Let’s Blitz Again, Like we did last summer…

“Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Shitler…?”

It would be one thing, if any of the people writing and tweeting about ‘The Blitz Spirit’, and surviving The Blitz, actually had survived the Blitz. But none of them did. Not one.

“It was thought that bombing civilians would cause a loss of morale, particularly in the densely packed and less well defended capital…”

They’re dealing in some faux wartime myth of everyone sharing cigarettes, singing around the piano in the underground and sitting, smiling in the ruins of their bombed out house, having a nice cuppa as the smoke clears next morning, via the testimony of those few hardy survivors. And maybe they did hear some carefully sanitised tales from their grandparents, but they’re forgetting the one really glaring error in all of this madness. Those who did live through it were themselves being fed lies at the time so that they could better survive.

It was called The Blitz for a reason, because raids came like lightning strikes out of the dark winter skies for months on end on many of our major cities. That it failed can still seem nothing less than a miracle when you look back over the statistics from the safe distance of time: between September 1940 and May 1941, just looking at major raids where at least 100 tons of bombs were dropped, there were 2 on Coventry totalling 818 tons, 3 each on Manchester and Portsmouth totalling 578 and 687 tons respectively, 6 on Bristol totalling 919 tons, 5 on Glasgow totalling 1329 tons, 8 each on Birmingham, Plymouth and Merseyside totalling 1852, 1228 and 1957 respectively, and 71 on London totalling 18,291 tons. Millions of homes and buildings were reduced to rubble. But the number of civilian casualties was between 40–43,000 lost to Luftwaffe bombing for the entire war.

When you consider London’s population of over 8 million in 1939, the loss of over a million homes there was a true decimation of the capital. But in comparison to lives lost and objectives achieved, The Blitz was an absolute failure.

It was thought that bombing civilians would cause a loss of morale, particularly in the densely packed and (apparently) less well defended capital. WWII was a war fought as much in the minds and in the homes of the civilian population as on the battleground, and propaganda came to the fore on both sides, which is why the ‘Blitz Spirit’ is so firmly entrenched in our psyche, of course. It was created for a reason, and a very vital one. One of the main purposes of the Blitz was that the Nazis wanted to break the spirits of the British people, and our own state propaganda was in full force to prevent this. But we’re not in the throes of war now, and we understand what the realities actually were for people living through those days.

Don’t we?

Of course, it’s possible to argue that putting a positive spin on No Deal so that we can get through it, in just the same way, is surely no bad thing then? Hence the preparation budget and advertising campaign. This is a tried and tested method for getting through a crisis!

Yes. I see your point. But, we’re NOT AT FUCKING WAR HERE.

This isn’t some foreign power attacking us. This is our own Prime Minister. Who is going against his own Parliament, to the extent that they have passed a new law to stop him enacting No Deal in the event his ‘attempts’ at getting a deal fail, and yet he still refuses to rule out No Deal. The terrible alternative he’s avoiding, bear in mind – the Surrender Bill as he likes to call it, playing into that warlike rhetoric, too – is asking for a three month extension. Just extra time to consider what our alternatives are, and to avoid having to commit to No Deal unnecessarily. Extra time to negotiate, if he’s still got nowhere by October 31st.

He’s even going against members of his own Party, to the extent they have voted against him and against the whip to get that law passed, and he has summarily kicked them out of his party like a spoiled toddler on his birthday, so now his majority in the house has ‘slipped’ from +1 to -45.

Arguing for No Deal Brexit as a plan is not the action of anyone who should be in a position of leadership, much less our own Prime Minister. The right thing to do was to draft a document like Yellowhammer, involving experts from a range of relevant disciplines, and having looked at the various possible scenarios and outcomes, take action accordingly. Not cover it up and then push on through against all prevailing advice. Nor then shut down Parliament for five weeks so that it’s impossible for Parliament to examine any detail of the government’s plans before time is too short to do anything constructive about them.

These are the actions of someone who cares more about doing what they personally want rather than what is right or good, or how it may affect anyone else in the country as a whole. These are, if we are going to stick with the language of the battlefield, the actions of a General promoted beyond his ability to lead. And one who leads from way back behind the front lines, in the comfort of his beautifully appointed and well defended camp.

He thinks he’s being Churchillian, but the only people he can be at war with here are the British public, and more and more of us see through him and his childish games all the time. Who do you actually think you’re kidding, Mr Pound Shop Shitler?

Yellowhammer recommends stockpiling bodybags, for fucksake.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe we are at war, and I’m just closing my eyes to it. I hope not.

None of the people posting about how we’ve all survived the Blitz and can do it again thethemselves survived the Blitz. I can guarantee you that. But I’d love to sit any one of them down with any of the few still around who did, so they can have a chat about what it was really like, and see if they still want to do it then. There’s a reason people say ‘Never forget’ when they talk about WWII. And they don’t just mean imperial measures and diphtheria either.

In fact, if we’re going to conjure up the Second World War, let’s not forget that we fought with our European allies to stop the rise of the far right and fascism, and to build a united Europe.

One piece of Churchill’s legacy we could still be proud of, at least.