If Any Question Why The Truth Died, Tell Them It Was Because The BBC Lied.
Almost 100 years later, when the memorial came under threat, a family descendant expressed his concern – David Cameron.
Jeremy Paxman made an appearance on The Graham Norton Show (about 26 mins in) to advertise his new book and TV programme about the First World War and in the process made a highly political, and as it turns out farcical, attack on Cameron for, according to Paxman, suggesting we should ‘celebrate’ WWI.
Only Cameron didn’t say that, far from it….you might have thought someone like Paxman, who makes a living as an interviewer, would pay more attention to what people actually say…..especially as he goes onto claim that this was Cameron’s clumsy use of language.
What we got from the BBC was an utterly wrong headed, highly political attack on the Prime Minister from one of the BBC’s leading political interviewers.
The attack was clearly preplanned….the BBC flashed up a conveniently available photograph of Cameron (29 mins), one of the least flattering that they could get away with…so they knew exactly what the subject of the interview was going to be.
They must have looked pretty hard for this particular photo because I didn’t find it on Google…
They could have used the photo on the Government website where the speech is located:
Wonder why they didn’t use that?
What did Cameron actually say?:
In his speech, made at the museum last year, Mr Cameron said the centenary would be a ‘personal priority’ and promised the museum £5million.
Mr Cameron added that he wanted ‘a commemoration that, like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations this year, says something about who we are as a people’.
Cameron didn’t say a ‘celebration like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations’…..he said a ‘commemoration…which tells us something about who we are as a people’.
A completely different take on his words from that chosen by Paxman.
Cameron was….Calling for the nation to remember the ‘extraordinary sacrifice of a generation’, he also said the War helped shape Britain by prompting medical and technological advances.
He said: ‘For all the profound trauma, the resilience and courage that was shown, the values we hold dear and the lessons we learnt changed our nation and helped to make us who we are today.’
The completion of transforming IWM London will see the Imperial War Museum reopened as the centrepiece of our commemorations for the centenary of the First World War. With that transformation, new generations will be inspired by the incredible stories of courage, toil and sacrifice that have brought so many of us here over the past century….it is actually a special place for us all to come, to learn about a defining part of our history and to remember the sacrifice of all those who gave their lives for us, from the First World War to the present day.
Our duty towards these commemorations is clear: to honour those who served, to remember those who died, and to ensure that the lessons learnt live with us forever. And I think that is exactly what we can do with these commemorations.
That all sounds pretty respectful and shows Cameron fully understands the sacrfices and horrors of that war…but Paxman thinks not, claiming Cameron wanted to turn it into a jolly ‘knees up’:
Mr Paxman said: ‘Not to recognise that it was one of the most consequential events in our history would just be perverse.’
He said: ‘These occasions, when the Prime Minister escapes from his speech-writers, are hazardous.’
‘Our Prime Minister promised the First World War commemoration would be “like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations”. What on earth was he talking about?’
Paxman, whose great uncle died in the War, said: ‘The commemorations should have almost nothing in common with the Diamond Jubilee, which was an excuse for a knees-up in the rain to celebrate the happy fact that our national identity is expressed through a family rather than some politician.
On Graham Norton Paxman adds.…‘Only a complete idiot would ‘celebrate’ such a calamity’
John Bishop then pipes up...’They’re not normal people, they don’t represent normal people, you shouldn’t be a politician unless you’ve had at least one job’
Paxman replies…’I share that prejudice…I had to interview Russell Brand the other day…and he was banging on about how people are really disenchanted with politicians and I think he’s right…absolutely right about posturing politicians who say there is only two ways of looking at the world…their way or their opponents way…and it’s rubbish.’
Yes…but it’s a political system supported by the BBC who instead of genuinely analysing policies, facts on the ground and all possible remedies hands the airwaves to the Labour Party whilst shutting out other voices like those of UKIP
And certainly it is the Oxbridge BBC themselves who are vastly out of touch with the population on economics, immigration, welfare, climate, Islam…well with just about everything. So it is a bit hard to accept Paxman criticising politicians for being out of touch.
And Cameron had an ‘outside job’…at Carlton Communications for seven years
Is that not a ‘proper’ job? Carlton Communications is a media company, not unlike the BBC…..do I need to say anymore?
Why did Paxman not admit Cameron had this job, choosing instead to imply that he had never worked outside politics? Is it purely so that he could make a cheap political point…based clearly on a lie?
