Once the local elections are over, commemoration of the 80th anniversary of VE Day on May 8th – the end of the second world war – will provide a focus for public attention and local celebrations.  Many of us will be caught up in ceremonies, street parties or receptions.  I will be singing in a commemorative concert in Westminster Hall (with Mike German, Joan Walmsley and 100 others in the Parliament Choir; do listen to it, broadcast on Classic FM).  

The government and the media will want to make this a patriotic occasion.  What additional twist should Liberal Democrats add to this?  I suggest that we should emphasise what Britain and its American ally declared they were fighting the war for: for political and democratic values, for an open international order and for social democracy at home – all values that are now being challenged by President Trump in the USA and by populists in Britain and in other democratic states.

I’ve just re-read President Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ speech, and the Atlantic Charter that he and Winston Churchill signed on a warship off Newfoundland in August 1941.   Together these set out the shared aims for which the UK and the USA fought the war.  Roosevelt’s speech to Congress on January 6th 1941 declared that:

 We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world. …

The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

Five months before, Roosevelt and Churchill had signed the ‘Atlantic Charter’ – drafted by the British, revised by the Americans – which set out their shared aims in the war.   ‘…their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other; they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned; … they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security;….’

Roosevelt was, effectively, a social democrat: he believed in an active state, ensuring human rights for its citizens and redistribution from rich to poor.  This of course is why US Republicans have deleted him from their list of great men, raising Churchill alone to be their hero of World War Two.  Churchill was a one-nation Tory, nowadays a rare breed.  Neither of them would stand fully critical scrutiny in today’s world.  FDR accepted that southern Democrats would not allow human rights to be extended properly to black Americans, and Churchill resisted extending freedom to the rest of the British Empire.  But at least they understood the dangers of appeasing dictators, the importance of human rights, constitutional government and international law.

We now face a US Administration which is setting out to destroy the institutionalised international order which the Allies established after 1945, and is actively undermining the US constitution and the domestic rule of law.  And we have in Britain a government which is astonishingly timid in its response to this existential threat, and in denial about the weaknesses of our own democratic institutions.  Peter Hennessy and Andrew Blick have just published a sequel to their 2022 critique of UK politics under Johnson and Truss, The Bonfire of the Decencies: its title, Could it Happen Here?, examines the conventions that have been broken, the courts that have been challenged, and concludes that we need to be far more protective of our unwritten constitution than we were able to be between 2016 and 2024.  And they query how effective our institutions might be in a situation after the next election in which economic recession and social discontent might lead to multiple minorities in Parliament and contested claims to form a government, potentially spilling over into the street.

So we shouldn’t just celebrate the memory of VE Day.  We should remind people of what our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents were fighting for, and that the domestic and international orders they hoped to see established, with economic and social security and rights for all, still need to be promoted and defended.  A liberal, open society, secured by the rule of law and constitutional democracy and a peaceful international environment, is hard to create and always possible to destroy.  Illiberal threats are all too evident at present, and liberals and social democrats have to do our utmost to defend it.

* William Wallace is Liberal Democrat spokesman on constitutional issues in the Lords.