‘A sideshow to the war in Europe'

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the Second World War to British national identity. As the Guardian once editorialised: ‘As far as the British people are concerned the history of planet earth goes like this. (1) The earth cools. (2) Primitive life forms emerge. (3) Britain wins the Second World War’. ¹ The war has been key to the ways many British people have thought about their nation and themselves as its citizens. In the postwar years, the war came to stand for a time when everyone got along, when the Empire was secure (and its people somewhere far away), and when Britain clearly mattered in the world. ² Representing the war in this manner became a way of ignoring the complexities of contemporary Britain. From the miners, to the Malvinas, and through the fortieth anniversaries in the 1980s of significant Second World War events, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made the best of the politics of public memorialising. By the fiftieth anniversaries in the 1990s, when cultural denial of political, geographic, and demographic change was even more challenging, Prime Minister John Major found navigating the currents of commemoration far trickier, with results that were costly on a number of levels. These anniversaries, then, can reveal rapidly changing ideas about Britain, the British, and the Empire, as individuals and groups (including governments) tried to find their place in contemporary global politics and postcolonial culture. In some ways, images of Britain and British identities viewed through the lens of the war ostensibly became broader and more inclusive, yet that new perspective in fact served to both extend and obscure its inherent exclusions. This renewed embrace of the ‘people’s war’ found ample room to include postwar generations, but was almost entirely blind to the many peoples who served under once-proud imperial flags.