Churchill once challenged BBC intolerance

Winston Churchill: hero or villain? That was the question the BBC asked on its website on 10 June. It caused outrage in some quarters, but was Auntie taking its revenge for the humiliation it suffered at Churchill’s libertarian hands during the second world war?

In the summer of 1940, a movement was launched in Britain called the ‘People’s Convention’, which brought together a disparate alliance of Marxists, socialists and pacifists. Among its most prominent backers were Robin Page Arnot, Harry Pollitt, and Willie Gallacher, all veteran communists. The Convention held its inaugural rally in London on 12 January 1941, attended by over 2,000 delegates, and one of them, a Mr Warman of Coventry, declared that ‘the policy of the government was not in the interests of the people but of the wealthy’.

Several figures from the artistic world were sympathetic to the causes of the People’s Convention, among them the actor Michael Redgrave, the actress Beatrix Lehmann, the band leader Lew Stone and Sir Hugh Roberton, the conductor of the Glasgow Orpheus Choir. The