Battle of Passchendaele

Lord Monks Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Black, for initiating this debate and join those who have expressed appreciation for the standard that he set with his introductory remarks—a standard which I think just about everybody who has contributed so far has also reached in their contributions.

I was general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation and lived in Brussels for eight years. During that period, many family and friends visited Belgium and it became a pilgrimage to visit Passchendaele and Ypres. The repetition never bored: every visit stirred the emotions and burned into me and others the words, “Never again”.

We have to reflect from time to time on the origins of the Great War, how so few people saw it coming, how it erupted so volcanically after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, how the German emperor gave the Austro-Hungarians a blank cheque, which widened a local conflict into a European and global one, and, once the war had started, how it proved impossible to stop. It resolved none of Europe’s tensions while it bred plenty of new ones, which became fertile territory later for the dictators.

Yet the outbreak of war was totally unexpected by the mass of Europe’s population. There were, of course, many tensions: the rise of a sense of nationhood in the small countries which were part of Europe’s empires; the Prussianisation and militarisation of Germany under an erratic Kaiser; frontier disputes, social and class tensions and the rise of a powerful new political philosophy—socialism. But in 1913, none of these was expected to erupt into a European war. Is there a lesson here for today and tomorrow? I want to address that question briefly, because I think there is.

In the EU referendum, one argument I advanced, admittedly with limited success, was that the EU was a peace project to harness former enemies into a common endeavour. Yet it got very little traction. It was unthinkable to many that there was a risk of war in Europe—elsewhere yes, perhaps, but Europe, no, at least west of Ukraine. Peace is widely taken for granted in our part of the world. I just hope that those people are right. Yet the lesson of the start of the Great War is that peace should never be taken for granted. War can erupt with little warning.

Does the Europe of today generate complacency? We know that there is a new wave of nationalisms. Catalonia is today debating whether to declare UDI from Spain. We know, too, that extreme right-wing parties have gained support in many countries, now even surfacing quite noticeably in Germany. There is widespread disillusion with austerity and our economic models, especially since the economic crash of 2008. In addition, mass movements of migrants and refugees are under way and no one has a clear idea, beyond building walls, of what to do about it. However, you can say for sure that the EU and its member states have not risen adequately to all these challenges and so have fed scepticism and disillusion about the project. Into this tinderbox, the UK decision on Brexit has tossed a match—a match which we hope will not provoke other countries to think that they too need to “roar like lions”, to coin a current phrase.

One thing I remember from the time I spent in Brussels was the Europe-wide respect for Britain’s role in bringing peace and democracy back to Europe and for our stability and political maturity. We have to be very careful that we do not become a more nationalistic exemplar in the European world. Our Brexit negotiators should have Europe’s troubled history at the front of their minds, certainly not at the back.

So I advise all noble Lords who have not been—and many have, as has been said today—to visit Passchendaele and its cemeteries, especially Tyne Cot, the largest. Also, make a detour and take in the moving German cemetery at Langemark, which has affected everybody who has been there with me. Visit the Menin Gate and the wonderful In Flanders Fields Museum, which is in the Cloth Hall at Ypres. I hope that the many British visitors and schoolchildren who go there are as moved by all this as my family and my visitors have been. Reflect, too, not just on the sacrifice and the hopelessness then but on any contemporary lessons.

My own family came off lightly. There are Monks commemorated on the Menin Gate, but they are not of my immediate family, as far as we know. Six of my uncles were in the British Army in the Great War and all survived, although one was to die later of a wound contracted in Ireland. Nevertheless, we count ourselves among the lucky ones.

But while we remember and honour the past, the dead, the wounded and the disabled, we must resolve never to commit our young people to senseless slaughter and to work for a peaceful world. The hundreds of thousands of casualties of Passchendaele deserve no less.