George Galloway: 'Are you ready to die for that?' King and Country debate Oxford Union - 2023

9 February 2023, Oxford Union, Oxford, United Kingdom

The topic ‘That This House Will under no circumstances fight for its King and its Country’ was famously debated in the union in 1933, when pacifism debates were all the rage post WW1 and in the buildup to WW2. The question was reposited 90 years to the day.

Mr. President, Right honourable and honourable gentleman, gallant officers of the military, there's an awful lot of fighters in here. Have you noticed? They're all ready to fight.

 I would've opposed this motion in 1933 for the reasons articulated by my colleagues in their opening speeches. In fact, I would've been the first in the queue of the recruiting office, had I been alive to fight fascism. Indeed, I would've been agitating to fight fascism in Spain three years before the Second World War. In 1936, both of my grandfathers fought fascism, under Montgomery, all the way from El Alamain to Monte Casino. I'm a former boy soldier, Lance Bombardier, Royal Artillery Battery 2, Army cadet force. I'm a former cadet in the Royal Marines, # in Dorset. I'm not a pacifist. In fact, I'll go five rounds with Tobias Elwood after the debate if he's up for it! And I'm twice his age!

But the people on the other side arguing against this motion have already damned most of the wars that I came here to oppose! You, you even oppose the First World War and the Afghan War and the Iraq War. Tobias Elwood tells us he opposed the Iraq War. I missed that when I was leading the fight against it, but I am delighted that nowadays you cannot find anyone who will support these wars that our politicians gave us in this 21st century. [interruption] Yes?

With successful military interventions such as the hospital in Sierra Leone, do not agree that it is possible to have successful humanitarian military intervention?

 No, I don't agree with the intervention in either of those cases. A better case could have been made for the Faulklands. An intervention, I did support. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, because that was a direct attack on British people, British citizens, and I supported it. But the examples you gave are not good ones. I'm sorry I gave way to you. I'm not going to dwell on the King, it's just as well he's got a divine right to be King, because nobody would ever have picked him! Least of all his own family!

On this day in 1649, on this day, the Rump parliament, a better parliament than we have today passed the following motion: 'The office of a King in this land is unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the life and liberty and public interest of the people of this nation.' I wish the parliament would pass that motion today.

I'm not going to dwell on the King for it would be an absurdity as has been acknowledged here, that because King Charles tells you you've got to go and fight and die in a war, you're going to do it! Utterly absurd.

So let's turn to Country. Who is the country? What is the country? Who you going to fight for, Rishi Sunak! You, you upgraded the lack of height of my colleague. Have you seen Rishi Sunak? In fact, if you push Zelensky on Sunak's shoulders, you still wouldn't even get a Napoleon. These are small men. Are you really going to follow ... give them a blank check. Yes, I'll fight for you, Rishi Sunak! You only have to roll the name, or his predecessor. What was her name? Liz Truss. Are you telling me that if Liz Truss said you had to go to war and die, you would do it because she was the prime minister. Tony Blair. Tony Blair, yes. [to opposition supporter clapping loudly] yes, I knew you were an idiot from the sunglasses that you are wearing.Tony Blair. Anyone?

Tony Blair, anyone? Who caused the death of a million people and counting! Who cascaded fanatic Islamist extremism around the world. You call them spores, the murder cult of Isis, Al-Qaeda, the head chopping throat cutters, the million dead Iraqis and you want to do it all again, by signing a blank check to Tobias Elwood? He told you, did you notice the word, the caveat that he slipped in for you? There's no conscription -- yet. He said, did you notice it? He was on television less than two weeks ago calling for martial law to be introduced in this country. In which case, I saw your lips move on Sky News. I saw your lips move on Sky News. And if we had martial law, we wouldn't be having this debate. And it might not be long before you can take off your fur hat and put on a tin one and go off to fight and die on the question of whether Kipensk is on one side of a line when it's been in four different countries in the last hundred years.

You ready to die for that? Because I'm not.

