Lord Stevenson of Balmacara
Main Page: Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)
My Lords, I thank all the speakers who have contributed to this debate this afternoon and evening. It has been a fascinating mixture of history, memoir, anecdote, expertise and analysis, and one of the best debates in which I have participated since I have been in your Lordships’ House—and I am sure that I was not alone in feeling a prickle of tears behind my eyes when we listened to one or two of the stories, which brought the reality of what we are talking about very much into the Chamber.
On that point, the Library Note we received, which was very full and detailed, mentions that there are a number of organisations within Parliament dealing with World War I—the Great War, as we should call it—such as a Member advisory group, and House activities planned for the period August 2014 to November 2018, including, as I understand it, short videos that might be going up on YouTube. How dramatic is that and how modern are we becoming in this House? If that is the case, would it not be sensible to pick one or two of the people who have spoken today, if they are willing, to record for a wider audience—as the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, suggested—the points that have been made here, which have been so powerful and will not come across so well in print? If that happens, the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, will be able to provide his props and wave them around to his heart’s content, and the noble Lord, Lord Laming, will be able to bring his medals out of his pocket and show us what they were about. It seems to me that we have more to come, perhaps from our own resources. This has been a very effective debate in terms of what this House can do, bringing together the knowledge and experience that we have. Indeed, there are some who have not spoken whom we would also like to hear from, such as my noble friend Lord Morgan, who has written extensively on this period.
As many noble Lords have done, I thank the Minister for introducing the debate and getting it on the Order Paper and for outlining so clearly the various programmes that will be rolled out over the next four years. He focused on education, youth and remembrance, which is a good triumvirate of ideas. I do not think it moves back into nostalgia and other concerns that have been mentioned. As far as I have seen from the programmes published by the DCMS and the BBC—we heard a bit about them from the noble Viscount—and the City of London, which today circulated a very full programme of activities across the City, these will be a very great and useful resource in years to come. However, as many noble Lords have said, it is really important to get the tone and content correctly nuanced—to use the word of the debate. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott, suggested—correctly, I think—we must ensure that we commemorate the losses and the sacrifices but not the war itself.
Of course, there is no doubt that the First World War changed Britain for ever. In many ways, it marked the true beginning of the 20th century and set events in motion that would shape people’s lives for generations to come, as we have heard. It was a conflict that touched every family, affected every community and fundamentally altered our country’s place in the world. It is extraordinary to think that it took the lives of 16 million soldiers and civilians across the globe, including 900,000 servicemen from Britain and the Empire. The centenary anniversaries this year and over the next four years provide us with an important moment to pay tribute to their service and sacrifice.
The commemorations will probably begin this weekend because this Saturday, 28 June, people all over Britain will be marking Armed Forces Day, showing support for our brave service men and women and remembering the contribution of veterans in past conflicts. As we have heard, by coincidence, this year that date is the 100th anniversary of the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand—the day when the assassination of one man by a Serbian nationalist plunged the world into conflict. As we get to 4 August, the actual anniversary of our declaration of war—which, it is important to note, was made by the British Empire, not just by Britain—there will be events across the country, as we have heard, and I am sure they will be very evocative.
As we approach the centenary commemorations of the Great War, it is important that we remember the war itself for more than just the industrialisation of death that it brought with it. As several noble Lords have said, the war had a profound effect on modern Britain, and it is important that we seek to understand, reflect on and learn from the wider social changes that occurred over this tumultuous period in our history.
As my noble friend Lady Howells, the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, and others have drawn our attention to, the British—and Empire—Army that fought the First World War a century ago had more in common demographically with the Britain of 2014 than the Britain of 1914. The contribution of the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies, as well as the other parts of the Empire, has not been sufficiently well recognised and I hope that this can now be rectified. This is important because it underscores some of the most important reasons why we have a multi-ethnic Britain in 2014. As a narrative, it does more than just explain the facts of our imperial past; it speaks to a very early contribution by many ethnic groups to our country and is an example of a powerful shared history that can help us understand why modern Britain functions as well as it does.
The Empire soldiers made several decisive contributions in a war which could have been won or lost by either side in 1918. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord King, mentioned that many academic historians argue about whether or not the war on the Western Front might ultimately have been lost without the contribution of the Indian Army. Those encounters had an impact on the Empire as well. The war transformed national identities in the dominions in ways that resonate powerfully even today. It also began to shape emerging arguments among independence movements in the colonies, although it took a second world war within a generation to play the decisive role in dissolving the British Empire and transmuting it into a Commonwealth of Nations.
I was very struck by the contributions of the noble Lords, Lord Trimble and Lord Rogan, and the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman. It was very helpful to get a sense of engagement from those who are much closer to Ireland than many of us and an understanding of some of the ways in which the Irish contribution was made. The record now shows that there was a significant contribution and a sacrifice willingly made. We ought to think harder about that because it is not something that is much talked about. I am glad that they made their contributions and allowed us to do so. I spent some time in Ireland and I am conscious of the contribution to what I think is a change of mood that was made by the recent visit by Her Majesty the Queen to the Republic, which made a huge impact and is still being talked about today.
We should also not forget the artistic and cultural impact that the war had in Ireland. Those of us who have been lucky enough to see “The Silver Tassie”, Sean O’Casey’s interesting and prescient play, recently put on by the Royal National Theatre, will recognise the same currents of thought that we have heard in this debate from those who have quoted Sassoon, Owen and the other English and Welsh poets who contributed so much to our understanding of what it was like to be in the First World War.
There were 16,000 towns and villages across Great Britain in 1914, but only 40 of them across Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland would reach 1918 without having lost someone in the conflict. Every community has its own story to tell of loss and blighted lives as fiancés and husbands did not return. Moving forward to the present day, our country’s deployment in Afghanistan has now lasted more than three times longer than the First World War; 453 servicemen have died and we have felt the pain of every one. It is hard to imagine now what it must have been like to live through a conflict where around seven times that many soldiers would lose their lives each week, or to appreciate how much of a scar was left on the country by the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916—a beautiful summer’s day, by all accounts—when 20,000 men were cut down before nightfall.
If we want to commemorate properly the First World War—if we want to do justice to the memory of those who lived through it 100 years ago—those commemorations cannot be about just those who fought and died on the front line. We also have to remember the heroes on the home front: the miners and factory and railway workers who kept our country going; and those who worked the land and cared for the wounded. This could not have happened if women had not taken on the jobs that had previously been seen as the preserve of men. An additional 800,000 women took up jobs in industry; 1 million were employed by the Ministry of Munitions alone; some 400,000 women found work in offices, and another 200,000 in different branches of government. As a result of that and many other changes, our society became much less deferential, readier to challenge authority and more multicultural. The changes meant that the extension of the franchise, fought for by suffragettes and suffragists in the run-up to 1914, became irresistible by the end of the war—a very good thing.
It is customary when winding up for the Opposition in debates of this type to either lay into the Government for their failings on the topic of the day or to list a series of very tricky questions, which we have worked on for hours and hours, aimed at unsettling and unseating the Minister—I am giving away a secret about how we do it—but I do not intend to do that. This is partly because so many noble Lords, such as my noble friend Lady Crawley, have expressed direct gratitude to the Government and the Minister for what they are doing in this commemoration, partly because of the emotional intensity of so many of the contributions—rightly so in view of the extraordinary losses that we have been talking about—but mainly because the Government, who have been in listening mode, have got the tone and content of this commemoration correctly nuanced, and I am delighted to be able to congratulate them on that.