From The Phoney Victory (Peter Hitchens, 2019) pp76-8
For the anti-appeasers of Oxford and elsewhere, it was enough to be against what the Tories were then doing. This was the view of the cultural elite of the time, much as it is now. But that elite was then a rather smaller and less influential group than it is today. The contest is mentioned briefly in Louis MacNeice’s Autumn journal, in which he recounts driving voters to the polls, urging them to ‘leave a blank for Hogg and put a cross for Lindsay’, later denouncing ‘Oxford’s coward vote’ for the Tory candidate.
The dubious suggestion, that the appeasers were somehow doing the work of the Nazis, was the basis of the anti-government campaign in that poll. It has been the foundation of much received opinion on the subject ever since. My teacher gleefully recalled chalking ‘Hitler wants Hogg!’ on walls and yelling this slogan from her bicycle as she pedalled down the city streets on polling day. Lindsay is said to have much disliked the slogan, but failed to prevent its use. His campaign also issued a placard alleging ‘Hitler says: don’t dare vote for Lindsay’, which Lindsay could surely have prevented if he had really wanted to. The principal of Jesus College, the Liberal A. E. W. Hazel, in theory on Lindsay’s side, pronounced: ‘In 40 years’ electioneering experience, I have never met dirtier tactics.The slogan was a slander. Hogg and many like him would in fact fight bravely against Hitler in the years to come. Hogg, as it happened, was actually wounded in battle against Hitler’s troops. His book The Left Was Never Right would take an elaborate and detailed revenge for this slur, seven hard years later. In response to three Left Book Club volumes denouncing ‘Tory Appeasement’ Guilty Men, Your MP and The Trial of Mussolini, Hogg listed 136 Tory MPs – and a mere 14 Labour members – who had served in the war. Ten Tory MPs had died on active service in the war. No Labour MPs had. And while 57 Tories won medals for bravery in battle, only five Labour MPs were decorated. In a waspish introduction, Hogg noted that the authors of these books, mostly known to him and in many cases of military age, did not seem (with one exception) to have played much part in fighting the war (the exception was Frank Owen, joint author of Guilty Men, who had served in Burma as an army captain).
Hogg described at length Labour’s sympathy for Germany in the 1920s, and Labour’s general pacifism and resistance to armaments and armed forces throughout the interwar period. This was not some footnote, hastily abandoned as the threat of war grew. The Labour Party’s Southport conference in October 1933, months after Hitler came to power, pledged to ‘take no part in war’.
This attitude continued long afterwards. Hogg noted that on 20 July 1934 Clement Attlee was among Labour MPs voting for a motion regretting rearmament which, they said, was ‘neither necessitated by any new commitment nor calculated to add to the security of the nation’. Attlee himself said at this stage, ‘We deny the need for increased air armaments. We deny the proposition that an increased RAF will make for the peace of the world and we reject altogether the demand for parity.’ It was at this stage that the important and expensive long-term decisions were taken which would lead to the existence of a modern force of fighter aircraft by 1940.
Labour simply did not sympathise with these actions. Herbert Morrison, later a leading figure in the 1945 government, complained in a speech at Whitechapel on 3 November 1935 that Neville Chamberlain was ‘ready and anxious to spend millions of pounds on machines of destruction’.
Mr Morrison plainly did not approve. He was also quite accurate in portraying Chamberlain as a heavy spender on arms and munitions. Just like Labour’s ex post facto pretence of being an anti-appeasement party, Chamberlain’s reputation as a walking olive branch is hugely misleading. Expenditure on the Navy increased from £56,626,000 in 1934-5 to £149,339,000 in 1939-40. The naval building programme from 1936 to 1939 included six capital ships, six aircraft carriers, 25 cruisers, 49 destroyers and 22 submarines.
Army spending rose from £39,604,000 in 1934-5 to £227,261,000 in 1939-40. RAF spending went up from £17,617,000 to £248,561,000 in the same period. The money allocated for munitions rose from £9,073,500 in 1936 to £55,509,000 in 1939. All these figures an equivalent to many billions now, and they are even more notable because government accounting, in those pre-Keynesian times, was so much tighter than it is today.
But Labour and its press decried such actions. The Daily Herald of 7 March 1935 gave its view on increased spending planned in the Defence White Paper. Labour’s main newspaper, despite Hitler’s arrival in power, still did not favour national military strength as a policy:
The White Paper is not merely a momentary affront to Germany: it is a permanent challenge to the whole system of collective security [. . .] It is important that the world should understand this it is not the voice of the people of Great Britain.
The liberal News Chronicle opined on the same occasion: “The consequence is a catastrophic increase of Germany’s suspicions and fear of encirclement. In twenty-four hours, the British government has immeasurably deteriorated the entire international situation.” Nor did the Left’s aversion to war diminish as Hitler grew more powerful abroad and more obviously evil at home.
Clement Attlee, in the House of Commons on 9 March 1936, after the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, moved an amendment which said (among other things),
The safety of this country and the peace of the world cannot be secured by reliance on armaments […] this House cannot agree to a policy which in fact seeks security in national armaments alone and intensifies the ruinous arms race between the nations, inevitably leading to war.”
He said his party viewed with alarm ‘proposals for the reorganisation of industry on a war basis’.
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