The other gunpowder plot

An historical  anniversary today gives me an opportunity to follow up from my last post: If Cromwell was not the miserable tyrant that he is so often painted - he was no democrat either. He and the other grandees of the New Model Army may well have  represented the forces of progress in overturning the old social and political order of the Divine Right of Kings - but they replaced it only with a meritocracy based on the emerging  middle classes. 

Levellers like Miles Sindercombe felt that they had not fought through three civil wars in order to hand political power back to these men of property. And so today is the anniversary of a plot in 1657 to assassinate Cromwell and replace the office of Lord Protector with the rule of parliament.  It is the 'other' gunpowder plot and much more worthy of celebration than that of 1605 and the attempted military coup by the 17th Century Catholic jihad-ists of Fawkes and Catesby

Sindercombe had served throughout the civil wars and taken part in the Leveller mutinies of 1649 which Cromwell had brutally suppressed. He then went on to organise another mutiny in the army of General Monck in Scotland - the same man who would later go on to organize the military coup that led to the restoration of the monarchy. Escaping the authorities he went to the Netherlands where he met up with other Levellers, including the more famous Edmund Sexby,  and planned a bomb plot to kill the Lord Protector. His bomb in Whitehall was discovered and he was arrested - avoiding the horror of being hung - drawn and quartered by taking poison.

It was Sexby who called him a martyr to 'The Good Old Cause' -  the vision of a truly democratic and  egalitarian England that we are still waiting for ...

Re-interpretting Cromwell and Christmas

It frequently  bugs me that the one thing that school textbooks and schemes of work always seem to include is an obligatory 'Cromwell - the man who banned Christmas' lesson. I refuse to be a part of this nonsense.

Whether you take the view that Cromwell was the man who made modern Britain, or the villain who participated in ethnic cleansing in Ireland, or, like me, believe he was a flawed man of his own class and time of huge morale courage who played a vital role in England's democratic revolution -  there are better and more important stories to be told about Cromwell.

It is of course quite true that from 1650 until the restoration of 1660 there were a number of restrictions placed on pubic festivities at Christmas time. Undoubtedly these were often unpopular with many people for whom Christmas was not just a religious festival, but part of a folk-tradition that saw a suspension of the the social order for a few days. But the restrictions on Christmas festivities did not just spring out of a despotic whim of Cromwell's kill-joy personality. 

For starters, there was also popular support for these measures from those layers of society who had been radicalised by the years of civil war. Inconvenient though it may be to our 21st Century liberal minds, we cannot really  separate the proto democratic socialism of the Levelers from the Puritan context that it sprang from. In fact long  before the civil war, in many parishes there had been a shift away from the medieval style celebration of Christmas with all its echoes of pre-Reformation England. This reflected a broad Puritan consensus in the country that Charles and his high-Church archbishop were increasing at odds with.

After the parliamentary victory in the first civil war,  there were also very practical political grounds for suppressing certain  public celebrations. Horse races, fairs and festivals were  becoming a frequent focus for protests and riots. Fear of an 'enemy within' attempting to usurp the new 'godly nation' was not simply paranoia,  there were frequent royalist plots and uprisings throughout the years of the Republic and Protectorate.

Finally Cromwell himself was far from a grim faced kill-joy. He enjoyed drinking, parties, music, dancing and had a particular taste for practical jokes and slapstick humour. The various proclamations against Christmas actually came not from the Lord Protector, but from the Council of State and parliament, and reflected much wider values and concerns than simply Cromwell's own particular hang-ups.

There are many genuine controversies about Cromwell. I would much rather teach a lesson about the Burford Mutiny to get across his  ambiguities and complexities - but painting him as a seventeenth century version of the Grinch doesn't do justice either to him or this important piece of history.

Waterloo today

Watching the nonsense on morning TV about some sort of 'Napoleonic Help For Heroes' to mark the anniversary of Waterloo today in 1815. It is worth reminding ourselves that the battle  was nothing other than the victory of counter-revoution and marks the beginning of the age of Capital. So  I have re-posted a piece I wrote a while back on 'On This Deity' .

