We have in the past ten years had a number of
important historical anniversaries. The 80th anniversary of D Day has just
happened. Prior to that we had the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First
World War, the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and the end of that
conflict. Such anniversaries with dignitaries and speeches and the few if any
survivors show what popular history remembers and what it forgets. So too I
think when we look back at the last ten years in the decades ahead.
Politics is not war of course, but the two are
related. War is a continuation of politics by other means. But then obviously politics
is war without the machine guns and the artillery. Britain has been in as desperate
a fight for its existence as ever was the case between Dunkirk and D Day in the
years since the referendum in 2014. The risk of the UK ceasing to exist was at
times higher indeed I was told on numerous occasions by SNP supporters that our
defeat was inevitable. The Germans must have thought so too when they
surrounded our army at Dunkirk and only had to defeat our air force to cross
the channel.
But here too history will misremember, and
commemorations will miss the point. D Day was a victory just like the
referendum in 2014, but it was only the beginning of the campaign and was easier
than what followed. What happened afterwards in the Battle of Normandy has been
almost completely forgotten. So too the ten-year slog, the trench warfare that
was necessary to defeat the SNP will be forgotten as if it never happened.
D Day was a triumph of organisation, planning and deception,
but casualties were lighter than expected. Omaha went badly, but it was nothing
like the first day of the Somme and nothing like either Stalingrad or Kursk. It
was in the days following D Day that the allied armies had far tougher battles
than they faced on June 6th. This is the bit that is not told during the anniversary
commemorations. This is the bit that will also be forgotten when our story is
retold.
The SNP is in disarray. I am reminded of the scenes in
the Longest Day where German officers are playing bridge only to be told that
there is going to be an election on July 4th. They dismiss the reports and won’t
tell Nicola Sturgeon because no one dares to wake her up. But soon after they
are throwing papers in the fire and someone in a bunker spots the allied fleet
coming out of the mist. They are here he shouts. It’s the election.
Something like this happened when John Swinney just in
the job for a week or two found out that he had to campaign with no money, no
manifesto and no plan. John did not so much have a long moustache as a long
face.
Well, we have been fighting in the bocage in Normandy
for the past ten years against the crack troops of Hitler Jugend, we have had
to bomb Caen with Lancasters to try to break the stalemate, but finally the
Americans have captured the Cotentin peninsular and the British have nearly
reached Falaise and now there is only a narrow gap from which the SNP can
escape from the pocket.
It must have seemed impossible to the same Germans who
had captured France with ease in 1940 and almost reached Moscow in 1941 that
they could reach the Falaise pocket in 1944. So too in 2015 when Nicola
Sturgeon reached the peak of her popularity it must have seemed incredible to
her and her supporters that she might in time fail. But both failed for the
same reason.
There is justice in the world. Britain ought to have
been defeated in 1940. It took a miracle for the army to escape from Dunkirk
and further miracles to survive that year and those that followed. But we also
benefited from the overconfidence of our enemy.
So too the SNP’s cause was always fundamentally
unjust. Trying to break up the UK after the UK had twice played a decisive role
in liberating Europe from German tyranny was historically unjust and for this
reason if for no other it failed. Unjust causes sometimes win, but not normally
and not here. It’s impossible not to believe that history is governed by
morality and justice. Otherwise, we are mere atoms governed by blind chance. To
believe that is simply unhistorical.
We are not there yet. The issue is whether the SNP
escapes from the Falaise pocket or whether it is completely routed. Douglas
Ross is behaving like one of those clownish British generals determined to give
the SNP a hand, but it won’t make much difference. By September we will be on
the Rhine no matter how much Boy Browning Ross mucks up.
This again is where the commemorations get it wrong. What
made D Day a success was the fighting that was done elsewhere on the Eastern
Front and that the Luftwaffe had ceased to exist because of the bombing campaign
whose purpose was not so much to destroy German cities as German aircraft.
If we had invaded France in 1943 as we perhaps ought
to have done, we might have liberated Poland and restricted the Soviet Union to
its own borders, but then again, we might have been thrown back into the sea if
we had tried a year earlier and we would have lost more troops than either the
British or the Americans could bear to lose. Better by far for Soviet troops to
die instead.
And so, if the General Election had been held in early
2023 the SNP machine guns would have slaughtered our troops not only at Omaha,
but at the other beaches too. We had to wait and prepare and above all else the
SNP had to reach peak hubris. No one dared to wake Nicola Sturgeon, no one dared
to tell her that she needed to limit her ambition, no one dared to tell her
that if she were not careful her troops would be surrounded at Falaise just as
prior to that they were surrounded at Stalingrad. No one dared to question that
the SNP finances were in order. No one dared to tell her that naughty things
are sometimes punished.
One of the loyal spear carriers who did not dare to
tell Sturgeon anything was John Swinney, for which reason also he doesn’t know
what to do now except throw more papers on the fire lest someone find more
scandals.
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