First World War: Commemorations

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Young, for proposing this topic for us to discuss. I agree with her that every such commemoration raises a lot of controversy, but it also exposes a lot of ignorance at the same time. Someone, perhaps to take a radical stance, has called it a “European civil war”. That may sound like brave talk, but it was not just a European civil war. A lot of the rest of the world was fighting on one side or the other in the war.

We need to be reminded of the history, at the top as well as the bottom, of how the war was fought. One of the most unique aspects—certainly it was not repeated in the Second World War—was the formation of the Imperial War Cabinet. The fact that it was formed, including people such as Jan Smuts from South Africa and Satyendra Sinha—who later became Lord Sinha of Raipur, the only hereditary Peer of Asian origin—representing various parts of the empire and deciding about the war, is not very well known. We ought to be able to commemorate that as a constitutional innovation as well as an historical event.

It is true that this practice was not followed in the Second World War. Despite that, the empire as it then was—or the Commonwealth—contributed to the Second World War. As the noble Baroness said, on the Indian side perhaps up to 2 million people participated in the war. As noble Lords know, throughout the history of the British Empire in India, the Indian army was paid for by the Indian taxpayer; it was never paid for by the British taxpayer. In the First World War, not only was all the additional recruitment paid for by the Indian taxpayer, India alone raised £2 billion—I think. I will check; I have written it in my own book, The Rediscovery of India, so I can check that. I do not know whether India was ever repaid, but we will pass over that.

One really ought to recognise that when Britain was fighting the First World War, and indeed the Second World War, there was a tremendous contribution from the rest of the empire in terms of soldiers and resources. India was an especially big supplier of raw materials and resources for fighting the war, and that contribution was vital to that effort. I am really pressing for recognition of the efforts of the top as well as at the bottom, because one ought not to forget that the institution of the Imperial War Cabinet was a remarkable constitutional innovation and we ought to commemorate that.

That said, although the celebrations will not go on to what happened after the war, the First World War had a profound influence on the British Empire. The movements for national liberation got a great fillip from the soldiers who had come to Europe and fought the war. When the soldiers saw that their masters were just about as good as they were in fighting, and not a superior race, they realised that humanity is much more alike than not. That message was carried much more thoroughly by the war into the minds of ordinary soldiers who had come from agriculture or other industries. We ought to recognise that that was in some sense a creative contribution from what was a destructive war.