Non-doms

Non-doms are back in the news. What is extraordinary is not that Labour are finally talking about abolishing the tax loop-hole for the super-rich, but that it has survived so long - and nobody has been screaming about this real benefit-scrounging.

Income tax dates from the need to pay for the Napoleonic wars - and from the very start there were some built-in dodges to enable those who could really afford to pay tax to avoid paying any at all.

The fig-leaf rationale for this at the time was empire building. If people pledged not to bring their income from overseas in to the country they were exempt from being taxed. In the pre-1857 British Empire when imperialism was essentially mercantile rather than governmental this had some of logic. Empire-building before the Great Rebellion in India was an early form of PFI with private individuals given only limited support from the state.  The system incentivized the younger sons of the nobility, aspirational social risers, and other assorted chancers escaping the rigid hierarchy of British society, to become minor potentates  in far flung parts of the world. Where they could live lives of opulence and decadence undreamed of in the home country. And so in some sense the tax dodge helped build the empire.

Nowadays the idea of ring-fencing overseas wealth  makes no sense from any point of view. Over the years the grounds for claiming non-dom status have become even more spurious - it is now more about having a foreign born parent or a bank account registered abroad than it is about owning a tea plantation. In fact there is no real pretence that it is anything other than a dodge for the super-rich.  

Apologists for this system argue that its abolition would drive the super-rich from this country. However this supposes that the hidden hand of the market somehow ensures that a trickle down effect ensures that we all receive some benefit from the mere presence of the super-rich regardless of whether they are actually building factories in this country or just counting the interest on their off-shore bank accounts. In fact on a practical basis it actually discourages the bringing back of real investment into this country - which of course would be taxable. 

Getting rid of this should hardly be controversial - no other country in the world has such a blatantly unfair and illogical loophole - but it will not be easily given up. It is emblematic of the perversity of the system we live under.

Richard III - whimsical historical nonsense

I suppose I am as much a history-geek as the next man. Possibly more so - in my line of work these days it's an occupational hazard. But maybe not as much as I thought I was: 

Earlier today I chanced upon some of the BBC's coverage of the re-burial of Richard III in Leicester. This seems to have been done in the manner of a 'rolling news' version of a Sunday afternoon nostalgia-fest. And I just don't get it. There seems to be a fascination with a whimsical obsession for 'days of yore' - of kings and queens, knights and heralds - and an awful lot of bollocks. 

Despite the best efforts of the weirdos of the Richard III society who have taken up his cause with all the energy of a real campaign again a real miscarriage of justice, the best that can really be said of Richard of York was that he wasn't really any worse than any of the other self-serving gangsters-in-armour that made up the competing dynasties of medieval monarchy. And that, unsurprisingly given that history has generally been written by the winners, the rival Tudor gang used their premier hack (Will Shakespeare)  to create the pantomime villain we are all familiar with.

But does any of this really merit an afternoon of ceremonial with hushed commentaries and talk about rehabilitation and reconciliation ? It is hardly as if the British people have been irrevocably divided between rival camps of Yorkists and Lancastrians. The Wars Of The Roses saw some spectacularly bloody battles between factions of the ruling class for 40 odd years.  But despite this the lives of the common people were left almost completely untouched. The average peasant or yeoman in the fifteenth century regularly witnessed the toffs slaughtering each with an attitude of detached indifference, and probably just breathed a sigh of relief when they marched their retinues off to billets in some other hapless village. 

Now I know how they felt ...

That time of year - again

The problem with blogging for a number of years is - just as it is in the real world - of repeating your rants. The same shit riles me repeatedly  - and often at the same time of year. So look back over the years and most Novembers you will find a post about Remembrance.

The centenary of the Great War this year - and the cynical might also add - the on-going military involvement of the Western powers, has given a boast to the increasingly flag-waving and misappropriation of history that now passes for Remembrance. And filling the moat at the Tower of London with individual ceramic poppies to commemorate each British and Commonwealth soldier killed in WW1 is possibly the most spectacular expression of this. 

A misappropriation of history with a multiculturalism that may suit the militarist liberalism that is Blair's legacy but which is deeply flawed: In 1914-18 there was no 'Commonwealth' - only an Empire; the same British Empire that was still to approach its zenith in the 1930s. 