And I'm not ready for sure to give a blank check to politicians to command my loyalty. My loyalty is to God, to my religion. I believe in St. Thomas Aquinas's concept of 'the just war'. I'll fight in a just war. If somebody attacks us, I'll fight them, getting on in years as I am. I'll tell my son to go and fight them. All of my sons, all of my daughters for a just cause. But you are not fighting for a just cause If you sign up to the concept that you will fight for King and Country because that's an unqualified commitment that you are making

My colleague was mocked for pointing out that there are circumstances in which, what does that bell mean by the way, some people have spoken for 20 minutes, she pointed out, there are circumstances in which we would fight.

Now I saved this last bit for little Ben Wallace, who I was told was coming here tonight and frankly, he's the only reason I'm here and he didn't show up. You're going to fight with wha? With what? You said I'd attack Tommy Atkins. I never have. I attack the donkeys that exploit the lives and limbs of the lions that they send into these wars. You will never hear me attack an individual British soldier. Far from it. I'm one of the volunteers of Jim Davidson's Care After Combat, looking after people that have been abandoned by the politicians that gaily sent them into war. Where is Tommy Atkins? He's on the streets with the homeless people. Where is Tommy Atkins? He's in the mental health hospital, damaged and abandoned by those that sent him into war. Where is Tommy Atkins? He's disproportionately in the prison system and not as a warder. Where is Tommy Atkins? He's disproportionately hooked on drugs. He's in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. I've picked him up myself, hooked on fentanyl and all these new opioids. That's what Tommy Atkins ends up doing in Tory Britain.

They send these men after war filled with their fake patriotism, King and country, straw hats and trumpets, and when they come back, they have no use for them. They leave them to rot on the streets without houses, jobs, futures, hope.

So don't come here and wave your flags at me. Don't come here and sound the tinny brass trumpet of your patriotism. Yes, we will fight for the working people of this country. Yes, we will fight for the good things about our way of life. By the way, when did you fall out of love with using armed force to take territory? We controlled 25% of the entire world's surface and ruled one third of the people of the world under our flag. All of it taken by armed conquest. All of those people held in subjugation by the British Empire and now they want to parade as if they were Boy Scouts that oppose the acquisition of other people's territory by force. These hypocrites.

Robert Burns, my national poet, put it this way. In an ode on the occasion of a National Thanksgiving:

“Ye Hypocrites, are these your pranks
To murder men and gie God thanks
Desist for shame, proceed no further
God won't accept your thanks for murder.”

I move.

Peter Shore: "Fear, fear, fear', Brexit speech pre-referendum - 1975

3 June 1875, Oxford Union, Oxford, UK

Three and half years ago, when they were urging us to go in, oh what a campaign it was!

You’ve got to get in to get on” was the slogan of that day. Five or six pounds a week better off for Britain if we can only get in to the Common Market. All the goodies were spread out, and Donald Stokes of Leyland buying one page advertisements saying, “all we need is a great domestic market of 250 million and we will sweep Europe!”

And do you know what has happened? And this is the one significance of the trade figure – I’m not arguing – who cares about the actual details of the size of it – that doesn’t matter. It’s the trend! The trend!

Three years ago, four years ago, we were almost in balance with the Common Market in this country.

What’s happened since? 500 million down in 72′. 1000 million in 73′. 2000 million in 74′. Running now at the rate of 2400 million this year! Don’t you see what that’s going to do to the prosperity of this country! You can’t go on borrowing that.

When you add to that the burdens I mentioned a moment ago, and we under grave threat! We’re in peril at the present time, and the country must know.

Therefore, now what do they say? What is the message that comes now? No longer to tell the British people about the goodies that lie there. No longer that. That won’t wash – will it? Because the evidence will no longer support it.

So the message, the message that comes out is fear, fear, fear.

Fear because you won’t have any food.

Fear of unemployment.

Fear that we’ve somehow been so reduced as a country that we can no longer, as it were, totter about in the world independent as a nation.

