Smells Like Blitz Spirit

A 1939 precursor to the 'Keep Calm
and Carry On' posters.

 “You’re no Winston Churchill!” mocks the tangerine-tinted tyrant.  To be honest, if someone called me a right Winston Churchill, I’d be pretty offended, so maybe Keir Starmer should be pleased he’s not being compared to a racist misogynist, who at best can be described as being in the right place at the right time.  Starmer’s a national embarrassment, says the Daily Mail, in a front-page story (4^th March 2026) that calls Churchill our greatest Prime Minister (slim pickings, there) and gives thanks that Starmer was not PM “in 1940, when Britain stood alone against Hitler.”

Ah, nostalgia. Ain’t it great?  There’s nothing quite like recalling World War II to convince ourselves that we’re somehow better than the rest of the world.  Let’s plaster everything from socks to keyrings to tea-towels in ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ slogans (interestingly, not mass-produced until 2008), and invoke a bit of ‘Blitz Spirit’ whenever things get tough.  The big band I play in is regularly booked for 1940s-themed gigs, where people dress in WWII uniforms, deck the place out in Union Jack bunting, dance to Glen Miller (an American, incidentally) and even subject themselves to eating SPAM to round off the nostalgia-fest.  From the Independent declaring, “London Can Take It!” following the 7/7 attacks, to the time we all stood in the street to applaud the NHS and took lockdown in our stride – there’s nothing that ignites our national pride like a good old reference to ‘Blitz Spirit’.

But did the British really keep calm and carry on?  And should we really be harking back to a time when tens of thousands of people were killed and millions of homes destroyed?  The Blitz (short for the German ‘blitzkrieg’, or ‘lightning war’) was the name given to the continual German bombardment of British cities for eight months from September 1940 to May 1941.  During that time, London was bombed for 57 nights straight.  Over 40,000 civilians were killed, with nearly half those deaths occurring in the capital.  The Nazis eventually abandoned their campaign, partly because they were preparing for their invasion of Russia and needed their forces elsewhere, and partly because their attempt to demoralise the British public and hamper the war effort simply hadn’t worked.

Score one for those who support the idea of Blitz Spirit.  And sure, there were examples of stoicism and humour amongst those living through the bombardment.  People got up each morning and went to work, even if they had spent all night in an air raid shelter (perhaps one of those famous images of strangers crammed together in a tube station).  Shopkeepers swept away the broken glass and rubble and were open again by midday.

But quite apart from the fact that the stiff upper lip masked private grief and crippling fears revealed in letters and diaries from the 1940s, the population wasn’t entirely so wholesome as those Churchill-loving patriots might have you believe.  Looting was rife during the Blitz – thieves would target houses during air raids, whilst the owners were in air raid shelters, or sift through the rubble of freshly-bombed buildings.  Rationing led to the introduction of coupons and ration books, which were routinely sold on the black market for profits in the tens of thousands, making certain gangs and individuals very rich indeed.  Pickpockets worked their way through the occupants of those tube station shelters.  Working class communities – where overcrowding was common and access to shelters more limited – suffered disproportionate losses.  Any discontentment or inequality was glossed over by government propaganda.  Blitz Spirit was little more than a myth.

But it’s a myth that the right-wing now relies on.  It’s the reason why Reform UK are gaining votes.  They prey on the susceptible by promoting the idea that the Britain of days gone by - when we had an empire and were oppressing, exploiting and enslaving populations around the world - was somehow better than the multiracial society we now live in.  Make Britain Great Again, they cry, emulating their MAGA buddies from across the pond.  And this belief in our greatness reaches back further still, to a time when Sir Francis Drake et al vanquished the Spanish Armada and birthed the notion that Britannia should rule the waves.  This tiny island, standing up to fearsome foes; it’s the reason why so many voted for Brexit and the reason why the Daily Mailis worrying about the state of our Navy, despite our relative insignificance to the current global world order.

