Perfidious Albion rides again

One of the purest places to visit is the museum of the White Rose in Munich University. A group of heroic students and one of their professors, Kurt Huber are commemorated for their execution, by the guillotine, at the hands of the Nazis. The students scattered anti-Hitler leaflets down into the auditorium of the university and were betrayed by the caretaker. Their crime was to publicise the atrocities and incompetence of the Hitler government. Professor Huber, a musicologist, psychologist and philosopher died with them. He was their inspiration and their guide. The White Rose movement was not specifically Catholic but it drew its arguments from the tradition of Christian humanism rooted in the teachings of St Augustine of Hippo who articulated the Christian view on government in De Civitate Dei - the City of God and the City of Man. When Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum he began a process whereby the Catholic Church demonstrated a specific concern for issues of social justice. This of course had always existed but Rerum Novarum made it a specific part of Catholic teaching. Pope Pius XII has often been criticised for his role in the Second World War but something that deeply concerned him was the future settlement of Europe. This went in tandem with the concerted efforts of Robert Schumann (now declared a Servant of God by the Catholic Church) and Konrad Adeneur that France and Germany should never fight again but instead be united. Both Schumann and Adeneur came from a strong Catholic background were part of the Christian Democratic movement that was prominent in Europe at the time. Later they were joined in this project by the Italian statesman Alcide de Gaspari. The genesis of the European Union was closely connected with this trend. Britain never felt part of this Christian Democratic world which was too Catholic and Continental for her. Having trained as a historian before I trained for the priesthood, following the vote against a Europe unity I instinctively began looking for historical precedents. The appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain sprung to mind. After selling Czechoslovakia down the river in September 1938 Chamberlain returned to England a conquering hero. Doubtless at the time he would have won a referendum endorsing his misguided surrender! Chamberlain’s political roots were provincial, commercial and Empire orientated. He was anti-Semitic and as far as he was concerned Czechoslovakia was a faraway country about which we knew nothing. Two years after Munich he was told by Leo Amery in the House of Commons ‘’In the name of God go.’ After the anti-European vote David Cameron was cheered in the House of Commons after a stunning act of misjudgement in calling the Referendum in the first place and then conducting a spineless half-hearted campaign. He was replaced by a geography graduate who comes from an Anglican Home Counties conventional background. Perfidious Albion betrayed Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Poland in 1939 when she hid behind the phoney war and failed to help her in any way during the German invasion. This was in the vague hope that some deal could still be done with the Viennese house painter, Herr Hitler. But there was nothing new under the sun here. Coming from a parish with Portuguese associations I am conscious of how badly we have treated our oldest ally for example in the First World War, but also on other occasions. At this time Perfidious Albion was also active in the Middle East. She triply betrayed the Arab cause. She promised Syria to the Arabs but was simultaneously negotiating Syria away to the French in the Sykes- Picot agreement. The parallel discussions with Zionists paved the way for a Jewish State in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration. At the Versailles Peace Conference British diplomats like Harold Nicolson as described in Peacemaking 1919 drew lines in the sand across the Arab world inventing states like Jordan and Iraq, We live with the consequences even now – with the help of Tony Blair and George Bush.

With German rearmament we followed a gigantic fudge to avoid taking any action against a resurgent German nationalism. Samuel Hoare the foreign secretary in 1936 negotiated a notorious pact with the odious Pierre Laval his French opposite number to hand over Abyssinia to Mussolini. ‘’No more coals to Newcastle and no more whores to Paris’’ was George V’s apposite response. Mussolini went on to conduct a brutal occupation of Abyssinia and many atrocities were perpetrated there by the occupiers.

In the Second World War Poland made huge contributions to the British War effort in the Battle of Britain, Monte Casino, D-Day and at Arnhem. What were their rewards? - Exclusion from the Post War settlement and their surrender to the Soviet Union after being betrayed into the hands of the Nazis. Elsewhere the Communist Foreign office official James Klugmann worked to undermine the non-communist resistance to Tito. It is said that Churchill’s response was that what we did to the Serbian resistance did not matter because we would not have to live in a Communist Yugoslavia. As a footnote to history we deported thousands of non-Communist Yugoslavs back to Tito to be butchered. Britain followed analogous policies towards Romania and Bulgaria.

One of the difficulties for Perfidious Albion was that she was masquerading as a world power while being fundamentally weak. She could not live up to the hopes of others even if she so desired. The British Empire was increasingly a fig leave, while the so- called special relationship with the USA was a hollow sham. Richard Davenport- Jones’s biography of Maynard Keynes shows abundantly that from the First World War onwards we were financially dependent on the USA to conduct military operations. The British myth was that we were a gallant little island kingdom who stood alone against Nazi Germany. In reality we depended on others including not only the USA and the USSR, but inter alia the Poles, Czechs, the Free French and heroic resistance movements throughout Europe (including Germany, for example through the White Rose movement.) We underplayed our dependence on the Indian Army in the Far East. And yet Perfidious Albion never fully experienced the war because unless you were a Channel Islander you never endured the corrosive trauma of occupation. Even when the War was over and lost, we retained the blinkered world outlook of an insular state.

Thus it was that when Anthony Eden became Prime Minister in 1955 we still lived the myth of being a great power. He engaged in a perfidious plot with France and Israel to invade Egypt. The Protocol of Sevres of 24th October 1956 was based on the ludicrous premise that we could invade Egypt without American support. We were ignominiously forced to retreat into our true role as a second class power. Later we could not save our vassal king, Feisal II of Iraq from being killed and his body being strung up in the streets of Baghdad, and so farewell Pax Britannica.

What is extraordinary about the campaign of Leavers is how selfish and narrow it is. It was intrinsically amoral. Ireland does not matter. Gibraltar does not matter. Scotland did not matter. Ireland does not matter. Wales does not matter. The leave campaign is one hundred per cent self-centred and introverted. It is a psychological disaster. In this it is absolutely in conflict with the teaching of the Catholic Church which seeks an ethical direction that we should be concerned for others, for the world, and indeed for all of God’s creation.

It is odd that Leavers did not make more of Europe’s ethical failings. For example Pope Francis is critical of the Europe Union but he is not against it. His pronouncements speak not only of a desire for peace but of an awareness of all creation. The British vote is a vote against the post-war settlement of Europe and a vote against the needs of the rest of the world. We are stuck in an amoral mess of our own making. The Johnson regime (and before this that of Mrs May) wants us to be a beacon of free trade in the world which is a dubious moral aim. It is difficult to see how it makes the world more just. Only those who are already wealthy will benefit from this, and the poor will stay poor.

The church should have a theology of politics. It is self-evident that we should campaign against slavery. It should be equally obvious that we offer a theological critique of the political system. Thomas More knew this, when he said ‘’I die the King’s good servant but God’s first.’’ Why don’t we understand this? The Church struggles with politics. In Britain she has no political compass but limits itself to the innocuous and the obvious. She is like a rabbit paralysed by the lights of a car. It seems incapable of offering theological synthesis of the present crisis. The age of Manning and Hinsley is dead. The Church offers no critique whatsoever based on Christian experience. It seems only concerned with pleasing its auditors and the Charity Commission. Does it have to be like this?