Norman Tebbit was Britain’s most marmite post-war politician. His funeral will be held on 31st July at Suffolk Cathedral in the East of England he represented in Parliament for 22 years. In the north of England he, along with his chief, Margaret Thatcher, is not remembered with affection. In numerous communities, the Thatcher-Tebbit team shut down industrial jobs – especially coal-miners, steel and other workers in heavy industry — in favour of supporting the full financialisation of the British economy, which benefitted principally the south of England.
Tebbit was an early anti-European at a time (the 1980s) when Margaret Thatcher was supporting the creation of the Single European Market, often against resistance from her Continental counterparts. The Single Market not only involved freedom of movement to allow European workers to come to Britain, but also meant the biggest sharing of power in British history to make commercial law, open borders and rules with other countries.
At the time, Pope (now Saint) John Paul II noted that Mrs Thatcher’s Single Market Treaty “will hasten the process of European integration. A common political structure, the product of the free will of European citizens, far from endangering the identity of the peoples in the community, will be able to guarantee more equitably the rights, in particular the cultural rights, of all its regions. These united European peoples will not accept the domination of one nation or culture over the others, but they will uphold the equal right of all to enrich others with their difference.”
Norman Tebbit never accepted that line and (by now in the Lords) fulminated against Britain opening its doors to Europeans in the 1990s and 2000s. With one exception: Polish workers in Britain. In 2008, the Federation of Poles of Great Britain published a report listing 100 anti-Polish headlines in just one national paper – the Daily Mail. “Polish killer”, “Polish rapist”, “Polish fraudster” were examples cited.
Speaking on BBC Question Time as the nation was being converted to anti-Europeanism, Lord Tebbit would have none of this. He denounced the rightwing Europe haters on the panel with him and said that Britain would have succumbed to Hitler in 1940 if it were not for the pilots of the Polish Airforce, who had escaped to England after the country was jointly invaded by Germany and Russia as the opening move for World War 2..
Tebbit had done his national service in 1950 in the RAF and went on to become an airline pilot. Ironically given his later reputation as a hammer of trade unions, he was a militant leader in BALPA, the airline pilots’ trade union.
Tebbit became a hero to the community of Polish airforce veterans and their British-born descendants. He regularly attended their commemoration events. In 2020, he wrote: “There was no doubt that the Luftwaffe was in the ascendancy as the RAF casualties mounted in the summer of 1940. The RAF was simply running out, not of aircraft but pilots, as we flung inexperienced men, just out of flying school, into the air against the battle-hardened Germans. Then, only just in time, the equally battle-experienced Poles arrived to reinforce the RAF, wanting nothing but revenge upon the Germans who had ravaged and occupied their homeland.
“Without the Poles, the battle would have been lost and the German invasion craft would have been able to cross the Channel before the autumn gales, bringing the Wehrmacht to massacre the Allied survivors from the Dunkirk evacuation. And the Second World War would have been won by Hitler’s regime.”
My father was a newly commissioned officer in the Polish Army in 1939. He took a Nazi bullet in the shoulder in the September 1939 invasion of Poland by the vastly superior German Army. The Poles held out longer against the Wehrmacht than the French army managed in May 1940. My father came to Britain in 1940 to continue the fight, though his war wound meant he was unfit to see combat again. He died in 1958 and I later took my mother’s name: McShane.
Labour did not have such a good name with the wartime Poles in Britain. In 1946, the Attlee government refused to allow Polish veterans of the Battle of Britain, Monte Casino, Normandy and Arnhem to take part in the giant parades commemorating Victory in Europe.
The reason given was that Attlee agreed not to challenge Stalin’s lie that the massacre of 23,000 Polish officers and intellectuals imprisoned by the Russian in Katyn in the spring of 1940 had been carried out by Germans, not by Russians — which was the truth. The Labour Left thought that “Left could speak unto Left” and that Stalin’s version of Russian nationalist tyranny was progressive.
After 1945, demobbed Polish soldiers were conscripted to work in mines to dig coal necessary for export earnings. But the National Union of Mineworkers in Scotland and Yorkshire refused to work on the same shifts as these continental Catholics, who were not keen on communism.
The communist-dominated mineworkers even refused to let Poles use their working men’s clubs for a pint after a shift. In response Polish workers opened “Dom Kombatanta” (House of the Soldier) to create their own drinking clubs.
Worse was to follow, as the Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, wrote to every Polish soldier in Britain on blue Foreign Office letterhead paper, in Polish, urging them to return to Poland now firmly under Stalinist rule. They had no illusions about their fate if they followed Bevin’s urging. It remains a dark day in Labour history that the Attlee government treated the Poles who fought to win the war for European freedom with such enmity and disregard.
Norman Tebbit meanwhile was no friend of British workers or trade unions. But he did not join in the chorus of rightwing Tory and UKIP xenophobia against Poles in Britain in the years running up to the Brexit plebiscite in 2016.
Denis MacShane was arrested in communist Poland for running money to the underground Polish Solidarity Union in May 1982 and briefly imprisoned. 20 years later he represented Britain as the Foreign Office Minister of State at the EU Council meeting when Poland joined Britain and other European nations as an EU member state.
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