WE start proceedings today with a declaration of disinterest. I hold no brief for Ross Greer, the Green MSP for West Scotland currently setting the heather, and Piers Morgan’s fury, alight for calling Winston Churchill a “white supremacist mass murderer”.
On the odd occasion Mr Greer has popped up on my radar, the main thought has been that he looks like Oor Wullie as imagined by Stephen King (now that, Ross, is juvenile banter).
Perhaps it is the depressing savagery of the Brexit debate, and the general coarsening of politics, that prompts this appeal for calm on both sides in the verbal war over Churchill’s legacy. Or maybe it just does not seem fair to have a fight in which thousands, including a Cabinet Minister (calm down Jeremy, the starting gun for the leadership election has not yet been fired), line up against one 24-year-old.
Mr Greer’s 15 minutes began last week after the Conservative Party sent a tweet to mark the anniversary of the death of Sir Winston Churchill, who died in 1965 at the age of 90.
“For many,” the party noted, “the greatest Briton to have ever lived.” Mr Greer reckoned this deserved a response, as stated previously, and lo there poured forth upon his head much outrage, the stickiest of it coming from Mr Morgan, the host of ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
The Scottish Parliament’s youngest MSP went on GMB to defend his view. Rather brave of him, I thought. No sign of the Scottish cringe in this one. He acquitted himself well enough, with an answer for every point put to him.
As Piers went into full Tasmanian Devil mode, Mr Greer, getting his retaliation in first, accused him of being a snowflake. Cheeky. When the MSP called a comment Mr Morgan made “wildly ahistorical”, the host clearly did not know what the word meant.
It was such a drubbing for Piers that his co-host Susanna Reid had to step in and save the interview, telling the MSP: “No one is denying that every historical hero should be scrutinised, but the use of the language is so offensive.”
Cometh the woman, cometh the point. While it is reasonable to appeal for some perspective on Churchill’s career, Mr Greer could have chosen his words, and his medium, more carefully.
Just as children are told that there are outdoor voices and indoor ones, so there is language you might use in, say, a student union bar, or among friends. His Twitter summary was brutal, over the top, and yes, designed to provoke a response.
Such is the way points are made on social media. Twitter is no place for reasoned debate. Twitter is where nuance goes to die. The fact that so many politicians, from Mr Greer to the US President, see it as a primary vehicle for communication with the public, is deeply worrying, and indicative of these populist times.
So much for what he said. What should not be in doubt is his right to say it. Nothing he tweeted was against the law. As for Piers Morgan telling Mr Greer that if “it wasn’t for Winston Churchill you would be speaking German and goose-stepping your way to Holyrood”, it is a rum do to praise Churchill’s part in the fight for freedom at the same time as condemning someone for exercising their right to free speech.
Even the most cursory look at Churchill’s history, pre-Second World War in particular, would find him a knotty, difficult character with a long, sometimes chequered career. He was a product of his era, his class, his prejudices. This was well known to people at the time.
By the 1930s Churchill was considered a busted flush. Then along came another world war. People could appreciate his blood, toil, tears and sweat because they had provided no little measure of these things themselves.
While they valued the role Churchill had played, perhaps even thought him a military genius, they were not above seeing him in the round. By war's end they did not regard him as the man to lead them into the future. Hence Labour’s landslide victory at the polls in 1945. That voters re-elected him in 1951 is simply proof that times change and opinions with them.
The further away we have come from the Second World War the more perspective on Churchill has been lost. There has grown up an almost infantile desire to portray him as a saintly figure who should never be criticised. No serious historian has taken such a tack, but others have. Take the 2017 film, Darkest Hour. Won two Oscars; Gary Oldman, brilliant. Fine movie, right up to the scene where Churchill takes a ride on the Tube and is urged by men and women of all classes and colours to stand up to Hitler, to fight, fight, fight and never surrender.
From there, the audience is led to believe it was a straight journey to Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech. What a great story. Except it never happened. The film’s director, Joe Wright, said the scenes were “a fictionalisation of an emotional truth”, a way to show that Churchill could read the mood of the British people better than his peers.
The trouble with history is not, as one character said in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, that it is “one ******* thing after another”. That is a statement of fact. The problem with history comes when we accept only one version of an event or person, usually from the victors' side, as the truth and nothing but the truth.
History is a deeply political, and politicised, pursuit. How it is told, if it is even told in the first place, says much about the times and where power lies.
How is it the case, for example, that I spent all my school years in Scotland yet was never taught a thing about my own country’s history?
The American Civil War. The Peterloo Massacre. The Russian Revolution. All of this, but not a word about the Clearances, the Act of Union, anything to do with Scottish history. Anyone would think there was a conspiracy at work. Perhaps Mr Greer, given how keen he is on history, might like to look into that.
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