I doubt  many members of the Chinese Labour Corps - not trusted to carry weapons but used for heavy manual labour - were motivated by a sense of fellowship with a community of nations defending democracy from Teutonic autocracy. 

In Ireland and India where men volunteered in droves - many did so on the basis that supporting the Mother country was a prerequisite for being granting nationhood. Their optimistic trust was to be betrayed by the British at Croke Park and Amritsar.

Even in Canada, Australia and New Zealand where their status as white settler states had secured the privilege of being Dominions rather than colonies, men volunteered in their droves to prove a point and secure nationhood. At the price of the slaughter at Vimy Ridge and Gallipoli.

It is no accident that this rewriting of History is happening at a time when the West is again trying to build a consensus - if not an actual coalition - in defence of 'civilised values'.  The Great War was many things but it was not a voluntary crusade - it was a war of conscripted masses and subject nations - whose sacrifice was nothing more than a tragic waste. 

Stick that on your memorials - and maybe then I will wear a poppy. 

The undeserving great unwashed

This week I seem to have turned into one of those sad 'concerned residents' with too much time on their hands who writes letters to the council. I am engaged in a largely pointless (but entertaining) email duel with some jobs-worth from the council (or more precisely their privatised 'contacted service provider') about bin collection: 

To incentivise us all to re-cycle we now have our re-cycle bins emptied weekly and our non-recycling waste bins emptied fortnightly. Which means of course that by the end of the fortnight everyone's  non-recycle bins are smelly , overflowing, surrounded by flies and the bin bags ripped open by urban foxes. This makes  our typical inner city environment - crowded, busy,  dirty and  generally fairly grotty - just that little bit more unpleasant at best, and at worst a threat to public health. 

My complaints to the council were met with a patronising letter explaining the council policy and effectively telling me that people should suck it up and just re-cycle more. 

Setting aside the arrogance of those in authority - if we are all too stupid to re-cycle then we deserve to pay the price of rubbish on the streets - this also ignores the fact that the re-cycle bins are actually also regularly overflowing. 

In other words, we are re-cycling but the service is just not adequate for the area. It seems like a no brainer that an urban area with a denser population - multi-occupier dwellings and mixed business and residential use, simply needs more frequent services than a dormitory suburb. Yet in Tottenham our rubbish is collected as frequently as it is leafy Highgate. 

This isn't about NIMBYism or 'localism' - nor is it petty. It is exactly what is happening at every level of this recession. Again and again the people who have to put up with the worst of its effects are told that it is our own fault. 

Historically it was always so. It was much the same in Victorian times when our inner cities first developed. The feckless and insanitary masses - literally the great unwashed - were blamed for their own appalling living conditions. And we seen the same old arrogance today - with a bit of added green sanctimony thrown in just to rub salt in the wound.

History battles.

It's been a bit of a struggle recently to keep up with the blogging. But I do have a piece in The Socialist on Michael Gove and the ideological battle over the history of the Great War. In this centenary year I suspect that there is an awful  lot more of this bollocks to come ...

Vindicated by 1984 papers.

My first reaction on hearing about the government papers released under the thirty year rule was a surprising regret that Thatcher hadn't managed to live another year.

Since 1984, the ideas that there was a political master plan to destroy the mining industry regardless of the economic viability of individual pits; that the police were being politically directed;  or that there were plans to use emergency powers to bring in the army, have all been depicted as the product of left wing conspiro-loons. In fact the papers reveal that these things were all true. Scargill and the NUM were right - and Thatcher and the Tories lied.

And then only a few weeks ago we saw some of Thatcher's surviving colleagues jumping on the Mandela bandwagon and claiming that she had tried to use her influence to secure his release. But we now know the minutes of her meeting at Chequers with PW Botha reveal that no such conversations ever took place.

Of course none of these revelations will make any impression on the unreconstructed Thatcherites. But it is all too easy for those of us who lived and campaigned through the years to underestimate the paradigm shift that has shaped a generation of Thatcher's children. 

