A People’s War?
Boris Johnson has talked of a ‘war’ against COVID-19 but what does that mean?
The Queen making a rare address to her subjects from Windsor Castle on Sunday seemed to echo the ‘we are all in it together’ theme referencing World War Two.
COVID-19 is of course a health emergency not a military one so the analogy possibly isn’t that helpful
Angus Calder wrote a study on how the effort made in the Second World War was largely led from below and required changes at the top:
In a conflict on such a scale, the nation’s rulers whether they liked it or not, depended on the willing co-operation of the ruled, even scorned and under privileged sections of society, manual workers and women. This co-operation must be paid for by concessions in the direction of a higher standard of living for the poor, greater social equality and improved welfare services… The air raid warden and the shop steward were men of destiny, for without their ungrudging support for the war it might be lost.
Angus Calder, The People’s War
Yet Calder himself was constructing a backstory, an historical myth. Of course myths to work have to have some basis in reality. The war most definitely took place for example. Whether with Labour in a Wartime Coalition Government the home front was about a united national effort from below is another matter. Sufficient air raid shelters were absent for example, the source of unsurprising friction as the rich sheltered from bombs while the poor often struggled. Nor were strikes unheard of even though they were illegal.
David Edgerton has written several incisive pieces on why World War Two comparisons are wrong. We weren’t all in it together then and we aren’t now, albeit for quite different reasons.
As we go from Brexit to the Covid-19 crisis, we seem to be shifting historical analogy from Britain stood alone to the people’s war versions of world war two. Both are postwar myths. Careless historiography costs lives!
David Edgerton on Twitter
A recent Guardian article on the subject
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