20. Allison Pearson, VE Day, and the ghost of Umberto Eco

A Telegraph columnist uses the 80th anniversary commemorations to reenact a particular strain of 1930s rhetoric...

May 07, 2025

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Previously: Cover story

In the years following World War I, the stab-in-the-back myth, which maintained that Germany lost the war because of Jews, socialists, and communists who betrayed the nation on the home front, was a powerful one for the far right. Nazi propaganda decried the Weimar Republic as “a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation [and] ruthless persectuon of the honest ‘national opposition’”. That line floated back into my mind as I read Allison Pearson’s latest Telegraph column.

Under the headline Starmer’s Britain is not worthy of the sacrifice our soldiers made 80 years ago, Pearson sketches out a modern version of that old betrayal narrative:

Some may say it’s not fair to compare Sir Keir Starmer to this country’s greatest leader, but we are, nonetheless, entitled to wonder how, eight decades later, that victory “of the great British nation as a whole” has been squandered and betrayed.

Starmer’s Britain, with its non-crime hate incidents and its summary arrest and imprisonment of “far-Right” opponents who dare to object to the slaughter of our children and the industrial-scale rape of white, working class girls, not to mention the vile weekly displays of Jew-hatred on its streets, increasingly seems to me to have more in common with the regime that we defeated.

Pearson wants to convince her readers that Britain is a nation being crushed under a jackboot or, perhaps more accurately, a vegan leather Doc Martin. In Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay, ‘Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt’, he says fascist societies paint their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak”. In the world of The Daily Telegraph, the “woke” are both so strong that they dominate all cultural conversations and so weak that they cannot cope with reality.

The first of Eco’s 14 points for defining ur-facism is “a cult of tradition”, and that’s all present and correct in Pearson’s bitter homily to the VE Day celebrations. She writes:

… millions who now live here have no affiliation to the UK, no ties of blood or sentiment, no clue about bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover or bagpipes or Scotland the Brave. They do not smile, as the rest of us smiled, when they see Princess Anne in her brown uniform with the cinched waist and jaunty cap, so like the one worn by her mother, our beloved late Queen, when she served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) as a driver and mechanic. (Anne, the best Queen we never had. Anne, the hardest working member of the Royal family who, despite a kidnap attempt, has the same level of security as that whingebucket Prince Harry.)

Nor do their throats constrict when they listen to the swelling chords of The Dam Busters March or hear the thunderous thrum of a Lancaster bomber, with its four Merlin engines, leading the flypast over Buckingham Palace. It almost seems to be hardwired into the British psyche, that sound. As if we know instinctively those magnificent men in their flying machines kept us safe.

This is the language of someone defining an enemy within. That enemy is not just comprised of the immigrants Pearson so despises, but of anyone young, on the left, or just not taken with the most red meat right-wing ideology. Of course, she makes sure to separate out those ‘foreigners’ of whom she approves:

Don’t get me wrong. Some immigrants, and the children of immigrants, are among our most patriotic people. Look at that Jamaican-British airman, now in his late-nineties, who told the BBC with such pride about his wartime service and the deep bond he enjoyed with his band of brothers.

It’s worth noting there how she chose to order the nationalities when describing that veteran, and how that paragraph came after this passage:

As the development economist Paul Collier recently pointed out, the population of London is no greater than it was 60 years ago, but more than half the current population is foreign born.

“Something rather drastic has happened to the indigenous population,” says Prof Collier. “I cannot think of another capital city where the indigenous population has more than halved in half a century.”

The “more migrants the merrier” narrative, promoted by successive governments to artificially inflate the economy while driving down per-capita prosperity, is “under huge strain”. As are “the myriad co-operations that make a society function”. We know that, don’t we? It hurts our secret souls, it threatens everything we hold dear. It’s the reason one wit on X could quip of London: “Not many Brits live there any more.”

There are so many dog whistles in those paragraphs that an audio version would sound like a rowdy day at Crufts. Eco wrote of the fascists’ exploitation of the “fear of difference” and their selective populism, the argument that institutions “no longer represent the voice of the people”. When Pearson writes of the hurt to her “secret soul”, it sounds an awful lot like someone complaining that it’s harder to be openly racist these days, especially when it’s followed by a straightforwardly racist quip mined from X.

Tell me that the next section I quote doesn’t remind you of that stab-in-the-back myth and the way long-dead propagandists harnessed it:

It would have been far easier to write a piece this week that went along with the nostalgic delusion, which raved uncritically about “how well we do these things” instead of pointing out the Potemkin pageant. But I love my country, and I will not lie to her. She deserves the truth. The greatest generation did not make sacrifices barely comprehensible to the modern mind to see Britain reduced to a husk of her former self. They who paid the ultimate price did not expect their homeland to be invaded and altered beyond recognition, their traditions trashed, their culture eroded, while complacent and complicit governments did nothing.

“There’ll always be an England,” they sang. Well, it turns out they were wrong; the liberal, globalist, no-borders class had other ideas. As the victors over Nazi Germany pass from this world into the history books, from now on, folks, it’s up to you and me to fight for the freedom they won for us, for the amazing country they saved.

Where Goebbels raged about the “November criminals”, Pearson talks of the “liberal, globalist, no-borders class”. Where the official Nazi histories condemned the Weimar Republic as a “morass of corruption and degeneracy”, she sketches out a picture of a “homeland” — a very interesting choice of words — “invaded and altered beyond recognition” with its “culture eroded”.

Of course, Pearson would respond to my points here by saying I’m a typical leftist, immediately leaping to calling her a fascist. But to be clear, I’m merely pointing out that in her desire to commemorate the Second World War, her particular form of reenactment borrows heavily from the sort of rhetoric of which the Third Reich was so fond. I can’t comment on the contents of her “secret soul”, but I can judge the words she files to be printed in a national newspaper.

In the run-up to my book, Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters, coming out on June 12, I’m publishing an edition of this newsletter every day (mostly excluding weekends and bank holidays). This is number 20 of 50.

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