamp.com/track/song-of-the-lower-classes

Windbourne sung this outside Trump Tower in a snowstorm, however Mr. Trump did not come down to give them a penny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE3s2IwgcAE

* Chris Lomax is President of Preston & South Ribble TUC

The editors would like to say a big thank-you to all those who have contributed to Preston Red Thread, if you would like to send us an article or review please get in touch, we'd love to hear from you. You can email at: [email protected]. Or join the Facebook group: “Preston Red Thread.”

#5 – June 2018