- Friday, April 19, 2024
By: Radhakrishna N S
By Amit Roy
THE actor Laurence Fox has made Sir Winston Churchill’s views on race and empire an important issue in the London mayoral election on May 6 by taking out a full page advertisement in a national newspaper depicting the wartime leader with a gag across his mouth.
“Free London,” it read, with its emotive appeal to the British sense of patriotism and Churchill’s role in providing leadership during the Second World War when victory against Hitler’s Nazi Germany could not be guaranteed.
The ad emphasised the words: “Your London. Your Freedom. Reclaim it.”
One man tweeted his support: “Great poster but who would ever have thought that one day we would have to protect Churchill, the ultimate British & world hero. Keep up the good work!”
Fox, 42, best known for playing the supporting role of DS James Hathaway in the British TV drama series Lewis from 2006 to 2015, is challenging Labour’s Sadiq Khan on behalf of the recently set up Reclaim Party. This is taken to mean he is trying to reclaim “British culture” by vowing to “offer a voice to those who are being dominated into silence”.
Fox, who is standing on an “anti-woke agenda”, explained his philosophy: “There is the presence of a deep and genuine hate of who we are and what we’ve done. Such guilty reflection has now reached crisis point. Even mild patriotism is branded as racism.”
He added: “(Prime minister) Boris Johnson says ‘there’s nothing wrong with being woke’. (Labour leader) Keir Starmer takes the knee to a hard-left organisation that seeks to undermine of all the things we hold dear, our families, our shared language and heritage. Sadiq Khan and his nation-hating cronies have their jealous eyes on our statues and institutions.
“This extreme political correctness must be resisted.”
It is fair to say not everyone shares his opinion that questioning Churchill’s views on race and empire equates to an attack on British culture.
The Cambridge academic, Professor Priyamvada Gopal, has hit back at critics who she claimed were trying to prevent the negative aspects of Churchill’s character from being debated.
Churchill College, Cambridge, where Prof Gopal is a teaching fellow, set up a series of events on “Churchill, Empire and Race” and she chaired a panel discussion on The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill.
“Even before it took place, the discussion was repeatedly denounced in the tabloids and on social media as ‘idiotic’, a ‘character assassination’ aimed at ‘trashing’ the great man,” Prof Gopal, professor of post-colonial studies in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University, wrote.
“Outraged letters to the college said this was academic freedom gone too far, and that the event should be cancelled. The speakers and I, all scholars and people of colour, were subjected to vicious hate mail, racist slurs and threats. We were accused of treason and slander. One correspondent warned that my name was being forwarded to the commanding officer of an RAF base near my home.
“The college is now under heavy pressure to stop doing these events,” she said.
“In a sea of fawningly reverential Churchill biographies, hardly any books seriously examine his documented racism. Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to complicate, let alone tarnish, the national myth of a flawless hero: an idol who ‘saved our civilisation’, as Boris Johnson claims… Make an uncomfortable observation about his views on white supremacy and the likes of Piers Morgan will ask: ‘Why do you live in this country?’”
Prof Gopal had come under attack in a paper by historian Andrew Roberts and published in Policy Exchange – which she described as a “right-wing think tank influential in government circles”.
The paper included a foreword by Churchill’s grandson Sir Nicholas Soames, who hoped the review would “prevent such an intellectually dishonest event from being organised at Churchill College in the future – and, one might hope, elsewhere”.
Prof Gopal said she found this ironic: “We’re told by government and media that ‘cancel culture’ is an imposition of the academic left. Yet, here it is in reality, the actual ‘cancel culture’ that prevents a truthful engagement with British history.
“Churchill was an admired wartime leader who recognised the threat of Hitler in time and played a pivotal role in the Allied victory. It should be possible to recognise this without glossing over his less benign side.
“He is on record as praising ‘Aryan stock’ and insisting it was right for ‘a stronger race, a higher-grade race’ to take the place of indigenous peoples. He reportedly did not think ‘black people were as capable or as efficient as white people’.
“In 1911, Churchill banned interracial boxing matches so white fighters would not be seen losing to black ones. He insisted that Britain and the US shared ‘Anglo-Saxon superiority’. He described anticolonial campaigners as ‘savages armed with ideas’.
“Even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking. In the context of Churchill’s hard line against providing famine relief to Bengal, the colonial secretary, Leo Amery, noted: ‘On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.’”
One reader disagreed with Prof Gopal: “The Tories are winning the culture war, and quite easily too. That’s because the not so silent majority can easily see that attacks on Churchill are, in fact, attacks on them, and their beliefs, and nothing to do with a deceased imperialist.”
Another said: “Churchill was the leader who led Britain when the rest of the world was capitulating. He wasn’t a perfect human, indeed he was very flawed, but his successes far outweigh his failures.”
Others disagreed with those who disagreed with Prof Gopal: “I suspect most people believe he was both the right man, at the right time, in 1940 – and a racist.”
One reader recalled what Churchill had told the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
“Enough said,” this reader added.
