PETER HITCHENS: Steve McQueen’s blockbuster Blitz is propaganda dressed up as historic truth – with racism on each avenue nook and the Communist Party portrayed as heroes

It is hard to beat a good nostalgic war film at this time of year. 

Watching danger and adversity from the warm safety of the sofa, while the frost hardens outside, is especially enjoyable. 

And it seems right for another reason. It brings us into contact with our lost, beloved forebears, who endured so much. 

The past and the dead are always very present at Christmas, when normal time falls into step with eternity and our memories of long ago are especially intense.

So I suspect quite a few people may turn to a new film, Blitz, about the German bombing of London in 1940. 

They will see that its star is the luminous Saoirse Ronan, and perhaps expect to be carried romantically back into those dangerous days when Britain stood alone and London could take it

I confess that, though I know the London Blitz was a horror, I have inherited some of my romantic view of it from my late mother, born in 1921, who always gave the impression of having rather enjoyed herself at the time, while serving in the glamorous ranks of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the Wrens).

I am also influenced by my late father-in-law, who – as a very young journalist – watched from London rooftops for bombs and then chased around Bloomsbury on his pushbike, pedalling from bombing to bombing as he reported the raids for his local paper for a few shillings.

We still have his tin hat, with ‘PRESS’ crudely painted on it. As a result, I (born in 1951) rather envied the generation of children, 15 years before mine, who went through it.

I am very much with Nancy Mitford’s heroine Linda Radlett, in Mitford’s gloriously English novel, The Pursuit Of Love. 

Linda scorns girls or boys who aren’t exhilarated by the whiff of combat and danger. ‘Children might or might not enjoy air-raids actually in process, but a child who was not thrilled by the idea of them was incomprehensible to her, and she could not imagine having conceived such a being.’

So here we are in ‘Blitz’, readily available to stream on Apple TV+, as Ms Ronan tearfully sends her young son George (who is mixed race) off on an evacuation train.

Elliot Heffernan, 11, who plays George, does a great job with a dubious part. Bombs turn out to be a comparatively minor danger. Instead, he is constantly menaced by racism and imperialism. 

Rather than be parted from his mother, the poor child leaps from a speeding train, climbs perilously on to another one going in the opposite direction and successfully returns to London. 

Yet, despite all this courage, enterprise and zing, he sulks a lot, and is somehow unable to find his way home to Mum in her cosy East End home. 

Mum, by the way, is that modern heroine, a single mother, who lives with her aged father, in a small neat house and works in a munitions factory with several other spirited Cockney sparrows.

She is single because her black lover has been deported, after being attacked in the street by racist thugs.

Racism is everywhere. Poor George is angrily chased away from the window of Hamleys toyshop by the first of what seem to be several undersized, neckless, bigoted policemen. Later he will also be chased away from the window of a baker’s shop by an equally bigoted shop assistant.

He is befriended in a Piccadilly arcade by a Nigerian Air Raid Warden (and yes, there was indeed one such warden in the whole of London, so it is possible if unlikely). 

This event takes place in an arcade apparently devoted to celebrating the British Empire in a very racist way, though I can find no evidence any such place existed.

Later, after the saintly Nigerian warden dies heroically, a solitary George is kidnapped by a hideous gang, who force him to help them rob bombed houses and indeed corpses, in a scene too macabre for me.

A running theme in the background is the unwillingness of the authorities to open up the London Underground as a shelter, and many who watch the film will doubt that this is true.

How could the government have been so stupid as to deny a huge, available refuge to the people of the capital?

But it is true, and here is a very interesting sidelight. Almost the only people who remember the campaign to open up the Underground as a shelter are veteran London Communists, because it was they who mounted that campaign. ‘Well done!’ you might say. But don’t. For actually they were doing it for purely cynical motives.

In 1940, the British Communist Party supported Stalin’s pact with Hitler and denounced Britain’s war effort as ‘imperialist’. They weren’t interested in getting shelters for poor Londoners. They were interested in demoralising the country into making peace with the Nazis, as their leader in Moscow had already done.

The British Marxist historian Brian Pearce has truly written: ‘During the entire period up to the Fall of France, the British Communist Party functioned as a propaganda agency for Hitler’. 

And things didn’t improve much after that. It’s useful to bear this in mind when you try to make sense of the London we see in this film, a city of virulent white racism at almost every corner.

Was this, in general, true? I have no idea. I was not there. But not according to the Black American journalist Vincent ‘Roi’ Ottley, who recorded a little later in the war that the British people he met were racially tolerant, and ‘inclined to accept a man for his personal worth’.

He was not saying we were saintly. He was comparing us with American whites, especially from the South. Racial prejudice, in his view, was subtle among British people and most obvious among imperial and military types who had spent their lives running colonies.

And it is a matter of history that many British people were revolted by the segregation of black and white soldiers in the US Army, when American troops arrived here in large numbers before D-Day.

There’s a fascinating passage about this in Nevil Shute’s remarkable novel, The Chequer Board, portraying a stand-off between British locals and a segregationist American Army, which I suspect is based on true events.

After an hour of Blitz, I felt thoroughly propagandised, not least by the smug presence of the boringly Left-wing musician Paul Weller, playing George’s grandfather. He doesn’t say much, and in the end, he is killed by a Nazi bomb. He just floats through the film looking knowingly superior.

Almost every modern drama about the past has to feature some sort of ambassador from the 21st century, who knows the future and so can smile scornfully at the folly and narrow-mindedness of the people of 80-odd years ago. And in this case it is Mr Weller.

But I think we would all be much better off wondering what might be wrong with the way we do things now, than looking back on previous generations, who were often kind and brave and who endured great hardships we can barely imagine.

I think I’m going to have to watch The Cruel Sea again. It features no Nigerian air-raid wardens or single mothers. But I think it is more truthful than Blitz about who and what we once were.