Appeasement Two- This Time It’s Bonkers

We all used to love watching Laurel and Hardy. The big guy would pick on the small guy but would always get his comeuppance at the end. Pie in the face, boot up the backside, chased by a gorilla. We love to see the little guy win.

But Laurel and Hardy wouldn’t have been so funny if there was real malice involved, and the little guy just got squished, beaten to a pulp and thrown out of a high window. That was what it looked like in the White House this week when President Trump and his bullying henchman JD Vance started picking on Volodomyr Zelenskyy. Laurel and Hardy, And Hardy.

Trumps volte face in (lack of) diplomacy is nothing short of 21^st Century Appeasement and while we all want peace we know through history where this leads.

And nowhere more so than in Bridgwater in 1938.

1938

Back then Bridgwater was on the national news, the international news and on Hitler’s breakfast table. Journalist Vernon Bartlett standing as an anti-fascist, anti-appeasement defender of collective security and outraged by the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at the Munich summit (to which the Czechs weren’t invited)) had stood as a Popular Front candidate under the label Progressive Independent and had won a sensational victory. Hitler reportedly almost choked on his boiled eggs as he read the name ‘Bridgwater’.

In the late 1930s as fascism was on the rise the west chose to follow a policy of ‘appeasement’. Just ignore them and they’ll go away. Anything for peace. But the lesson of history is you can’t appease dictators as it just encourages them. And the same applies to bullies. At some point you have to stand up to them.

Many people across all parties were shocked and appalled by appeasement and tried to fight by-elections whenever the opportunity arose to make that opposition known. Six times that happened but finally and only in Bridgwater did it win through. After the Bridgwater victory things changed. Britain rearmed and started to offer guarantees to countries threatened by fascism. In September 1939 war broke out and the world eventually united in Victory.

1988

Sir Richard Acland, the man behind the 1938 by-election

In 1988 I researched this historical first for Bridgwater. In a caravan in Exmouth, I met the elderly Tom Edmonds who had campaigned for Bartlett in 1938 and who told me “We knew when the balloon finally went up it would be us on the frontline. That was inevitable but we knew we had to make that stand. Because it was right.” Tom was one of the 2 people who carried Bartlett on their shoulders from the Town Hall declaration to the Bristol Hotel, where he was staying.

That same year I interviewed Sir Richard Acland. He was the Liberal MP for Barnstaple in 1938 but part of the cross-party anti-fascist campaign group. It was him that engineered the Bridgwater by election and him that ran Bartletts campaign. Sir Richard, was a socialist and the Acland that gave away the Acland lands to the National Trust. In Parliament he formed the Commonwealth party and later became a Labour MP. When I interviewed him, he lived in a small cottage in Broad Clyst but he remembered Bridgwater with a fondness for a radical town and a history changing campaign. He asked me to thank the people of Bridgwater. I wasn’t even a councillor then. Just a slightly overweight punk rocker.

We did a play; I wrote a book and a website with all this information. www.vernonbartlett.co.uk

1991

In 1991 I had hitch-hiked to Czechoslovakia and found myself on a bus to the town of Zlin, formerly Gottwaldov (named after the now rejected Communist leader). The Czechs had had their Velvet Revolution and wanted the security of the European Union and NATO. While I was on the bus the radio sparked into action and the driver turned it up. Mikhail Gorbachev, architect of the post-communist East Europe had been overthrown in the Soviet Union and the hardline communists were back in power. On the bus the fear was obvious. Could their hard fought for freedom be snuffed out so soon.

By now a councillor I took the lead in setting up Britain’s first post velvet revolution Anglo-Czech twinning. Bridgwater and Uherske Hradiste. Another Bridgwater first.

Since then, literally thousands of Brits and Czechs have visited each other’s countries because of this link. Choirs, footballers, rock tours, students and tourists. Again, Bridgwater made the difference.

The Czechs joined the EU and NATO. They’re a prosperous country. And they’re nice people.

1995

In 1995 I was in the courtyard of Castle Buchlov in Uherske Hradiste being interviewed by a TV crew that was filming a very successful business mission which came back to Somerset with 6 contracts. War in Yugoslavia had just broken out. I pointed out how fragile the new world order was and that while we had to make every effort for peace and that making friendship links was crucial, there was war again on the European continent and we always had to understand that history simply doesn’t have a beginning and an end but a constant stream of threats and decisions to take.