80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Friday 9th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I join many others in complimenting, first, the Minister on his inspiring opening speech to this debate. I also compliment the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Peterborough on her speech. I was particularly encouraged by her focus on families, a subject dear to my heart.

These victories in Europe and the Far East were primarily over wicked, dangerous and anti-human ideas. John Maynard Keynes said:

“Ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else”.


Ideologies that took over in Germany and Japan justified the complete domination of their regions: German territorial expansion into central and eastern Europe and Japanese subjugation of east Asia. Such coercive ideologies undermine human flourishing and lead to the killing, at worst, or silencing, at best, of vast swathes of populations. Most recently, trans ideology came close to doing the latter.

Ideologies’ victims just do not fit with the programme, frequently because of immutable characteristics, such as those born Jews in Nazi Germany, or they simply do not or cannot see the world through the ideological lens imposed on them. Hence, freedom of thought and expression are such precious values.

Yet there is a deeply human need for absolutes and certainties, which post-modern relativism has barely dented. Mathematician and philosopher Professor John Lennox exposes the self-contradiction at the heart of post-modernism. It expects us to accept as absolute truth that there are no absolute truths. New atheists proclaiming atheism’s truth and denying God defy post-modernism. Jürgen Habermas, an earlier atheist, voiced dangers of the shift from our moral basis to the post-modern. He said:

“Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. To this day, there is no alternative to it … we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk”.


New atheists such as Richard Dawkins recognise that jettisoning what he refers to as “cultural Christianity”, something the post-war West has come perilously close to doing, means that the flowerings reeled off by Habermas will lose their roots and wither. That said, we have lived through 80 years of the greatest advances in the history of the world. From a technological, scientific and health perspective, no previous 80 years have ever been better to live in, so the sacrifice of those who secured the victories in Europe and Japan has been worth it—but we cannot rest on their laurels. The survival of any world order cannot be guaranteed, and threats abound.

I see four “D”s of decline and decay surrounding us, such as the towering levels of debt. Shopper politics provokes Governments to borrow lavishly, and private debt is egged on by consumerism. Demographically, we and many other nations are in a bind. Ageing populations are not replaced by new births or supported by younger generations, as the extent of older-age loneliness reveals. It is socially acceptable to say that one is too selfish to have children, and other forms of decadence are reinforced. Popular culture tells us to live for the moment, avoid sacrifice, self-denial or service. Finally, concerns over, for example, historical slavery, sharply divide us over whether western civilisation is even worth defending or upholding.

Yet the motivation to care about, speak up for and protest over the weak, the vulnerable and those who have not, often at great personal cost, flows, per Habermas, from our Judeo-Christian foundations. The Roman Empire into which Jesus Christ was born was not at all so inclined. Our freedom to pursue those ends was bought for us by those willing to stand against vicious, authoritarian regimes.

Defeat, then, was not inevitable—neither is decline now. YouGov polling in the Bible Society’s Quiet Revival report found an increase of 50% in church attendance across all ages, with the most dramatic church attendance growth among young men. Now, more than one in five are attending church at least monthly—ditto, almost one in two young Black people aged 18 to 34.

Perhaps those Judeo-Christian foundations of justice and love, which proved so effective in beating back the dark ideologies of the Second World War, are surfacing again. A new generation is discovering that in a relationship with our maker and with each other, in Habermas’s “collective life in solidarity”, lies the wellspring of meaning and the essence of what it means to be human.