We saw a taste of this last year with her (almost) state funeral and her elevation 'above politics' into an iconic statesman-like  figure. Let's hope now that  just a few of those Thatcher's children have their eyes opened by these revelations and see her, and the next generation who defend her, for what they are - vicious class warriors without scruples.

Henry Hyndman and Hampstead

A long traditional Boxing Day walk yesterday taking in part of  the 'Northern Heights' that winds it way across my bit of Northern London - from Alexandra Park to Hampstead Village and back.

This western side of Haringey couldn't be more different from Tottenham - and the walk was rather like taking a cross section through the underbelly of the chattering classes. Barbours, Hunter wellies, those South American hats with the ear flaps,  and all-terrain baby buggies were out in abundance.  The pub at the end of the walk was full of them.  Opposite the pub a blue-plaque on an imposing Victorian mini-mansion caught my geeky eye.  

Here lived Henry Hyndman, founder of the first 'Marxist' organisation in Britain. Also sometime Tory toff kicked out of the Liberal Party, ego-maniac and control freak. He managed to piss off Marx when he wrote a crude introduction to Marxist ideas without mentioning Marx at all. But most significantly he shattered his own organisation and drove out the best elements like William Morris and Eleanor Marx. Amongst other things, he did so by making some seriously fucked-up political decisions including taking money from the Tory party in return for splitting the Liberal vote, and supporting Britain's involvement in the Great War. His final political incarnation was in an organisation with the unfortunate name of the National Socialist Party.

In effect he began the phenomenon of ruling class interlopers screwing up the labour movement - a torch that was picked up most effectively in recent times by Tony Blair. And he couldn't have found a more fitting place to be commemorated than Hampstead Village.

Al-Andalus: 'The ornament of the world'

I am stocking up my holiday reading -  one of the perks of my new life is I can say that reading history is now actually part of my job. At the moment I am reading The Ornament of The World - a history of Muslim Spain.

It's appropriate timing for all sorts of reasons: Every few days we hear another story about Gove's plans to re-orientate school history towards Britain's glorious and civilizing relationship with the rest of the world, and even more worrying every few days there seems to be another story about another attack on a mosque, Islamic school or community centre. You don't have to be a paranoid liberal to see a connection between the two trends. 

Which is why re-telling the largely forgotten  story of Al-Andalus might just be a timely addition to the school curriculum. Whilst most of Medieval Europe was in the grip of a near Church-monopoly on culture and ideology, Al-Andalus was for nearly 800 years, a prototype multicultural society where Muslims, Jews and Christians not only co-existed but actually interacted to produce a flourishing centre of arts and knowledge.

And the major threats to this society were religious hardliners of all faiths: Invading Fundamentalist Berber Muslims from North Africa who objected to the tolerance of the Ummayad regime, and Jews and Christians who objected to their own communities' adoption of Arabic culture. Ironically the final downfall of Al-Andalus was at the hands of the much celebrated El-Cid - a mercenary who had spent much of his life fighting for Muslim princes who bore a Muslim name.

I am aware that it is always dangerously ahistorical to transplant our own values to an age which was so fundamentally different to our own. But in these dark days of prejudice and mis-information it might just be worth trying to redress the balance with a look at a story that challenges the lie of an inevitable 'clash of civilisations'. It's a lie perpetuated both by the likes of Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage, and in a more respectable and articulate form, by Michael Gove and Nial Fergusson.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

It was always going to be a risk: 

Taking a bunch of cynical street wise London teenagers to an art-house cinema to watch two hours of largely black and white talking-heads in a worthy  documentary.

But getting my GCSE class to watch Ken Loach's 'Spirit of 45' paid off. You couldn't make it up - the kids came out wide-eyed and buzzing: Had it really happened ? And how come people had let that bitch Thatcher get away with destroying it all ?

As I walked back to where my bike was parked I have to confess to being choked with emotion: 

Satisfaction that a generation whose experience was so different, could be inspired by these old people talking about socialism. Melancholy for that older generation - my Mum and Dad's - who had seen their dreams fall apart and who we will never get a chance to properly thank. And anger for my own generation - those 40-somethings who bought into the 80's Thatcherite dream that shat on it all.

Thanks Mr Loach - you confirmed that I am in the right job.

