Meeting of the Parliament 08 May 2025
I thank members for some very thoughtful and, at times, moving contributions. Eighty years is an important milestone. It is a literal lifetime since the war ended in Europe, and we need to reflect on that.
My personal reflection, as it always is at moments of silence, was on what it would have been like. Beyond the numbers, which we need to remember, and the history and politics, we need to ask what it would have been like to be one of those young people in a landing craft on D day, or in a bomber flying over the darkened skies of Germany, knowing that, in the latter case, you had a 40 per cent chance of survival. What would it have been like knowing that, coming off one of those landing crafts, there was a very high chance that you would lose your life in pursuit of democracy and against fascism? I do not know what that would be like; I actually really cannot imagine it. I also cannot imagine what it would have been like to come from a civilian life and to be conscripted and asked by your country to do that.
As we move past the 80-year anniversary and beyond living memory, we need to keep that fresh, visceral memory alive. It must have been incredibly scary. It was an incredible sacrifice, and an incredible thing to go through. After all, 85 million people—3 per cent of the world’s population—lost their lives. It was a conflict the like of which and the scale of which we had never seen before, and we must never allow it to be seen again. Members are right to have raised concerns about whether we are continuing to learn those lessons.
We also need to remember that it was not only armed forces personnel that made that commitment. The nature of world war two was different; it was a total world war. It was good to hear contributions from across the chamber about that, including Douglas Ross’s reflections about family members going down to Dalkeith to work on Army payroll, and Kevin Stewart’s comments on family members going to work in Coventry. There were a vast number of people in reserved occupations—people whose duty was to serve on the home front—including those conscripted to work in the coal mines. The conflict consumed the whole of society. Everyone had a part to play, and everyone did that. The scale is not just about the number of people fighting, because the conflict consumed the whole of society. That is why the lessons of world war two are so important.
At this 80-year mark, we need to remember that many of the lessons stem from the fact that world war two occurred only one generation following world war one. The commitments and the lessons learned from world war two happened because we could not afford the proximity of another global conflict so swiftly after that war, as had happened after world war one.
I was pleased to hear the contributions of the First Minister and Anas Sarwar, which reflected on how the new order was created and the institutions that people sought to create. What I find most interesting is that people did not wait until after the war to create those. In 1943, Winston Churchill called for the creation of the Council of Europe, which came into being. It was in 1944 that the Bretton Woods conference took place, which sought to create economic institutions, including many that exist today.
The lesson of the first world war was that war was created by economic and political circumstances, and that the world had to work together to ensure that those could not—