Rightly detained, but for too long
John Grigg
IN THE HIGHEST DEGREE ODIOUS by A. W. Brian Simpson Clarendon, £35, pp. 464 At the beginning of the second world war emergency legislation was passed, empowering the government to do more or less anything it liked for the duration. One regulation that resulted from this, 18B, gave the right to detain without trial, though few British subjects, as distinct from `enemy aliens', were in fact detained until the critical month of May 1940. Then 18B was strengthened to enable the Home Secretary to lock up members of any organisation which had ever been associat- ed with an enemy regime, or which, more broadly, had been 'subject to foreign influ- ence or control' (`foreign' covering Italy, not yet at war with Britain, and the Soviet Union).
Over the next few weeks nearly two thousand British subjects were incarcerated in conditions appropriate to convicted criminals. The most prominent were Sir Oswald Mosley, Captain Maule Ramsay MP and Admiral Sir Barry Domvile. Mosley and his wife, Diana — one of the remarkable Mitford sisters — were at first held in separate prisons, but from late 1941 they were allowed to live together at Holloway until their release in November 1943. Domvile had been released earlier the same year, but Ramsay was held until September 1944. By then only a hand-
ful of British subjects remained in detention, and all were released immedi- ately after VE-day, when 18B was abolished.
The title of Brian Simpson's study of this aspect of the war is taken from a cable sent by Churchill to the Home Secretary, Her- bert Morrison, from Cairo, in November 1943. 'The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge' was, he said, 'in the highest degree odious' and 'the foundation of all totalitari- an government, whether Nazi or Commu- nist'. Though in May 1940 Churchill had favoured 'a very large round-up' of people who might be a danger to the state, libertarian sentiments could more easily be indulged three and a half years later, when Britain was no longer under imminent threat of invasion, when Russia and America were in the war, and when the tide had clearly turned against Germany.
Professor Simpson's interesting and scholarly book errs, perhaps, a little in not making quite enough allowance for the desperate circumstances of 1940. He describes the summer of that year as 'a bad time for common sense', in the context of arguing that there was no serious British fifth column and that the state, therefore, under pressure from the security services, overreacted. But this is hindsight with a vengeance. At the time it was common sense to take no unnecessary risks.
Mosley and most of the others detained may have been patriots after their fashion, but they were against the war and their ideological links with the enemy were all too obvious. The British Union that Mosley led was modelled on Mussolini's and Hitler's movements, however exiguous its size, while the anti-Semitism that obsessed Ramsay and Domvile, in particular, as well as many lesser figures, made them natural sympathisers of Nazism. Moreover, the Mosleys' marriage, in 1936, had taken place in Berlin, when Goebbels had given a 'So, Arthur, it all started with one round table?' lunch in their honour, attended by Hitler. How, in 1940, could such people fail to be regarded as potential Quislings, however unjustly?
The British communists were unques- tionably under foreign influence and con- trol. Yet they were not detained along with the fascists, and Professor Simpson more or less concedes the case for leaving them at large. There was a reason of principle, that Britain was not at war with the Soviet Union. More compelling, however, was the pragmatic reason that there might be industrial unrest, and trouble from the Labour left, if they were detained. For the same reason the fascist detainees were held much longer than they need have been.
Though the communists' immunity is understandable, there were some very strange anomalies in 1940, to which Profes- sor Simpson draws attention. Why, for instance, was Major-General J. H. C. (`Boney') Fuller not detained? Fuller had been heavily involved in the British Union before the war, and had attended Hitler's birthday celebrations as recently as May 1939. He was 'violently anti-Semitic, and admired the Nazis'. Professor Simpson sug- gests that he may have been left at large because, as the possible military leader of a fascist underground, it may have been thought profitable to keep him under surveillance; or alternatively because he had supporters among the military top brass, including General Ironside. In the absence of documents the truth cannot be known.
Professor Simpson is withering about official secrecy in Britain.
One has only to look at the Public Record Office at Kew and compare its size to that of a warehouse or aircraft hangar to see that provision for the preservation of British pub- lic records is on a pathetic scale.
Most government files are destroyed, he says, while access to some that survive is indefinitely refused.
The legal profession does not come well out of the book. Most judges took the view that 18B gave the Home Secretary, rather than the courts, the final say in detention matters, and the law lords ruled that it was not for the courts to interfere with the executive in wartime. Even Lord Atkin's celebrated dissent from this ruling, which has caused him to be regarded 'as a sort of legal saint in a profession which is rather light on sanctity', is ungenerously ascribed by the author more to a concern for judi- cial status than to 'any special commitment to liberty'. The only part of the state machine which emerges with some credit from Professor Simpson's analysis is, rather surprisingly, the home office. Diana Mosley has written of detention without trial that it is 'like being kidnapped — you cannot see the end'. The British fas- cists who had this unpleasant experience endured it for only a limited time, and were few in number compared with the nearly 30,000 'enemy aliens' detained at the beginning of the War — so many of whom were refugees from Hitler's tyranny. Still more infinitesimal is the number of the 18B victims when compared with the millions who languished and perished in the Nazi concentration camps. Moral indignation generated by reading Professor Simpson's book has to be matched by a sense of proportion.
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