And as for Paxman interviewing Brand……..no you didn’t interview Brand, the multi-millonaire, calling for ‘equality and revolution and the redistribution of wealth and power”…you sat smirking, ineffectively trying to stifle your giggles as Brand went off on one.
If you want to read the full speech by Cameron at the Imperial War Museum…which of course tells us why he thinks the Museum is a valuable asset to the country (a notion that Paxman disagrees with thinking the Museum ‘celebrates war’), here it is in its full glory without the revisionist interpretation by the BBC for you to make up your own mind:
Transcript of the speech given by Prime Minister David Cameron on Thursday 11 October about plans to mark the First World War centenary.
Prime Minister
Thank you very much, Andrew, for those words and thank you for all the work that you’ve done. This is, I think, a very exciting time for one of the finest museums in the world. It is a museum I particularly love. I will never forget when my mother brought me here as a boy and being absolutely captivated by everything within the museum. But almost more interesting was bringing my own children here, quite recently, they’ve come twice, I think, altogether. And realising that even when I was a boy there were still people alive who had fought in the Great War. There aren’t now, but my children were just as captivated and interested as I was. I think that speaks volumes about what we are discussing today.
The completion of transforming IWM London will see the Imperial War Museum reopened as the centrepiece of our commemorations for the centenary of the First World War. With that transformation, new generations will be inspired by the incredible stories of courage, toil and sacrifice that have brought so many of us here over the past century.
From the breathtaking sights of the hanging gallery to the unforgettable smell of the trenches, from great art – like this painting of The Menin Road by Paul Nash – to the many moving stories recorded from the front line, the Imperial War Museum is not just a great place to bring your children – as I said, as I’ve done – it is actually a special place for us all to come, to learn about a defining part of our history and to remember the sacrifice of all those who gave their lives for us, from the First World War to the present day.
We should also recognise that in the decade since the introduction of free access to our national museums, the annual number of visitors here has increased by almost two-thirds. I passionately believe we should hold on to this heritage and pass it down the generations. That is why, even in difficult economic times, we are right to maintain free entry to national museums like this. It is why we will continue to do so.
Today, I want to talk about our preparations to commemorate the centenary of the First World War. I want to explain why, as Prime Minister, I am making these centenary commemorations a personal priority, and I want to set out some of the steps we are taking to make sure we really do this properly as a country.
Let me start with why this matters so much. Of course, as Andrew said, there will be some who wonder: why should we make such a priority of commemorations when money is tight and there is no one left from the generation that fought in the Great War?
For me there are three reasons. The first is the sheer scale of the sacrifice. When they set out, none of the armies had any idea of the length and scale of the trauma that was going to unfold. For many, going off to war was a rite of passage. Many of them were excited; they would eat better than they had when they were down the mines or in the textile mills. They would have access to better medical care, and many thought they’d be home by Christmas, anyway. There is the story of the Russian High Command asking for new typewriters and being told the war wouldn’t last long enough to justify the expenditure.
As Major J V Bates from the Royal Army Medical Corp wrote:
‘Being our first experience of war, we men were not so much frightened, as very excited. It wasn’t until after two or three weeks of continually fighting rear-guard action, reconnaissance patrols and seeing our mates killed and wounded that the real horror of it came home to us. And if everyone else was as frightened as I was, then we were all petrified.’
Four months later, one million had died in the heavy artillery battles that actually came before the digging of the trenches. Four years later, the death toll of military and civilians stood at over 16 million, nearly 1 million of them Britons. 200,000 were killed on one day of the Battle of the Somme. To us, today, it seems so inexplicable that countries which had many things binding them together could indulge in such a never-ending slaughter, but they did. The death and the suffering was on a scale that outstrips any other conflict. We only have to look at the Great War memorials in our villages, our churches, our schools and universities.
Out of more than 14,000 parishes in the whole of England and Wales, there are only around 50 so called ‘thankful parishes’, who saw all their soldiers return. Every single community in Scotland and Northern Ireland lost someone, and the death toll for our friends in the Commonwealth was similarly catastrophic. In the 1920s over 2,400 cemeteries were constructed in France and Belgium alone, while today there are cemeteries as far afield as Brazil and Syria, Egypt and Ireland.
