Britain Spurns Call to Celebrate VE Day
LONDON — The British government will not commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe in World War II for fear of offending the Germans and other former enemies.
But the Foreign Office declined to say Friday whether Britain would be represented at ceremonies in the Soviet Union, which is expected to mount major celebrations to mark the anniversary.
“We have not yet received an invitation,” said a Foreign Office spokesman who asked not to be identified. “We would approach it with an open mind.”
On Thursday, the deputy foreign secretary, Baroness Young, turned down a request from the Social Democratic Party for the government to sponsor an official celebration to mark VE Day on May 8.
In a letter to the party’s foreign affairs spokesman, John Cartwright, Young wrote:”An invitation confined to the wartime allies would have to exclude West Germany, Japan and possibly Italy as well as Bulgaria, Finland, Romania and Hungary.”
She wrote that such a celebration “would hardly do justice to the realities of present-day politics and our flourishing postwar partnership with Germany, Italy and Japan.”
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