History:In this book Roy Hattersley offers a dozen essays on the social and political landscape of Britain between the first and second World Wars. He covers a very wide range of issues - inevitably with more success in some cases than in others, writes Garret FitzGerald.
His chapter on Britain's handling of Ireland between 1916 and 1921 is fair, although to Irish ears some of its phraseology seems strange. I had not previously seen Dublin Castle referred to as "the provincial government in Dublin". Whatever Ireland may have been pre-1921, it was never a province of the UK! Moreover to say that Cork "felt the worst of loyalist wrath" when British forces burnt and sacked its city centre in December 1920 is an unwarranted slur on the southern Irish unionist community, who were probably at least as shocked by that event as were nationalists.
I found his chapter on the abdication of Edward VIII particularly interesting, for it throws light on aspects of that affair of which I, at any rate, was unaware. Especially in view of current public acceptance in Britain of Prince Charles's marriage to Camilla Parker-Bowles, many people today may find it strange that the king's intention to marry twice-divorced Mrs Simpson should have made it necessary for him to leave throne and country.
But in retrospect that development was fortunate for Britain, because, although Roy Hattersley claims that "before his abdication and exile (he) had no sympathy for either Adolf Hitler or his Nazi party", he also quotes the new king's extraordinary response to a suggestion from Hitler's representative at George V's funeral, (the deceased monarch's first cousin, the duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha), that he, the king, and the prime minister should meet Hitler:
"Who is King here?", he enquired rhetorically. "Baldwin or I? I myself wish to talk to Hitler and will do that, here or in Germany. Tell him that please." And he also cites a statement by the pre-Ribbentrop German ambassador to the effect that, in relation to German occupation of the Rhineland the king said: "I sent for the PM and gave him a piece of my mind. I told the old so-and-so that I would abdicate if he made war. There was a frightful scene. But you needn't worry. There won't be a war." In the light of that behaviour all one can say is: thank God for Mrs Simpson and for British attitudes to divorce 70 years ago!
He is also interesting on two earlier events: the 1926 General Strike and the circumstances leading to it and the formation of the National Government in 1931. The General Strike was a disaster for the British trade union movement, which was dragged into it by the Miners' Federation of Great Britain and then left by that body to hang in the wind, before deciding after nine days to end its support on terms that eventually favoured the mine-owners.
THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT of 1931, and the consequent damaging split in the Labour party might have been avoided had the Labour government been willing to save the British economy by devaluing sterling through leaving the Gold Standard (to which, eight years after the end of the first World War, Winston Churchill had unwisely re-attached it), or if, alternatively, it had been prepared to cut unemployment benefit by 10 per cent. Understandably, perhaps, at a final Cabinet meeting neither of these alternatives commended themselves to many Labour ministers.
That same evening at the palace a "scared and unbalanced" Ramsay MacDonald, according to the monarch's private secretary, faced a "calm and lucid" king. After that meeting, Roy Hattersley says, he privately told one of the opposition party leaders present that he "would be a ridiculous figure . . . and would bring odium on himself" if he joined a national government.
But next morning, MacDonald returned to the palace and allowed himself to be persuaded by the king to lead just such a government, with Conservative and Liberal members. Whilst recognising that he would be "denounced and ostracised" for his action, he said he "could do no other", but he advised younger members of the party to "save themselves" by refusing to serve in the new government - advice most of them followed, thus splitting the Labour Party for much of that decade.
Other particularly interesting chapters deal with the strong social commitment of leaders of the Church of England during those two decades, and with the role of Sir John Reith in founding the BBC and setting it the high standards which served it, and Britain, well for many years thereafter.
IN PASSING, I might, perhaps, recall that in May 1975 I had a confrontation with Roy Hattersley, then minister of state at the Foreign Office, during a political committee meeting of EC ministers in the Bermingham Tower of Dublin Castle.
During a visit the previous week to four Middle Eastern countries as Irish foreign minister, rather than as president of the EC Council of Ministers, I had managed with some difficulty to reassure governments that a financial agreement with Israel which I had just signed on behalf of the Community did not apply to the occupied territories.
But the Arab League's secretary-general wanted this reassurance in writing - which I could provide only in my national, not my Community, capacity. He then suggested that if I told my EC fellow-ministers of what I had done, and if they did not demur, I should send him a telegram saying "They did not tell me to go to hell" - and on that basis he would be able to reassure his member states.
When at the Dublin meeting I explained this to my EC colleagues, all but one congratulated me. But Roy Hattersley objected. I'm afraid I took some pleasure in telling him that I simply did not believe that when the UK's term in the EC presidency came around, his foreign secretary would for those six months refrain from taking any action in his national capacity and added that it was 50 years too late for a British minister in Dublin Castle to tell a member of an Irish government what he could or could not do!
I think that Roy took this in good part - and it certainly did not inhibit him from sounding me out six months later about whether I might be prepared to take on the presidency of the European Commission - to which I replied: not until and unless we had resolved the Northern Ireland problem!.
Garret FitzGerald is a former Taoiseach
Roy Hattersley's take on the UK in the years between the first and second World Wars Borrowed Time: The Story of Britain Between the Wars By Roy Hattersley Little Brown, 436pp. £20