Rudyard Kipling, whose own son was lost, presumed killed, at the Battle of Loos in 1915, described the construction of these cemeteries as the biggest single bit of work since any of the pharaohs, and as he pointed out, the pharaohs only worked in their own country. Such was the scale of sacrifice across the world. The then Indian empire lost more than 70,000 people; Canada lost more than 60,000, so did Australia; New Zealand, 18,000. And as part of the UK at the time, more than 200,000 Irishmen served in the British forces during the war, with more than 27,000 losing their lives. This was the extraordinary sacrifice of a generation. It was a sacrifice they made for us, and it is right that we should remember them.
Second, I think it is also right to acknowledge the impact that the war had on the development of Britain and, indeed, the world as it is today. For all the profound trauma, the resilience and the courage that was shown, the values we hold dear: friendship, loyalty, what the Australians would call ‘mateship’. And the lessons we learned, they changed our nation and they helped to make us who we are today.
It is a period of our history through which we can start to trace the origins of a number of very significant advances: the extraordinary bravery of Edith Cavell, whose actions gained such widespread admiration and played an important part in advancing the emancipation of women; the loss of the troopship SS Mendi, in February 1917 and the death of the first black British army officer, Walter Tull, in March 1918, are not just commemorated as tragic moments, but also seen as marking the beginnings of ethnic minorities getting the recognition, respect and equality they deserve.
The improvements in medicine were dramatic. In 1915 wounds which became infected resulted in a 28% mortality rate; by 1917 the use of antiseptics saw the death toll drop to just 8%. Plastic surgery developed into a well-established speciality over the course of the war.
At the same time there were hugely significant developments in this period, which, frankly, darkened our world for much of the following century. The advance in technology transformed the nature of war beyond recognition. The tanks and aircraft of 1918 were the forerunners of those that fought with such devastation in World War II. They would have been almost unimaginable for the cavalry regiments that set out in the autumn of 1914.
The war’s geopolitical consequences defined much of the twentieth century. It unleashed the forces of Bolshevism and Nazism and, of course, with the failure to get the peace right, the great tragedy was that the legacy of ‘the War to end all wars’ was an equally cataclysmic Second World War, just two decades later.
So I think for us today to fail to recognise the huge national and international significance of all these developments during the First World War would be, frankly, a monumental mistake.
There is a third reason why this matters so much. It is more difficult to define, but I think it is perhaps the most important of all. There is something about the First World War that makes it a fundamental part of our national consciousness. Put simply, this matters not just in our heads, but in our hearts; it has a very strong emotional connection. I feel it very deeply. Of course, there is no one in my family still alive from the time, or anything close to it. My grandfather, my uncle, my great uncle all fought in the Second World War. I have always been fascinated by what happened to them and tried to listen to their experiences.
Even though the family stories that I’ve heard direct from the participants, as it were, were all from World War II, there is something so completely captivating about the stories that we read from World War I. We look at those fast fading sepia photographs of people posing stiffly and proudly in their uniform. In many cases it was the first and last image ever taken of them, and this matters to us.
The stories and the writings of the Great War affect us too. That mixture of horror and courage, suffering and hope; it has permeated our culture. From the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, my favourite book, Robert Graves’s memoirs recounting his time in the Great War, Good-Bye to All That. To modern day writers like Sebastian Faulks, from Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, focusing on the aftermath of trauma, to War Horse, showing the sacrifice of animals in war. Current generations are still absolutely transfixed by what happened in the Great War and what it meant.
The fact is, individually and as a country, we keep coming back to it, and I think that will go on. This is not just a matter of the heart for us in Britain. It is a matter for the heart for the whole of Europe and beyond. From The Last Post Association, whose volunteers have played every night at the Menin Gate since 1928, to Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, to the Memorial to the Missing, in Belgium, which is the largest British war cemetery in the world, visited by nearly half a million people every year, still today, to the battlefield memorials right across Western Europe.
For me, when asked: what is the most powerful First World War memory you have? It is going to visit the battlefields at Gallipoli. I’ll never forget going, having a fantastic Turkish guide who showed me the beaches we were meant to land at, the beaches we did land at, the fight that went on up those extraordinary hills. One of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen is the monument erected by the Turks in Gallipoli. Before I read you the inscription, think in your mind, think of the bloodshed, think of the tens of thousands of Turks who were killed, and then listen to the inscription that they wrote to our boys and to those from the Commonwealth countries that fell. It is absolutely beautiful, I think. It goes like this:
‘Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us, where they lie, side by side, in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they shall become our sons as well.’
