Neville Chamberlain or Winston Churchill?

David Cameron has gone off to Berlin today for talks about the EU and its finances with Angela Merkel.
I wonder if he is using Neville Chamberlain or Winston Churchill as his role model?

Will he decide to appease the Germans, and come back having acceded to their wishes waving the equivalent of Chamberlain's piece of  paper, "Peace in our Time"?
Or is this the point when he decides that "enough is enough" and decides to emulate Churchill  and make it clear exactly what he wants - unconditional surrender.

Today's papers seem to make Germany's position quite clear.
The Telegraph headlines "German attempt to derail UK poll" seems clear enough, with the on-line Telegraph giving details here.

The current on-line headline is "German finance minister predicts end of pound as PM meets Merkel".
Wolfgang Schäuble says all of EU will have a common currency  "sooner than people in the British Isles believe", as David Cameron arrives in Berlin for tense talks with Angela Merkel.
This is also reported in the Mail

Elsewhere the Telegraph reveals that, according to a leaked German government document. the Germans want "An intrusive European body with the power to take over the economies of struggling nations should be set up to tackle the eurozone crisis."
As in 1939, many of the other countries in the EU seem to have surrendered or are on the point of capitulation. I wonder how the people of the erstwhile eastern bloc countries are feeling, having rid themselves of their most recent oppressor only to find that their previous invader is now in charge? I wonder how the Danes and the Dutch feel about all this? One might expect Sweden to remain neutral as before and make a substantial profit out of the situation, and France will in due course get a new Vichy style government. Ireland, Spain and Portugal will continue to sit on their fences.

I hope that it will be the equivalent of this picture we see after Cameron's talks

But I fear that it will be the one at the top of the page.

World War One and my Father

Every Remembrance Sunday, my thoughts always turn towards the First World War rather than more recent wars. There were of course more British fatalities in this war than there have been in all the subsequent conflicts, and it was after this war that the tradition of the Remembrance Sunday
was borrn. Then my thoughts always seem to turn to my father, born in 1899, who served in the closing stages of the war. He never spoke about his experiences, all I know was that he was in the Machine Gun Corps and for a period in the trenches he was attached to a regiment of Australians for whom he had great respect.

After the war, he qualified as a accountant and, presumably because he spoke German as his father was Swiss, he secured a job with the Bayer Products, the British subsidiary of the giant Bayer chemical company. He, and my mother, went to Germany numerous times in the late twenties and thirties and on one occasion he visited Hitler's retreat at Berchtesgaden, I don't know if he actually met Hitler!

What he did do during this period was to develop a deep contempt for all our politicians and particularly the pacifists who were pushing disarmament. The only exception was Churchill, who at that time was "out in the cold" for advocating rearmament. As my father frequently told me, in his later years, if you had travelled around Germany at that time as he did, you would have seen all the signs of a country preparing for war. They were devoting massive amounts of effort and money into building the autobahns, far more than could possibly be justified by the number of vehicles using them.
But it seems that most of our politicians of that time were totally blind to what the didn't want to see; Churchill was the main exception and because of this was branded a warmonger. In his memoirs, Churchill frequently refers to "information that I have received from Germany" and similar phrases. I like to think that my father was possibly one of those supplying information, although it seems unlikely.
I do know, at the start of the war when the government asked anyone who had any recent photographs taken in Germany to forward them to the War Office, my father supplied a considerable number. I don't know if this was amongst them, my parents are in the second row, just behind the arrowed girl in the white dress.

BAD NEUENAHR, GERMANY 17.7.35

What would my father think of our politicians today?
Like those of the thirties, most of them seem to prefer to ignore reality. They have taken us into an unwinnable war in Afghanistan and prefer to ignore the realities of what is happening in Europe. They have reduced our military to such an extent that they couldn't possibly defend the Falklands, let alone this country. They refuse to accept that we now have an enemy within due to mass immigration or that Germany remains a threat to Europe, using money this time rather than tanks. And more to the point, if they turn out to be wrong, like Chamberlain, where is the latter day "Churchill" to take over?
Is it any surprise that I, like my father before me, hold the majority of our politicians of all parties in total contempt?

- - o o O o o - -

As a side issue, if there is anyone reading this who has any contacts in Switzerland who might be able to help me find more about my grandfather, Johan Schütz, whom according to the 1911 census was born in Fribourg, Switzerland around 1865, please contact me.