If the government came along to your street, to your town,
and said to you and everyone who lives there:
you have to move. We need this.
Would you go? Would you accept it?
Because that's what happened here:
in the abandoned village of Imber, on Salisbury Plain.
In the years leading up to World War 2,
the War Office, who commanded the Army back then,
had steadily bought the land around Imber,
along with almost all the buildings in the village.
They convinced farmers and residents to sell their property
and rent it back, on leases that had to be renewed annually.
It helped that there was a depression,
and the government was offering a fair price.
Salisbury Plain became the largest military training area in the country.
By the 1940s, as the Second World War escalated,
the land around the village was used constantly for military training.
And having to make sure that the 150 or so civilians living in this village
weren't hit by shells or accidentally shot
started to get in the way of that training.
Not to mention that the troops preparing for the D-Day landings
needed to prepare for fighting in small rural villages.
So in 1943, the residents were given about seven weeks' notice to leave.
At first, it was temporary, just for six months;
then it was until the war ended;
and then, suddenly, it was permanent.
A legal battle rolled on until 1961:
and ultimately it was decided that Imber belonged to the army,
and that the residents would never be allowed to return.
Most of the houses had been destroyed
and modern, generic simulations of houses had gone up in their place.
And again: this wasn't some ancient time, some old, centuries past era.
This is easily in living memory. But there were some concessions made:
the road through would be kept open for a few days a year,
and the church, built around 700 years earlier,
would still be able to have services at Christmas, Easter and a couple of other times.
There is a Latin proverb, written by Cicero.
Inter arma enim silent leges.
In time of war, the law falls silent.
Now it's been used to comment on America's internment of Japanese-Americans
in World War 2 despite the First and Fifth Amendments,
and on extraordinary rendition and torture despite international law in more recent times.
But this, here, was more subtle: here, the law didn't fall silent:
it just spoke in a rather different voice. Because this wasn't illegal;
this wasn't a government bending laws and regulations to their breaking point, or beyond.
Back at the end of the thirties, as war in Europe began to look inevitable,
the British government passed the Emergency Powers Act.
The Act allowed the King, and therefore the government,
to create regulations as necessary to help the war effort,
and to enforce those regulations by any punishment
including, in the worst case, death.
It allowed anyone to be detained in the interests of public safety,
or defence of the realm, and it allowed any trial to be held in secret.
It also allowed property to be searched and seized at will.
By the standards of what was possible under the law, Imber was treated well.
Now I don't know whether that ever could happen again,
and whether in this century, in this country,
a village of people would -- for the most part --
quietly leave their homes to "help the war effort".
But I will say this: there are still similar emergency-powers laws on the books,
albeit with a few more checks and balances,
and only for use in times of absolute crisis.
But I do wonder how much panic it'd take to find the government
quietly reaching for those powers again, and with most of the public supporting them.
I don't think we've changed that much in the last century.
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