No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid*

Ironic. As mentioned in my last post I was going to interview my dad to use his reminiscences as a source for one of my classes. One that I had heard before was of  him going to a meeting as a teenager shortly after the war to hear Aneurin Bevan speak on the creation of the health service - a defining moment which persuaded him to join the Labour Party. 

I was going to brave the icy weather and ride down to Kent when I got a call from his carer to come early because he had been taken into hospital. Fortunately he was able to be discharged the same day. But whilst spending a fairly harrowing day in the very same AndE department from which my mum was admitted and never returned, we had an announcement advising us that waiting times were three hours and that anyone waiting to be seen should go to another hospital ten miles away, or to see their GP. 

And next week I will be on a march next Saturday  to protest the cuts at the Whittington Hospital - roughly a life time on and from my dad going to that meeting ...

* These words from Aneurin Bevan's 'In Place of Fear'

Fritz Thyssen. A warning from history.

Friends in Germany have told me how the collective-guilt rammed down the throats of kids in the school system there can actually be counter productive. Rebellion is and should be the default setting of youth - and if it's rebellion against a well-meaning liberal agenda then it can produce a new generation of neo-Nazis.

In this country anyone with digital telly can at any given moment find a couple of programmes about the Nazis or WW2 on History or Discovery. And kids in our schools might easily find that they are studying the Nazis and/or the Holocaust in History (possibly both before and after they chose their GCSE options), in English, in Drama, in RE and PHSE.

I have now seen at first hand that many kids seem to compartmentalise the Nazis, WW2 and the Holocaust. They can easily come away with the view that WW2 is quite cool. The Holocaust is a bad thing but fairly divorced from antisemiticism. And  Hitler was  really charismatic.

So when coming to teach this I thought I'd try to get across the idea that the Nazis weren't just about Hitler's personal charm. And that they went from fringe nutters to viable force only when rich and powerful people decided that they were the best bet in helping them hang on to their power in the face of crisis and revolution. Not an original analysis I know - but still one that seemed to be lacking.

I hit upon the idea of getting this across by looking at a potted biography of Fritz Thyssen. The steel magnate was one of the richest men in Germany - and an early adopter of Nazism once the depression started to grip. He recruited his mate to the party - who also happened to run the national bank. They donated millions to the party to help fund one of the most extraordinary election campaigns in history. And they orchestrated a letter signed by a group of twenty seven leading businessmen calling on President Hindenburg to ask Hitler to form a government in the interests of law and order and social stability. Unfortunately for Thyssen he was also a devout Catholic who had qualms about Crystal Night and fell out with the party as the Holocaust was getting underway. He fled to Vichy France, was brought back and put in a concentration camp. After the war the allies tried him as a war criminal.

In other words a perfect personification of the uneasy but intrinsic relationship between big business and fascism. However I was told that none of this was needed. It simply isn't on the syllabus - not even at A level. It is however essential reading for our own times.

Eric Hobsbawn

I have to confess that I owe a slightly perverse debt of gratitude to Eric Hobsbawn who died yesterday.

It was his 'Labour's Lost Millions' article published in Marxism Today in 1983 that sent me on the trajectory that ended with me joining the then Militant. At the time I was a member of the Young Communist League having made the rookie mistake of believing that the Communist Party were to the left of Labour. My wonderfully tolerant Bennite parents didn't give me much to rebel against - but this was one way of expressing the unavoidable teenage rejection of the older generation. 

Fortunately this delusion only lasted a few months before Hobsbawn's article came out. Instinctively I knew it to be a rejection of class politics and of of the values of the labour movement in favour of something that would come to be later known as 'New Labour'. And so I probably became one of the few who joined the Labour Party with the express view of seeking out the Militant and the 'proper' Marxists. So thanks for that Eric.

Like any socialist  with an interest in history, I had his books - and it is only fair to say that his history was very much better than his politics and in a world of Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and David Starkey, they remain essential reading.  

But strangely enough, I think that perhaps one of the things most to Hobsbawn's credit was the very thing that most obituaries are criticising him for - he maintained his party membership long after that brief period in the sixties when it may have had some cachet in academic circles. 

