Was Churchill a Democrat?
The title of my talk this evening is “Was Churchill a Democrat?”
So, on one level, this would seem a very easy talk to give.
When I told my wife Andrea what I was proposing she asked me if I was really going
to travel almost two thousand miles to stand up after a dinner, give this title, say
“yes – he was” and sit down again.
That might be tempting. But is it really that simple?
Let me quote from an article that will be familiar to some of the Churchillians here. It
is called Fifty Years Hence and it was a look into what the future might hold that
Churchill wrote and first published in the Strand magazine in 1931, when he was
aged 55 and about to embark on a decade in the political wilderness. It was later
republished in the anthology of his essays entitled Thoughts and Adventures. He
wrote:
“Democracy as a guide or motive to progress has long been known to be
incompetent. None of the legislative assemblies of the great modern States
represents in universal suffrage even a fraction of the strength or wisdom of the
community. Great nations are no longer led by their ablest men, or by those who
know most about their immediate affairs, or even by those who have a coherent
doctrine.
Democratic governments drift along the line of least resistance, taking short views,
paying their way with sops and doles, and smoothing their path with pleasantsounding platitudes.”
Since his death, if not since 1945, Winston Churchill has certainly become an icon for
democracy. And what about during the Second World War? If Roosevelt’s America
was the arsenal of democracy, then surely Churchill was her mouthpiece?
There is no doubt that he was a great orator. His celebrated speeches continue to be
quoted and misquoted, and his greatest words have become almost ubiquitous. Just
think how many Churchill phrases you can recite without really trying….
I have nothing to offer but blood toil, tears and sweat
If the British Empire and its commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still
say, this, was their finest hour
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended
across the continent
In April 1963 President Kennedy famously quoted Edward R Murrow, though
Murrow himself may have been quoting Beverley Nichols, and claimed that Churchill
had mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. Churchill said it had simply
fallen upon him to give the lion’s roar.
Most historians and informed observers would also agree that he was an
accomplished war leader, and the right man to energise the British political and
military establishment in the crisis of the summer of 1940.
Yet this did not mean that Churchill’s contemporaries always saw him in democratic
terms. According to Lloyd George , “He spoilt himself by reading about Napoleon”,
while Rab Butler saw him as “a half-breed American and the greatest political
adventurer of modern times”, Lord Beaverbrook – somewhat ironically given his own
reputation - felt that, “Churchill on the top of the wave has in him the stuff of which
tyrants are made” and Aneurin Bevan dismissed him as “a man suffering from
petrified adolescence”. Perhaps Churchill would have responded, as he did to Violet
Bonham Carter, by stating, “that we are all worms, but I believe I am a glow worm”.
So, a man of words and a man of action. But was he a democrat?
He certainly had a long career in democratic politics. He was first elected to the
British Parliament at the age of twenty five in 1900, and, apart from a short interlude
in the early 1920’s, remained there until a few months before his ninetieth – and
final – birthday in 1964. It was a career during which he held most of the major
offices of State, though it was not a career that was without controversy or even
apparent contradictions.
He was, after all…
The grandson of a Duke, who turned down a Dukedom, preferring in old age to
remain in the House of Commons as plain Mr Churchill.
He was…
The young Conservative who defected to the Liberals and then returned to the
Conservative fold, allegedly remarking “that anyone can rat but it takes a certain
ingenuity to re-rat”.
He was…
The radical President of the board of Trade who pioneered unemployment insurance
and labour exchanges, but he was also the reactionary Home Secretary who
opposed industrial unrest and refused to support the female suffragettes;
And he was…
The die hard opponent of totalitarianism, the scourge of bolshevism and
fascism,who fought tooth and nail against giving greater self government to India,
and who famously dismissed Gandhi as a “half naked fakir”.
So was he just an opportunist? A buccaneer, as Lord Hurd recently described him. Or
can we identify a clear set of core beliefs? And if we can, are they those of a
democrat?
He was certainly not a Republican. Clementine Churchill said that she thought her
husband was the last believer in the divine right of Kings. In 1934 Churchill wrote an
article lamenting the “veritable holocaust of Crowns” that had resulted from the First
World War, explaining that in his own lifetime he had “seen the destruction and the
overthrow of the Imperial Houses of Brazil, China, Turkey and in Europe of the
Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, and the abolition of the
monarchies of Greece, Spain and all the German States”. To his mind it was a tragedy
that, “the silly idea that republics are more free or better governed than monarchies
dominated the treaty makers at Paris” and “one could speak also of Portugal and
Spain, who have sunk into such troubles and eclipse since they drove out their
sovereigns…”.
Nor was he ever a consistent advocate for universal suffrage. As I have indicated a
moment ago, as a rising young politician in the Edwardian era he refused to back the
movement for female suffrage, famously asserting that he would not be henpecked.
As a result he was targeted by suffragettes ringing bells and attacking him with dog
whips.
Nor Ladies was his concern restricted to female suffrage. In his article “Are
Parliaments Obsolete”, also written and published in 1934, he expressed the view
that universal suffrage might be dangerous if it led to ill educated elements gaining a
control of the constitution. “What a lamentable result it would be if the British and
American democracies when enfranchised squandered in a few short years or even
between some night and morning all the long-stored hard-won treasures of our
island civilisation. It must not be.” In his text he was prepared to suggest weighting
the franchise in favour of “the more instructed and responsible elements.” “If we
have gone too fast or too far in broadening the basis of full citizenship, and the result
endangers the permanent well being of the British covenant, we must not hesitate to
retrace our steps for a short distance.”
But the articles I have just cited must be seen in the context of their time and place.
