Your excellent book - by Richard... Sunday, June 05, 2011

Your excellent book - by Richard... Sunday, June 05, 2011

I have come to the conclusion that publishers, if not actually practicing concentration camp guards, must have trained most of them. You spend months writing, against an insane deadline, burn the midday oil (that's where you are still awake from the night before and forget to open the curtains), and work yourself into frenzied exhaustion, all to get the great work to the church on time.

And what do you get? Nothing. Total silence. A creepy, eerie silence – your book, the love of your life, object of your complete attention and devotion for the best part a year, has fallen off the end of the world. It is as if it never existed.

Then, after a full month of torture, the e-mail. Because of the controversial nature of the book, my publishers had sent it out to some high academic referees, for an opinion. They have pronounced. The e-mail header is: "your excellent book". The text is signed, "your enthusiastic publisher". I guess it's a go!

However, there is a downside. I had intended my "take" on the Battle of Britain, provisionally entitled, "The many, not the few", to be a popular history, so I've been very sparing on the footnotes and references. But the referees think the book has academic merit, and could have a bright future as a text book. So they want me to improve the referencing. That is a messy, gutty job, and it will take time. That is my next week and a bit wiped out.

This is not all bad, though. It gives me an opportunity to revisit and update some of the sections, not least the latest on Rudolph Hess, and his supposed solo mission to broker peace with the British.

Surprisingly, this has considerable relevance to the Battle of Britain. Although the conventional narrative focuses on the derring do of the RAF pilots, the battle was as much, if not more, a political event than it was a military contest. Right throughout the period, the tempo of the battle was punctuated by German attempts to bring the British to the negotiating table, so much so that it looks more like that this was the main German objective in fighting the battle.

Now, with this latest finding, we seem to have confirmation that Hess was acting on the instructions of Hitler when he came to Britain on 10 May 1941 (pictured - the wreck of his aircraft). And when one puts this the context of there being a succession of peace offers right throughout the period, this makes absolute sense. The Hess initiative was just one in a long line of similar initiatives.

Throughout writing the book, this is one aspect I had been discussing with my close friend and local journalist, Jim Greenhalf, himself a published author who eight or nine years ago wrote a short story on the Hess affair. Jim recalls this in a post on his blog, where he entertains the likelihood that Hitler did indeed know of Hess's flight, and had approved it. Years later, his story looks to be vindicated as being ahead of its time.

Interestingly, in the comments to the news story in the Scotsman, the question is asked as to why this matters now, seventy years after the events. The answer, of course, is that the myths of yesteryear shape the present – and the myth we currently live with is that Britain in 1940, with Churchill at its head, stood fast while RAF Fighter Command, with its Spitfires and Hurricanes, repulsed the Nazi hordes.

The truth is a lot more nuanced than that, and has profound implications for how we see that period, and ourselves. I'd better get down to that referencing, I suppose, or that story will never see the light of day.

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Perpetuating the delusion - by Richard...

Only a fool could write such as this: "When David Cameron was elected as Conservative leader, it seemed as if the party's 20-year civil war over Europe had been resolved. Cameron's own Eurosceptic credentials were irreproachable ... ".

Now, faced with a conflict between his belief that the Boy Cameron is a Eurosceptic, and the reality – that he is (and always has been) a rabid Europhile, that fool. Peter Oborne writes a piece trying to reconcile his delusion with the reality. Thus he blandly informs us:

Newly elected ministers have a choice of two methods when they deal with Brussels: they either fight in a bloody-minded way for British interests, as Margaret Thatcher or Nicholas Ridley did, or they join the club. Osborne's decision set the tone: without exception, Cameron's ministers have joined the club.

This, of course, is ex post facto rationalisation. Cameron was always "in the club", so the current outcome was inevitable – and predictable. Oborne's piece, therefore, continues his own delusion, that Cameron was a Eurosceptic. He has to go with that delusion, otherwise he has to admit that, for years, he got it wrong. That would never do.

His stance, though, is almost as delusional as Tim Montgomerie "revealing" what Conservative Party members "really think" of David Cameron and his Cabinet. If the members could actually think, they would have run the Boy out of town and elected a Conservative.

But, "Scratch the surface, and they are disappointed that Cameron isn't being more robust about crime, eurozone bail-outs and the tax burden... ", the Montgomerie tells us. Oh, dearie, dearie me. The little Tories are "disappointed". I weep for them.

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Unsustainable libraries - by Richard...

DESPITE ALL the talk of "cuts", the fact remains that Government spending continues to rise and that certain budgets, such as overseas aid, continue to soar, even though the state has to borrow nearly £3 billion a week to cover them. Nearer to home, the equivalent of overseas aid seems to be "climate change", on which councils spend money like there is no tomorrow (which presumably is the justification they might offer for their profligacy).

So writes Booker, on a theme that is familiar to EURef readers. It would have been really interesting to have known what the result of a Council Tax referendum might have been in Camden Council - where the libraries are being closed. Some commenters suggest that we need to be able to vote on categories of expenditure, in order to prevent this sort of thing. And what would the government do if the voters then blocked Councils from spending on items that were a statutory requirement and/or required by the EU?

You can thus see why the government would be reluctant to allow people to have real power. They might spend the money on libraries instead of sustainability officers, and that would never do. For sure, local decisions can be made by local people – as long as they don't actually change anything.

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