And a constant attrition of our moral.

A constant attempt to tell us that what we have and what we had as not only our own achievements, but what generations of Englishman has helped us to achieve, is not worth a damn.

The kind of laughter that greeted the early references that I made that what was involved was the transfer of the whole of our democratic system. Not a damn!

Well, I tell you what we now have to face in Britain, what the whole argument is about. Now that the fraud and the promise has been exposed.

What it’s about is basically about the moral and the self-confidence of our people. We can shape our future. We are 55 million people. If you look around the world today, and you listen to Gough Whitlam and his 14 million Australians. He trades heavily with Japan – and I’m very fond of the Australians – but do you think that he’s going to enter into a relationship with Japan, which gives Japan the right to make the laws in Australia?

Do you think Canada, 22 million of them, and to the south a great and friendly nation – yes, they are – but do you think Canada is going to allow its laws to be written by the 200 million people in some union in America? No, no – of course not.

The whole thing is an absurdity! And therefore I urge you, I urge you to reject it. I urge you to say ‘No’ to this motion! And I urge the whole British country to say ‘No’ on Thursday in the referendum!

Here is the full debate

David Lange: 'The character of nuclear weapons is such that they subvert the best of intentions,' Oxford Union debate - 1985

 

1 March,  1985, Oxford Union, Oxford, United Kingdom

That Nuclear Weapons are Morally Indefensible
(Argument for the affirmative,)
Rt Hon David Lange, Prime Minister, New Zealand, Opponent, Rev Jerry Falwell

Mr President, honourable members of the union, ladies and gentlemen … in fact if I could greet straight away – because I understand there is a direct feed to the White House tonight – if I could greet the President of the United States, who is of course of the very genesis of the proposition we are debating tonight.

A quote in Time magazine last year, an assertion by the President of the United States that nuclear weapons were immoral; his avowal reiterated in January this year in a statement over the space initiative known as SDI. And there again, he asserted that this system of the nuclear stare-out can not be sustained morally.

May I say to the honourable gentleman who preceded me, there is nothing of what I am about to say which has been conditioned in any way by my meeting with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom yesterday …

[Laughter]

I did not meet her yesterday …

[Laughter and applause]

I am meeting her on Monday. But I know the apprehension that he feels at his constant fear of being summoned to that carpet …

[Laughter]

I also feel a considerable sympathy for the members of the opposite side, who have this extraordinary sense of destabilisation at the imminent prospect of peace breaking out.

The character of the argument, sir, is something which I find regrettable. So I can say very simply that it is my conviction that there is no moral case for nuclear weapons. That the best defence which can be made of their existence and the threat of their use is, as we have heard tonight, that they are a necessary evil; an abhorrent means to a desirable end.

I hold that the character of nuclear weapons is such that their very existence corrupts the best of intentions; that the means in fact perverts the end. And I hold that their character is such that they have brought us to the greatest of all perversions: the belief that this evil is necessary – as it has been stated tonight – when in fact it is not.

And I make my case against nuclear weapons the more vigorously because I distinguish between them and all other forms of coercive or deterrent power. I’ve got no case to make against the policeman’s truncheon. And the people tonight who have argued that you must go to the ultimate in force every time you seek to embark upon it, is of course a surrender to the worst of morality.

I accept, and do not wish to be heard arguing here against any proposition that the state must arm itself with military force to protect its citizens against aggression or to defend the weak and the helpless against aggression.

But I do not accept that the state must for those reasons arm itself with nuclear weapons. That is a case I do not easily or lightly make in Europe where governments have held it their duty to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. I do not doubt for one moment the quality of the intention which led to that decision or that series of decisions.

And I freely acknowledge that that decision is pursued in good conscience with the honourable intention of preserving the life and freedom of the people of Western Europe. Because those governments are faced with the close presence of an alien and relentlessly oppressive regime and obviously feel it their duty to prepare for their own defence by membership in what for most governments’ policy now is straightforwardly a nuclear alliance. That is an assessment I understand and I do not come here to argue for any proposition in favour of unilateral disarmament.

