Talal Hangari reviews Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, by Tariq Ali, published by Verso

Britain has yet to come to terms with its history. The criminality of the empire and the cruelty on which it rested still have not penetrated popular consciousness. Instead, British misdeeds are ignored or indeed erased as a matter of official policy (see Operation Legacy). Any book which seeks to correct this deficiency, and highlight the darker corners of the past, ought to be welcomed. Tariq Ali’s Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes falls into this category. It is a counter to popular mythology; an effort to peel back the curtain of propaganda and locate truth, or at any rate, something much closer to the truth.

To hero-worship Churchill has become an important component of British national identity. As Ali writes, Churchill is no longer a mere mortal, but “a burnished icon whose cult has long been out of control.” He is a symbol of courage and defiance; the British bulldog; a font of wit and quotable wisdom. He stood up to Hitler and roused the nation at its hour of greatest need. Like all good propaganda, the cult has some tenuous factual roots. However, based as it is entirely on the Second World War, it fails to understand who Churchill was in the round. According to Ali, this tendency was exacerbated by the need to invent the patriotic rhetoric that supported Thatcher’s war in the Falklands in 1982. More broadly, “the manufactured love for Churchill… came to embody the nostalgia for an empire that was long gone.”

An account of Churchill’s life and career which grounds itself in fact is likely to agree with two of Ali’s central claims: first, “Imperialism was Churchill’s true religion”; and second, “Virtually any reactionary cause that emerged could rely on him for support.”

Churchill was an imperial fanatic. Even by the standards of his Conservative colleagues he was eccentric. Leo Amery, a friend of Churchill who served in the war cabinet, wrote that, “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane… I don’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.” Churchill responded to attempts to reform the Indian government with disdain – such measures would lead, in Churchill’s words, to “the liquidation of His Majesty’s Empire.” He was wholeheartedly in favour of violent repression to quell the resistance of the natives. When in 1920 Kurds revolted against the British in Iraq, Churchill declared: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gases against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum.”

Churchill’s racism was a natural corollary of his imperialism, and therefore an “integral part” of his politics, as Ali puts it. His evidence to the Peel Commission, set up to investigate the causes of the Arab Revolt in Palestine in the late 1930s, expressed his beliefs clearly:

“I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race… has come in and taken their place.”

It is a testament to the remarkable power of the Churchill cult that despite such a plain defence of murderous­ settler-colonialism, to call Churchill a racist in public is considered not just rude, but a matter of real debate or interest.

Churchill’s support for reactionary causes is no less richly documented. He proclaimed he would “unswervingly oppose” the “ridiculous movement” for women’s suffrage; sent soldiers to crush striking Welsh miners in Tonypandy in 1910; and had more than a little praise for fascism, lauding Mussolini as “the greatest lawgiver among living men”. According to Ali, these were not accidental slip-ups or occasional misjudgements. This is who Churchill was: an ultra-conservative imperialist, a racist, a deeply anti-communist member of the British elite who had fascist sympathies.

Ali also effectively discusses the crimes Churchill was involved in. Foremost among these is the negligence that led to the Bengal Famine in 1943, causing between 3.5 and 5 million people to perish. The deaths were not the result of a lack of food so much as the deliberate misallocation of it; military needs were always prioritised despite Governor-General Wavell’s attempts to solicit famine relief from London. Churchill was callous and dismissive toward the misery. As Prime Minister once again in the 1950s he presided over the brutal repression of Kenyan rebels against the empire, including the use of concentration camps. 150,000 people were arrested. One wonders when we will be a civilised enough society to discuss these crimes and show a modicum of respect to the victims.

While Ali carries out the task of presenting the reality behind the myth with skill, this is avowedly “not a biography in the traditional sense. It situates Churchill within the ruling class that fought against workers and dissidents at home and built a large empire abroad.” What emerges is more a thematic tapestry than a straightforward narrative of Churchill’s life. There are some quite long digressions: in Chapter 2, for example, there is a survey of the history of British radicalism from the late eighteenth century to the emergence of large-scale trade unionism. Thus the smothering of industrial action in the early twentieth century (enthusiastically supported by Churchill) is on the same continuum as the Peterloo massacre. This approach furnishes useful context but is at times liable to make the text unfocused.

The book would have benefited from a closer engagement with Churchill’s ideas through primary sources. There is certainly much for the reader to consider, but at times Churchill’s voice seems to get lost beneath the progress of important events. Some remarks of his that one might expect to find in a critical study were unfortunately absent. Additionally, a much closer engagement with the Churchill cult and its evangelists would have been profitable. There is a large corpus of hagiography that exists to sanitise Churchill’s life for contemporary audiences. A careful inspection of some of this literature at relevant junctures would have enhanced the text.

Those who are interested in the reality of the history of this country, rather than the rose-tinted version portrayed on cinema screens, televisions, and in many histories and biographies, ought to consult this volume. It is a worthy contribution in a crowded field.

Talal Hangari is a writer and activist studying at the University of Cambridge.