So beautiful, beautiful words on this First World War monument. For me, those words capture so much of what this is all about. That from such war and hatred can come unity and peace, a confidence and a determination never to go back. However frustrating and however difficult the debates in Europe, 100 years on we sort out our differences through dialogue and meetings around conference tables, not through the battles on the fields of Flanders or the frozen lakes of western Russia.
Let me turn to the plans for the centenary. Last November I appointed former Naval doctor Andrew Murrison as my special representative. I am very grateful to him for the excellent work he has been doing in assembling ideas from across Government and beyond, and for putting the UK among the leaders in this shared endeavour and for laying the foundations of our commemorations. Today, I am honoured to be able to say that he is going to be joined by some of the most senior figures in British public life, including Tom King, George Robertson, Menzies Campbell, Jock Stirrup and Richard Dannatt. That’s two former Secretaries of State for Defence, one of whom was also a Secretary General of NATO, a former Chief of the Defence Staff, a former Chief of the General Staff. They’ll be joined by others, including world leading historians, like Hew Strachan, and world class authors like Sebastian Faulks. I hope they’ll provide senior leadership on a new advisory board that is going to be chaired by the Secretary of State for Culture, Maria Miller.
Our ambition is a truly national commemoration, worth of this historic centenary. I want a commemoration that captures our national spirit, in every corner of the country, from our schools to our workplaces, to our town halls and local communities. A commemoration that, like the Diamond Jubilee celebrated this year, says something about who we are as a people.
Remembrance must be the hallmark of our commemorations, and I am determined that Government will play a leading role, with national events and new support for educational initiatives. These will include national commemorations for the first day of conflict, on 4th August 2014, and for the first day of the Somme, on 1st July 2016. Together with partners like the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the custodians of our remembrance, the Royal British Legion, there will be further events to commemorate Jutland, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, all leading towards the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day in 2018.
The centenary will also provide the foundations upon which to build an enduring cultural and educational legacy, to put young people front and centre in our commemoration and to ensure that the sacrifice and service of a hundred years ago is still remembered in a hundred years’ time.
Now, the Imperial War Museum is already leading the First World War Centenary Partnership, a growing network of over 500 organisations, helping millions of people across the world to discover more about life in the First World War and its relevance today. Today we are complementing that with a new centenary education programme, with more than £5 million of new Government funding. This will include the opportunity for pupils and teachers from every state secondary school to research the people who served in the Great War, and for groups of them then, crucially, to follow their journey to the First World War battlefields. I think that will be a great initiative and really welcomed by secondary schools and secondary school pupils.
We are also providing a further £5 million of new money, in addition to the £5 million we have already given to support transforming IWM London – this project right here at this incredible museum. It will match contributions from private, corporate and social donors.
So our commemorations, if you like, will consist of three vital elements: a massive transformation of this museum to make is even better than it is today, a major programme of national commemorative events properly funded, given the proper status that they deserve, and third, an educational programme to create an enduring legacy for generations to come. All of this will be overseen by a world class advisory board chaired by the Secretary of State for Culture, supported by my own special representative Andrew Murrison.
And that is not all, because we stand ready to incorporate more ideas because a truly national commemoration cannot just be about national initiatives and government action, it needs to be local too. So the Heritage Lottery Fund is today announcing an additional £6 million to enable young people working in their communities to conserve, explore and share local heritage of the First World War.
That is in addition to the £9 million they have already given to projects marking the centenary, including community heritage projects. And they are calling for more applications; they are open to new ideas, to more thinking. So whether it is a series of friendly football matches to mark the famous 1914 Christmas Day truce, or the campaign led by the Greenhithe branch of the Royal British Legion to sow the Western Front’s iconic poppies here in the UK, I think we should get out there and make this centenary a truly national moment, but also something that actually means something in every locality in our country.
So, in total over £50 million is being committed to these centenary commemorations; I think it is absolutely right they should be given such priority, as I have explained. As a twenty-year-old soldier wrote just a week before he died: ‘But for this war, I and all the others would have passed into oblivion like the countless myriads before us, but we shall live forever in the results of our efforts.’
Our duty towards these commemorations is clear: to honour those who served, to remember those who died, and to ensure that the lessons learnt live with us forever. And I think that is exactly what we can do with these commemorations.