And if I make that acknowledgement, I must then deal with the argument that it is the intention which determines the moral character of the action. My contention is very simply that the character of nuclear weapons is such that it is demonstrably the case that they subvert the best of intentions. And the snuggling up to the nuclear arsenal which has gone on with my friends on the opposite side tonight shows at what level of sophistication and refinement that subversion takes place.

There is, Mr President, a quality of irrationality about nuclear weapons which does not sit well with good intentions. A system of defence serves its purpose if it guarantees the security of those it protects. A system of nuclear defence guarantees only insecurity. The means of defence terrorise as much as the threat of attack. In Europe, it is impossible to be unaware of the intensity of military preparedness. In New Zealand, the visitor must make an effort to find a military installation or indeed any sign of military activity, although it does exist. There is no imperative in New Zealand to prepare for war; the result is that I feel safer in Wellington than I ever could in London or New York or Oxford.

The fact is that Europe and the United States are ringed about with nuclear weapons, and your people have never been more at risk. There is simply only one thing more terrifying than nuclear weapons pointed in your direction and that is nuclear weapons pointed in your enemy’s direction: the outcome of their use would be the same in either case, and that is the annihilation of you and all of us. That is a defence which is no defence; it is a defence which disturbs far more than it reassures. The intention of those who for honourable motives use nuclear weapons to deter is to enhance security. Notwithstanding that intention, they succeed only in enhancing insecurity. Because the machine has perverted the motive. The President of the United States has acknowledged that, notwithstanding that my honourable friend opposite does not, and the weapon has installed mass destruction as the objective of the best-intentioned.

The weapon simply has its own relentless logic, and it is inhuman. It is the logic of escalation, the logic of the arms race. Nuclear weapons make us insecure, and to compensate for our insecurity we build and deploy more nuclear weapons. We know that we are seized by irrationality – and every now and then some new generation technology comes in, the argument for which is that it will cause us to draw back from the nuclear precipice. And we are seeing right now another initiative, under a new title: the title of course in dispute as much as its efficiency will be. And that, Mr President, is the story of the whole saga of the nuclear escalation.

We know, all of us, that it is wholly without logic or reason, any sense at all, to have the means at the disposal of two particular sets of powers to turn this world into rubble time and time again. And yet in spite of that awareness, the world watches as two enormous machines enhance, refine their capacity to inflict destruction on each other and on all of us.

Every nuclear development, whatever its strategic or tactical significance, has only one result, and that is to add to an arsenal which is already quite beyond reason.

There is an argument in defence of the possession of nuclear weapons which holds that the terror created by the existence of those weapons is in itself the fulfilment of a peaceful purpose: the argument advanced here tonight that that 50 million killed over four years by concerted war in a conventional sense in Europe, and the argument that somehow the existence of this mutually assured destruction phenomenon has since that time preserved this planet from destruction.

It is I think probably an example of northern hemisphere or European arrogance that we overlook now the 30 million people in this world who have died in wars since then – while we are apparently beset from the two super-powers by a system designed to have people stop killing each other.

I believe that the fear they inspire is not a justification for their existence.

INTERJECTION: Sir, the one area of the world do you refer to then? How have those casualties in that area defended by nuclear deterrence? Namely Europe. Not one of those 30 million lived in Europe.

Have you considered the proposition for one moment that that war, that cost those casualties might have entrenched within people the yearning for peace, the growth of democratic institutions, the accountability of political representatives, so that none wishes to wage in conventional or nuclear terms, any war? Why attribute to the presence of that awesome potential clash of firepower a stability which your politicians have been arguing they created?

You can’t have it both ways! Either you are hailing a new, United Europe, matching to glory and to the exclusion of certain primary production from other countries …

[Laughter]

Or you have it there simply because you have counterpoised this terrible means of destruction … I’m want to pass over … yeah?

[Laughter]