With all respect to the Prime Minister, with all respect
to Mr. Churchill, with all respect to anyone who has a good word to say for the officially-imposed celebrations on June 8th (I have only, myself, found one such), I remain of the opinion that the whole affair is untimely, inappropriate and little short of the indecent. That, I am glad to find, is the almost universal view, and it is all to the credit of the British people that it should be. We have had two victory celebrations, both right, spontaneous and inevitable— at a date when there was some solid reason for believing that victory spelt peace and stability. To-day, twelve months after the end of the German war such illusions are tragically shattered. Peace, in the sense of the absence of actual war, does indeed exist. But what of the hoped-for stability? What of the imagined prosperity? And while half Europe starves, Britain is required to celebrate. And a Government that refused the usual donatives to the commanders of the victorious forces is spending five or six times what that would have cost on fireworks and processions. Of course the show will attract the usual crowds, just as the spectacle of the Cabinet riding from Downing Street to Westminster on dromedaries would. But whoever was originally responsible for arranging the show has fundamentally and deplorably misread the national psychology.
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