What We Are Fighting For - 2 of 17

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From Picture Post Magazine, July 13, 1940, pp 10-11

We are fighting, then, firstly for an island -- for a few hundred square miles of land floating in the North Sea. More important, we fighting for a way of life which has its setting in that island. Nobody needs to tell us that our way of life is not perfect. But we are fighting to preserve the best of it, and to have the opportunity to change the not-so-good for the better. We are taking up arms to preserve the rights of free speech and free opinion for which our fathers struggled, and to keep the road towards total freedom open for our sons. And to this end there is one thing we are fighting for above all, the right to work out our own agreements and disagreements for ourselves. We who live in Britain during this summer and autumn of 1940 are guarding the gorge between the past of the the British race and its future. If we hold, we have the chance to take a great jump forward together. If we yield, we shall be put back six hundred years. All of us. Not just one section or group or class. But all of us.

Nevertheless each class in this country has something particular to fight for now -- apart from the land and the way of life which are common to us all. Each class severally has much to lose.

The workers of Britain have much to lose. The navvy and the farm labourer, the craftsman and the engineer -- their life is not perfect now. They put into their work more than they get out of it. But in a Nazi Britain they would put in even more and get out even less. In a free Britain they have the chance to continue the struggle for the full fruits of our labour. In a free Britain their future is in their own hands.

The workers have much to lose materially -- in wages and hours and conditions of work. But they have also much that is not material to lose. All the things which make life worth living when they come off the job are in danger.

The evening spent in the privacy of their own homes. The evening spent digging their own garden, or gossiping in the pub. All those things are threatened. Instead the Nazis offer a prospect of evening drills and evening propaganda lectures, marching and salutings, world without end. And the police everywhere. The police in the pub. The police in the club. The police under the garden wall. Police who bear no relation to the British village "copper."

As for industrialists and landlords, they, too, have much to lose. They have a tradition and an inheritance to lose. And a reputation for patriotism which the whole world is watching. The world, and the ordinary people of this country -- are watching with the greater attention because of what happened only yesterday, in another country. In that country a small but powerful clique of industrialists and landowners put security of their own property before the independence of their nation. [...]

(cont. on WWAFF post 3 - stay tuned)

Jay's thoughts:  I read the words above and I cannot help but think of the unelected bureaucrats and technocrats in the present EU, and the unelected inquisitors of the WHO, and the unelected civil servants in our governments, and public health academics, and the state of our current mainstream press, all of who are pushing us towards full-on socialism, which I believe will lead to the direst of outcomes for all Britons and the rest of the world.  The most salient words for me are the bits about the police:

And the police everywhere. The police in the pub. The police in the club. The police under the garden wall. Police who bear no relation to the British village "copper."

Do we not already have this police state now? The smoking enforcement officers who prowl our streets, who lurk outside our pubs, who conscript our "coppers" to barge into our private premises to force us to comply with the anti-smokers' evil demands?  We do. We have it in spades.  Once upon a time, we would fight against it. Now, we meekly accept our fate like sheep, awaiting slaughter.