“Fifty Years Hence” was written in 1931, when the world was still reeling from the
global economic meltdown triggered by the Wall Street Crash, and when the whole
notion of human progress seemed open to question, while his articles “Will the
world swing back to Monarchies” and “Are Parliaments Obsolete” were the products
of 1934; a year which saw Hitler sweep aside all vestiges of democracy in Germany,
the Japanese consolidate their hold in Manchuria, Mussolini start to threaten
Abyssinia, and Oswald Mosley and his black shirts at their most active on the streets
of London.
It is all too easy for us to take our liberties and freedoms for granted and to forget
how fragile they seemed in the mid twentieth century when they were threatened
by economic collapse and by the emergence of new totalitarian systems. I searched
the internet to see how many democracies there are in the world today. Of course, I
could not get a definitive answer. But it seems that out of 200 or so countries there
are between 80 and 120 with regimes incorporating elements of democracy. It has
obviously been fluctuating slightly in the last few years. Is Libya in? Or Egypt? But,
ask yourself this. How many democracies were there seventy two years ago in 1941
– when Hitler’s empire reached its zenith? Again, it depends on how you define
democracy. But the answer is maybe a dozen, with totalitarianism and dictatorship
holding sway over most of the world.
When Churchill was writing the articles I have just cited in the 1930’s the
parliamentary democracies appeared to be faltering. The rising stars in the
international firmament were the communist Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, fascist
Italy and Nazi Germany. I think what we see in these articles is not Churchill
dismissing democracy but seeking to find a way of buttressing democratic
institutions. In particular, we see him wrestling with the danger of giving too much
power to the people, if the people then just use this power to overturn democratic
structures and install a dictatorship. Churchill was certainly not advocating a return
to absolute monarchy, but he was in favour of “The English conception of a limited
monarchy, where the Sovereign reigns but does not govern” arguing that this model
“still holds its own as a practical instrument and means of national self-preservation
against every type of republic and every degree of dictatorship”.
Put simply, he saw suffrage as one element of democracy, but only one element, and
one which grew out of, and was sustained by, a whole raft of rights that had been
built up over the centuries, and which the voters should not simply be allowed to
overturn. These he summarised as: “freedom of religion, freedom of thought,
freedom of movement, freedom to choose or change employment. The inviolability
even of the humblest home; the right and the power of the private citizen to appeal
to impartial courts against the State and the Ministers of the day; freedom of speech
and writing; freedom of the press; freedom of combination and agitation within the
limits of long established laws; the right of regular opposition to the Government; the
power to turn out a Government and put another set of men in their places by lawful
constitutional means; and finally the sense of association with the State and some
responsibility for its actions and conduct..”
This was Churchill’s response to dictatorship. This was his vision of what western
parliamentary democracy had evolved to guarantee. From Magna Carta to the
American bill of Rights to the Great British Reform Act of 1832, he saw hard won
freedoms enshrined in law and protected by Parliaments as the particular gift to the
world of the British race and the English-Speaking Peoples. His was a democracy
shaped by history, tradition and duty, which blended the best of reactionary and
revolutionary elements; the popular ideologies and passions of the English Civil War,
and the French and American revolutions tamed by the cold logic of English common
law and constitutional monarchy. As such, I would argue that it is a vision which
reconciles the different aspects of his career and character. It allows the grandson of
a Duke to enact social legislation while retaining clear limits to his radicalism; it
allows a parliamentary democracy to govern an Empire. Indeed, freedom to choose
or change employment even stretches to cover his own changes in political
allegiance or party. He would no doubt argue that he joined the Liberal Party in 1904
to protect freedom of trade, opposing Conservative tariff reform, and rejoined the
Conservative Party in 1924 to defend British freedoms against the spectre of
communism.
The development of these democratic values and institutions was the subject of his
last great work, his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, started in the late 1930’s
when western democracy was facing the challenge of fascism, and finished in the
1950’s when the threat was Soviet communism.
I said earlier that Churchill was both a man of words and a man of action. Churchill
the wordsmith was clearly a democrat. It is said that actions speak louder than
words. In Churchill’s case I do not think that is necessarily true. His words continue
to echo down the generations. But if we judge him by his actions, they are surely
also the actions of a democrat.
He spent his life working within the British parliamentary system, fighting a
staggering number of elections and campaigning on issue after issue in parliament.
Whether the cause was free trade, the naval estimates, opposition to Indian
independence, or rearmament, you get a very real sense that he was at his best
when in the thick of the debate. Jock Colville thought the “Finest Hour” speech of 18
June 1940 was far better when delivered to the crowded chamber of the Commons
than subsequently to the solitary BBC microphone for the radio. As wartime Prime
Minister Churchill came regularly to parliament, delivering speeches there that he
did not broadcast at the time, such as the famous “Never in the field of human
conflict speech” of 20 August 1940, which he only recorded after the war. He kept
the MP’s informed in Secret Session briefings. He took questions and criticism, and
even suffered the indignity of having to contest two no confidence motions in his
Government during the bleak first half of 1942. It is true that he won them easily,
but can you imagine Hitler or Stalin even entertaining the idea.
I will end with Churchill’s most famous quote about democracy. Fittingly, it was given
in the House of Commons on 11th November 1947. Interestingly, he does not claim
that the words are original, but after all that I have said I hope you will see that it is
fitting that they have become part of his canon. For he said, “Many forms of
Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No-one
pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that
democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that
have been tried from time to time.” That much you will have heard before, but what
he then went on to say, in what were clearly his own words, was; “but there is a
broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that
public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide and
control the actions of Ministers who are their servants not their Masters”. By 1947,
thanks in no small part to Churchill, democracy was back in global contention and he
was able to see universal suffrage as part of the solution.
So, was Churchill a democrat? I hope you will be relieved to hear me say - Yes –
though sometimes it must have been damned hard for him.