The Present View from the Barricade of Flowers

For our very first blog post on this site Tom Blackmore explored the need for a peaceful barricade of flowers as a defence against ‘the juggernaut of nationalism’ rolling down the road. As the Council of Europe prepares for its Reykjavik summit of nations to renew the conscience of Europe, at the same time as National Conservatism holds its first conference in London he returns to that post to take a look at how those ideas hold up after the last historic 5 years.

The Convention on Human Rights in Europe is an international treaty.

The juggernaut of nationalism is rolling down the wide streets of Britain once more. A general hue and cry has been raised under the flag of patriotism, and a brighter, bluer, paradise.

Down the street a barricade has been hastily erected. This was built by those surprised and blind-sided by the popular vote overcoming expectations in 2016. Those who were shocked that the mask of protest was nationhood.

Despite the efforts of many brave defenders, that barricade is not holding. Surprise, muddle, nostalgia, the pragmatism of economics, all mean that our membership of the EU is being sacrificed on the shrine of some people’s will.

We are watching from further down the street where it is still quite quiet. We are at work on the foundations of a further barricade, this one built to defend not business practices and trade, but rights and freedom.

For when the juggernaut has swept away economic co-operation, and the rules of the club, its’ declared intention is to sweep away all European law, including the Convention on Human Rights.

‘It’s more of the same,’ they yell, ‘more interference with our sovereign nation.’

Actually of course the Convention is something very different.

The Convention allowed individuals to take their government to court if their government failed to protect or even abused their human rights and fundamental freedoms.

It is not the rules of the club drawn up by nation members, but a treaty between sovereign nations, inspired by a global hunger for peace.

The Universal Declaration was the product of the United Nations, a project to generate good globalisation, or at least an attempt at it. It spawned regional instruments that captured its’ vision but sought to apply them to the character of the region.

In Europe, this was forged by the newly founded Council of Europe and its Parliamentary Assembly. And it was moulded by those who had made a forensic study of the totalitarian condition of the Nazi regime, and who had confronted the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg.

Nations draw up treaties to better manage relations with others. In the immediate aftermath of years of depression and war, European nations wanted treaties that would stop wars and bloodshed. They identified that nationalism, born from the fire of the industrial revolution, had stoked the flames of military aggression. And they wanted those flames extinguished.

Sovereign nations signed a treaty, agreeing that such a court should be built and that they would be subject to it to protect their people.

Although without any plans to expand, let alone the capability, or any immediate threat, nationalism lost its meaning. Patriotism became contentment with our own condition, and the warm comfort of neighbourly co-operation. And so it remained.

The foundations of our barricade is history, its substance the peace and freedom enjoyed by many for 70 years.

But a word about this juggernaut now drawing up in front of our barricade. In amongst the smouldering rubble of nationalism a flame has spontaneously combusted and has been fanned into a fire of some vigour. The wind that has reignited the blaze is fatalism.

Danny Kruger, a disciple of this ‘national conservatism’ turned recently on the fatalism of the left, writing:

‘In the new religion, not Karl Marx but Friedrich Nietzsche is the prophet. Everything is reduced to nothing, destroying the foundations of a civilisation that was built with care and sacrifice over centuries.’

Danny Kruger, New Statesman 15th Aril 2023

He’s perfectly right that the new puritanism can smother freedom and create restrictions with Victorian ferocity born out of a zeal build a new Jerusalem. Of course they fail, because we live on earth and not in heaven, and they despair.

Kruger overlooks the mirror image morbidity of the right. Their mission is the creation of a society that accepts their vast unequal material advantage and makes their hypocrisy righteousness. He yearns to be led by one of a leader from the past.

‘great figures of the Conservative Party’s history – Peel, Disraeli, Churchill, Thatcher – who were traditionalists only in the sense of restoring the country, often with some force, to a path it had left’.

Ibid

This is raw sentimentalism, poor history and could never happen because we live on earth and not in hell. With their comrades on the left they too resort to nihilism.

Both extremes call out the elitism of one another, as they cling to their alternate vision of a utopia within our national communities.

Patriotism is quite different from nationalism. Patriotism is about the love of your country, and that love inspires the ambition for the very best for the country in any and all changes of circumstance. Nationalism is a flag which should only be unfurled when circumstances demand it. The defence against an enemy, and the accommodation of the economic quest for Empire are times when the flag was deemed necessary. Not now.

The juggernaut of nationalism rolling down the road is a carnival float of ghosts, distant recollections, fears and frustrations as we grapple with global change. That makes a slippery enemy for those defending the barricade.

But perhaps the tactic of erecting a barricade is wrong.  Perhaps these wraiths need exorcism not challenge, a deep peace not battle. Perhaps, we, down the road, waiting for the juggernaut, should build and tend a mound of flowers, a garden barricade, where the ghosts can lie down and sleep.

This exorcism will free us from fear, our paranoia pertaining to sovereignty, and our hopelessness.

For inspiration we can turn to the peacetime speech given by the Winston Churchill to open the Congress of Europe, which celebrates its 75^th anniversary in a fortnight. He began:

I have the feeling that after the second Thirty Years’ War, for that is what it is, through which we have just passed, mankind needs and seeks a period of rest…. President Roosevelt spoke of the Four Freedoms, but the one that matters most today is Freedom from Fear. Why should all these hardworking families be harassed, first in bygone times, by dynastic and religious quarrels, next by nationalistic ambitions, and finally by ideological fanaticism? Why should they now have to be regimented and hurled against each other by variously labelled forms of totalitarian tyranny, all fomented by wicked men, building their own predominance upon the misery and the subjugation of their fellow human beings?

Winston Churchill, Congress of Europe, The Hague, May 1948

He talked about the cost and benefit of European Unity.

