80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Friday 9th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, only the oldest of us can remember VE Day—still less the Second World War itself. Exceptionally, the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, will be able to remind us. For our grandchildren, this is relatively ancient history, and the issue for us is what aspects of that history we choose to emphasise. What lessons should we say they should learn from the chaos, the cruelty, the slaughter and the sacrifice, the final victory and the contested peace that followed?

The two world wars remain central to Britain’s national identity. My own grandchildren have been learning about them in school over the past year. We have taken them to the Western Front, to walk over the fields where in the spring of 1918 my 18 year-old father joined the Highland Division and lost so many of the friends he had trained with. We have taken them to Bletchley Park, where my parents-in-law worked during the Second World War. We tried to explain to them what it meant to my mother to lose her younger brother—my godfather—when his Lancaster crashed on a training flight. For all of us, linking historical narratives to personal stories is a way to help the younger generation understand the past.

I have been struck by how quickly my grandchildren understood that neither war was one in which Britain actually stood alone. There are monuments to Canadian and Australian troops on the Western Front, and we saw references to French, Portuguese, Indian, Moroccan and Belgian troops alongside the British, and to the Chinese Labour Corps that maintained British tanks in 1918 and dug trenches and graves. Some 20 years later, Poles provided crucial help for decryption in the early stages of Bletchley Park, and an American contingent arrived there in 1942. There were Polish fighter squadrons in the Battle of Britain, when Britain was “standing alone” against the German threat, and I was surprised to discover when we visited the Yorkshire Air Museum that there were a great many Belgian pilots in Bomber Command.

The Imperial War Museum’s display on World War II shows us something of the Caribbean contribution to Britain’s war effort, in all three armed services. I felt it underplayed the importance of the 2.5 million Indians in the British Imperial Forces, and the role Indian divisions played in Burma and the Eighth Army, fighting—alongside Polish and South African divisions, as well as the American Army—across North Africa and Italy.

Recalling this part of our wartime history matters because the descendants of those Allied soldiers and airmen have now become part of our national community. My parents-in-law are buried in a Bradford cemetery alongside well-kept Polish and Ukrainian sections, the latter containing the bodies of displaced persons—we used to call them “DPs”—unable to go back to their homeland as the Russians reasserted hostile control. I have met many Sikhs and south Asian Hindus and Muslims in Yorkshire whose grandparents fought for Britain in World War II, most of their grandchildren and neighbours unaware of what they did. This should now be an intrinsic part of our historical understanding of today’s British national identity.

What should we tell today’s children about why we fought the war, beyond the immediate threat of Nazism? We should teach them about the war aims that the British and Americans agreed on behalf of the world’s beleaguered democracies. The Atlantic Charter, drafted by the British and revised by the American President, declared in August 1941 that its countries

“seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other; … they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned; … they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security”.

President Roosevelt’s speech to the US Congress earlier that year had spelled out why the United States was already acting as “the arsenal of democracy”. He said:

“We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point … that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world. … The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society”.


Yesterday, our Defence Secretary reminded us also of Ernest Bevin’s Western Union speech, delivered to the Commons on 22 January 1948 as the Cold War began to end the hopes that the victory of 1945 would lead to global peace. Bevin declared that

“the free nations of Western Europe must now draw”

closer

“together. … Our sacrifices in the war, our hatred of injustice and oppression, our Parliamentary democracy, our striving for economic rights and our conception and love of liberty are common among us all. Our British approach … is based on principles which also appeal deeply to the overwhelming mass of the peoples of Western Europe … If we are to preserve peace and our own safety at the same time, we can only do so by the mobilisation of such a moral and material force as will create confidence and energy in the West and inspire respect elsewhere, and this means that Britain cannot stand outside Europe and regard her problems as quite separate from those of her European neighbours”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/1/1948; cols. 395-97.]

I listened to Nick Thomas-Symonds, our Europe Minister, also quoting those words a few weeks ago.

We all recognise how far short our world today has fallen from these ideal objectives. The current US President has repudiated Roosevelt’s international and domestic legacies. Globalisation has spread global prosperity but has also fed a degree of inequality within and between states which threatens social cohesion and leaves too many unfree from want. We are learning again the lesson of the 1930s that constitutional democracy and open societies are not the natural order. Populist politicians offer easier answers, and authoritarian regimes are hard to dislodge.

Our British public do not yet appreciate how difficult are the domestic and international challenges we now face. We have managed to hold taxes down by skimping on public investment and cutting defence expenditure to fund the rising cost of health and welfare for our ageing society. Now, we have to raise defence spending and engage our citizens in national security. The war in Ukraine is a threat to our security to which we must respond. The Chinese drive to dominate global manufacturing and high technology also requires greater public and private investment. Yet there are populists out there still pretending that taxes can be cut while spending more on defence and without cutting public services.

History does not repeat itself, but it does offer warnings. Our divided and complacent country in the 1930s was slow to respond to the threat of authoritarian fascism and Nazism. We now face threats to the liberal international order that Roosevelt and Churchill led the allies to build, and to the peaceful Europe that the end of the Cold War promised. Temporarily or permanently—we hope only temporarily—we have lost American support and leadership. It is our shared duty to work together to carry the public with us, and to work with our democratic allies, in Europe and beyond, to defend the principles for which our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents fought more than 80 years ago.