Prince Harry and the titillating toff phenomenon

I have developed a disturbing addiction to watching 'The Tudors'. I missed out on it first time around, but I now find it has a dreadful fascination. It may be rubbish history but it makes for fun tv. 

It's so full of historical anomalies and inaccuracies that I don't know where to begin - but mostly there is the fat and forty syphillitic Henry VII's  portrayal as a renaissance pouty poster boy. Amongst the constant plotting, shagging and double-dealing there is some suggestion that Henry was a tortured soul. But mostly there is a sense that he is just a 'lusty good ole boy.'

From the original Prince Hal (Henry V), Henry VIII, Charles II, George IV, Edward VII  - to the current royal party animal, another Prince Harry. There seems to be a long tradition of the masses rather liking to be shocked and titillated when royalty behaves this way.

The phenomenon is much the same as with  professional footballers.  A mixture of deference, puerile fascination and an odd sense of living a more interesting life through someone with access to more temptation and toys. And most strangely of all - a sense that when our betters behave in this way they show their humanity and by implication demonstrate that they are most 'like us'.

All of which means that those party pictures of Prince Harry won't really do much significant damage to the monarchy. Sadly.

Armed bodies of men in our streets

In the summer of 1911 - almost a hundred years ago to the day - Britain was on the brink of civil unrest and a potential revolution. A dispute in the London docks had spread to the other major ports, railwaymen had gone on strike as well, and engineers had followed them. 20,000 troops from the Woolwich and Aldershot garrisons were put on standby to impose order in the capital when the Port of London Authority backed down and made concessions to the dockers' demands. Strikes continued in the other ports and in Liverpool two warships were ordered up the Mersey and troops deployed in the streets. Shots were even fired over the heads of protesters. It was not the finest hour for Winston Churchill the gung-ho Home Secretary who earlier in the same year had overseen the sending of troops into the Rhonda to impose order against striking miners.

Right now HMS Ocean is moored up near Tower Bridge, we have air to surface missile sites in the East End,  and there are large numbers of troops in camo uniforms all over the place. It is probably the most visible military deployment in London since the Second World War. But interestingly the general public response has been sympathy for the squaddies who have been obliged to give up leave after returning from Afghanistan in  order to pick up the pieces for the bungling of Olympic security by the ConDems and big-business private security contractor G4S. It speaks volumes though that  I am far more troubled by the sight of squads of tooled-up wannabe robo-cops from the Metroplitan Police. 

PC Simon Harwood, the un-convicted killer of Ian Tomlinson personifies the psychological type drawn to their ranks. An aspiring action man with a hair-trigger temper who hasn't got the bottle to join the real army and fight anyone who shoots back - so he opted for the safer option of combating unarmed civilians at home. If that seems like an exaggeration I challenge anyone (if they dare) to go and inspect any serial of TSG cops. The likes of PC Harwood or Sgt Delroy Smellie seem to fit a certain profile that is a prerequisite for the Met's goon squad.

Most ordinary people will treat the squaddies - disproportionately from the most economically shat-on parts of the UK - with good natured class solidarity, but they have every reason to be wary of the pit-bulls of the  Met currently  straining at the leash. I am certainly going to be careful about treading on the cracks of the pavement in the next few weeks ...

Bomber Command Memorial

I usually feel ambiguous around Rembrance day - and  I was even more troubled at the prospect of the unveiling of a memorial for Bomber Command on Friday. And today, realisng that it is Armed Forces day - an unabashed rehabilitated day of flag-waving and militarism - I am doubly so.

The story of the 'bomber boys' of the Second World War has been undeniably neglected. The popular image of the wartime RAF is the romance of the fighter pilots - a small band of  cavalier public-school boys saving us from invasion in the Battle of Britain.  Our own version of Thermopylae and the 300 Sparatans. On the other hand, the story of the bomber crews has been swept under the carpet.

For starters the bomber crews were more numerous and less glamorous. Their role was not to dash around the skies in aerial dog-fights but to sit in tight wing tip-to-wing tip formations every night like sitting ducks. Waiting to be picked up by searchlights or radar and shot down by night fighters or flak. Statistically they faced the most dangerous job on the allied side - one in twenty odds of not returning from a mission when an operational tour lasted thirty missions. It is not surprising that a kind of stoic fatalism and dark humour characterised  Bomber Command.