It is said with truth that this involves some sacrifice or merger of national sovereignty. But it is also possible and not less agreeable to regard it as the gradual assumption by all the nations concerned of that larger sovereignty which can alone protect their diverse and distinctive customs and characteristics and their national traditions all of which under totalitarian systems, whether Nazi, Fascist, or Communist, would certainly be blotted out for ever.

Ibid.

Concluding:

After all, Europe has only to arise and stand in her own majesty, faithfulness and virtue, to confront all forms of tyranny, ancient or modern, Nazi or Communist, with forces which are unconquerable, and which if asserted in good time may never be challenged again.

Ibid.

Here was his vision for Europe.

‘… it may be that we shall move into a happier sunlit age, when all the little children who are now growing up in this tormented world may find themselves not the victors nor the vanquished in the fleeting triumphs of one country over another in the bloody turmoil of destructive war, but the heirs of all the treasures of the past and the masters of all the science, the abundance and the glories of the future.‘

Ibid.

Few doubt that Churchill was patriotic, that he profoundly loved this country. During the war he employed ‘nationalism’ to support morale and bolster courage for a country in extremis and multilateralism  to reshape Europe  when peace broke out.

In the audience at the Hague was David Maxwell Fyfe. It was eighteen months since he returned from prosecuting at the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. His reputation established there lent him authority as the Congress progressed. On the final day he was alongside Churchill on the platform having embarked on his work on the Convention on Human Rights which would be signed two and a half years later. It is his story that we tell.

Read the original post The Barricade of Flowers by Tom Blackmore.

Discover our telling of the creation of the ECHR through the eyes of David Maxwell Fyfe at thehumansinthetelling.org.

Are you a religious movement?

During 2015, when MagnaCarta800 coincided with ECHR65, English Cabaret performed a series of performances of Dreams of Peace & Freedom to highlight the history of our rights and freedoms. What happened next came as something of a surprise. Composer Sue Casson explores the beginnings of our beautiful protest.

Dreams of Peace & Freedom tells the story of the birth of human rights through the eyes of David Maxwell Fyfe, who, after confronting evidence of Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials as a British prosecutor, became a champion and artisan of the Convention on Human Rights, ‘a simple, safe insurance policy’ against such crimes happening again.

Weaving his words with musical settings of poetry that inspired him ‘in an
‘engaging and creative way‘ as one audience member put it, our performances, amongst other things show the relationship between Magna Carta, the first written charter of rights, and the ECHR, the local instrument of the Universal
Declaration, which Eleanor Roosevelt called the International Magna  Carta. 

Poet Rupert Brooke was a great favourite of Maxwell Fyfe and is our primary lyricist. So, one of the performances was as part of the annual celebration of the Dymock poets, of whom Brooke was one. Unexpectedly, our musical performance of his words met with resistance. One of the attendees asked us after the performance whether we were a religious movement? 

At the time, unaware of the way the wind was blowing, we shrugged it off as a misunderstanding. After all, the piece was inspired by the sound created by the Girls Choir at Southwark Cathedral, and so its atmosphere is well suited to a church.

At the time, unaware of the way the wind was blowing, we shrugged it off as
a misunderstanding. After all, the piece was inspired by the sound created by
the Girls Choir at Southwark Cathedral, its atmosphere well suited to the echoes
of a church, and what is religion but belief in the ‘deeper magic’ behind
spiritual values?

‘Tolerance, decency, kindliness’

David Maxwell Fyfe’s closing at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials

These were the qualities for which Maxwell Fyfe was searching ‘for what we might wish to see in place of the Nazi spirit,’ and he set about enshrining these in law at Strasbourg. And our musical forgotten history even has a happy ending, in the shape of 65 years uninterrupted by war
in Western Europe.

But this performance turned out to be an early indication of what was just around the corner, as the country grew more suspicious of the value of a convention that threatens governmental sovereignty. Seven difficult and divisive years on, the political landscape has made this story controversial, as Mountfield observed after a recent performance at the Bonavero Institute for Human Rights.

‘What began as a celebration is now a call to arms.’

Helen Mountfield, Principal Mansfield College, Oxford

When we sang in Gloucestershire we never imagined a need to convert sceptics. Now we know there is, we’re not so sure our fervour for once indisputable positive values, including the pre-eminence of the rule of law, doesn’t smack of a religion after all. The message it seems can go unheard, or be dismissed as a relic from another, different age.

‘We cannot persist with a system that was designed for a different era’

Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister

Yet we continue to sing, even if just now it feels as if fewer people are listening. Our still, small voice of protest is easily drowned out by shouting. But like the Evensong that inspired it, the power of which is never diminished by a less than full house, we are there to keep ‘the faith of a lawyer’ alive. In its’ reflective nature lies its power, for it makes a virtue of humanity itself, that has always expressed itself through music, poetry and imagery.

By now we’re familiar with the silence that falls when there is debate about
Britain remaining a signatory’ to ECHR – for believers its’ the silence of
complacency, that the worst won’t happen, or fear at speaking out in case it
prompts unwelcome controversy. For non-believers, it’s a refusal to acknowledge that leaving the Convention when we are part of Europe, leaves us the only other country outside it bar Russia and Belarus. Do we want to ‘convert’ them with our evangelical zeal? Well actually, yes.

As the Council of Europe prepares to ‘renew the conscience of Europe ‘ in May, we offer our song cycle to tell the forgotten history of our rights and freedoms in an inspiring way. Whether performances fall under mystery, morality, citizenship or entertainment, like any parable, it’s a story that we believe should be told – and shared.

Watch the video of our beautiful protest here.

Discover our Charters of Freedom Linktree here.