The crucial thing about ‘Blitz Spirit’ and our love of all things World War II is that the Nazis were undeniably evil.  To suggest that we shouldn’t have stood up to Hitler is ludicrous.  (Though perhaps ignoring some of our own atrocities and dubious moral acts along the way.). Therefore, the logic appears to be that if you don’t think Churchill was our greatest PM and you don’t want to wave Union Flags at every VE Day celebration, you’re pretty much a Nazi yourself.  Ironically, of course, the most vociferous Blitz-spiriters are the ones now spouting the intolerant rhetoric and outright racism that Britain fought for during its alleged finest hour.  But Reformers don’t have too keen a sense of irony, it would seem.

It's certainly not a new take to suggest that Blitz Spirit is a myth.  Amongst those with basic critical thinking skills, it’s widely accepted, but there’s no denying that the concept is intrinsically tied up with our sense of national identity.  What’s worrying is how easily some politicians are able to manipulate our history so that vulnerable voters buy into the idea of our country’s superiority; the idea that we are better alone, without those meddlesome foreigners; that we should yearn for a time when we had the military might to stand up to any enemy in the world.  Problem is, it’s not clear just who the enemy is anymore.  And no one taught us how to stand up to the enemy within: our own jingoistic nostalgia.

Further Reading:

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11213968

 

https://theconversation.com/how-the-myth-of-blitz-spirit-defined-and-divided-london-after-7-7-259948

 

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Blitz-Spirit/

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/08/keep-calm-and-carry-on-posters-austerity-ubiquity-sinister-implications

A.I. IS COMING TO EAT YOUR CHILDREN!

Well, probably not. But hopefully that got your attention. And even if AI isn’t going to eat your children, it might just consume them in another way. It’s a metaphor, see?

No AI was involved in the creation of this image,
as is no doubt apparent

On a recent training course, I was told that if you don’t like AI, it’s because you don’t understand it.  Thing is, I do understand it. And it terrifies me.

 

That’s not to say that I’ve never used AI.  Like all technological tools, it can be useful.  This is very much a post about the use of AI in the creative arts.  I’m not a paranoid Luddite shrieking hysterically about robots taking over the world.  I understand that Artificial Intelligence is just that - artificial. Created by us.  Which means we should tread carefully in choosing when it is appropriate to use it.

 

AI does not write a story, or generate a piece of art, or produce a song from nowhere.  It can do this because it has been fed hundreds of years’ worth of writing, art and music, created by real humans.  Simply put: it is stealing our work.  I’m not deluded enough to believe that anyone would request a song in the style of me, but my music is out there online, freely available to be mined and fed to an AI song generator.

 

As a teacher, there is another moral quandary to be faced here.  I’ve always seen it as my role – perhaps idealistically – to foster a generation of independent, critically-thinking young minds.  Check the sources, not just the AI summary, guys.  Let your imagination run wild.  Isn’t it a little hypocritical of me to expect the children I teach to produce their own writing, if I’m not able to do it myself?

 

Who ultimately benefits when we lose the ability to think for ourselves and question what we’re told?  An unquestioning, unthinking population is one that’s easy to subdue and - more troublingly - exploit.  AI is not the great leveller that the tech companies want us to believe it is.  If the market is flooded with AI-generated slop, it’s only going to make it harder for anyone to make money from art.  The only people who will get rich from AI are the tech giants.

 

But perhaps the most compelling argument against AI is this: why do we make art in the first place?  Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, an AI company that can generate an entire song from a minimal prompt, said in a recent interview with the Guardian, “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

 

Can this really be true?  I’d like to know who Mikey’s been speaking to.  Someone who has produced a song at the click of a button will never know the buzz I get from performing on stage, or just noodling away on my keyboard on a Sunday afternoon.  Funnily enough, I also enjoy the time I spend writing. (Yes, even this post, ironically).  Our appreciation of and ability to create art is one of the defining traits of our species.  What will humanity lose if we remove that creative process from our skillset?

 

When I put a piece of music out into the world, who can say whether I actually spent time writing, playing and recording it?  Who can say whether I actually wrote this post? Maybe I asked an AI to clone my tone and write an introspective piece on its own failings.  At the end of the day, you’ll never know.  And doesn’t that scare you?