Their social composition was more diverse than Fighter Command - many sergeant-pilots were working class or at least lower middle class grammar school boys.  Becoming  an air-gunner was one route in which an 'erk' from the ranks could actually get into the air.

But most importantly, unlike the fighter pilots of 1940, they were not the heroic defenders preventing the bombing of women and children - they were the ones doing the bombing. Causing death and destruction on an industrial scale that between 1942-5 eclipsed anything seen in the Luftwaffe's attacks on this country.

It can be - and is - argued that the young men of Bomber Command cannot  be held responsible for the morality of decisions made by their political and military commanders. Maybe so - and maybe we are in no position to judge from the comfort of our peactime lives - although clearly many veterans did feel this responsibility for the rest of their lives.

It is an added tragedy that many wars seem to generate buried tales of  heroism. Perhaps in this case simply telling their forgotten story is more appropriate than commemorating them in stone. 

An Eastenders story that needs telling

Since volunteering in schools I've been struck how they don't seem to teach local history - at least not in the ones I've seen. Often there's just not the room in the national curriculum - and with Michael Grove's promotion of the LadyBird school of history I suspect there will be even less. Which is a shame because it has the potential to be a great way of telling the 'island story' he's so fond of. 

Of course here in London where there's every chance that a history class will have pupils from anywhere in the world 'local' does not necessarily mean what you might first assume. But then again, the flip-side of this is that London has always been like that. 

Which is why I have jumped at the chance to teach a couple of lessons about a subject very close to my heart - the changing face of London's docklands. With Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, Somali and Eastern European communities established there since the early nineteenth century, the history of the docks almost holds up a mirror to the  classrooms of modern London

So as a bit of preparatory homework I took myself to the excellent Museum of London in Docklands. Telling the story of docklands from Roman times to it's recent 'regeneration', this is proper 'warts and all' local history. Which is to say that it doesn't romanticise the thriving golden era of the docks - which were inextricably linked with the slave trade, nor does it omit the conflicts of he great dock strike of 1889 or the battles a century later between the displaced dock communities* and the London Docklands Development Commission. 

But sadly stuck in the shadow of Canary Wharf and the corporate barrenness that is modern docklands - the museum was almost totally deserted on a Saturday morning. At the end of the tour you are invited to take a post-it and stick your thoughts and impressions up on a 'comments wall'.  Someone has quite rightly suggested that all the bankers and traders who work at Canary Wharf should be compelled to spend half a day in the museum.

*My mum - who grew up around Wapping in the war years -  returned there in the early 1990s - she considered retiring to  one of the new flats. The flats themselves were lovely but she was very upset that she couldn't find the streets and squares she remembered as a child - because they simply weren't there any more. The LDDC had accomplished what six years of the Luftwaffe couldn't.

Mail comes full circle

Notoriously back in 1934 the vile-then-as-it-is-now Daily Mail ran the headline 'Hurrah For The Blackshirts'. The BUF and Nazi sympathising press baron and Mail-owner Viscount Rothermere proclaimed that  'The sturdy young Nazis are Europe's guardians against the Communist danger'. 

Unlike many other national newspapers the Mail does not have an online archive - so I can't provide a link to the relevant article*. This is probably no accident  - the Mall loves to wrap itself in wartime nostalgia with constant references to the virtues of the wartime generation and give-aways of classic British war movie DVDs  or recordings of Vera Lynn singing wartime favourites. 

Happily though they just can't help giving themselves away. 

On the day when France goes to the polls and it looks like a victory for the 'Socialist' candidate Hollande, and a more inspiring upsurge for Melenchon and the Left Front - the Mail reverts to form: '... the only responsible vote in France next Sunday is one for Marine Le Pen'.

It's not too alarmist to remember that first time round, the street-fighting boneheads of the Far Right only became a serious threat when paranoid sections of the ruling class decided that they were the lesser of two evils.

 * The clipping at the top of the page is actually  from  a Rothermere editorial in the Daily Mirror in which he  also had a  share-holding.