The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [10]
Speeches outside Parliament were an important aspect of parliamentary democracy—taking the arguments to the people. But at its core was Parliament itself, the Chamber of the House of Commons. On May 28, eight days after his Hoxton speech, Churchill listened in the Chamber as Chamberlain set out the case for Protection. No one on the Liberal benches rose to answer him. Churchill therefore rose himself: an astonishing act by a backbench Member of Parliament against one of his own leaders, a giant on the parliamentary scene. If Protection were to become Conservative policy, Churchill warned, “the old Conservative Party, with its religious convictions and constitutional principles, will disappear, and a new Party will arise, rich, materialistic and secular, whose opinions will turn on tariffs and who will cause the lobbies to be crowded with the touts of protected industries.”
Determined to preserve Free Trade, Churchill was helped in establishing a Free Food League by a dozen like-minded younger Conservative Members of Parliament—also in their twenties and thirties—who were committed to retaining the Free Trade aspect of Conservatism and who rejected protecting British goods by means of tariff barriers. They threatened to stand against the party at the next General Election and to give their support to the Liberals, if the Conservative Party became the standard-bearer for tariffs. When the League was launched on 13 July 1903, sixty Conservative MPs joined it. They called themselves Unionist Free Traders, a new political grouping in the House of Commons. “Let me say in strictest confidence,” Churchill wrote to one of them, “that my idea is, and has always been, some sort of central government being formed.”
No such central government came into being. Balfour, after much hesitation—acerbically exploited by Churchill in the House of Commons—committed the Conservative Party to tariffs. Within a few days the Liberal Association of Birmingham Central—where Lord Randolph had once fought—invited Churchill to be its candidate at the next election. He declined, still hoping that the Unionist Free Traders could form an independent parliamentary grouping. To his chagrin, the Liberal leadership refused a suggestion that, in the coming election, the Unionist Free Trade candidates—of which he would be one—would not have Liberal candidates put up against them. The Liberal Party machine, Churchill wrote to a friend in despair, “seems to be just as stupid and brutalised as ours.”
More offers to stand for Parliament as a Liberal reached Churchill at the end of 1903. His Liberal uncle, Lord Tweedmouth, asked if he would like to stand for the Scottish constituency of Sutherland. He declined, but he did send a message of support to the Liberal candidate in a by-election in another constituency, Ludlow. A few days later, in a speech in Halifax, Churchill angered his Unionist Free Trader colleagues still further when he declared, “Thank God we have an Opposition.”
Churchill effectively joined that Opposition on 2 May 1904, when he spoke in Parliament against the Conservative decision to give West Indian sugar a protected price against all non-Colonial markets. He took the opportunity of his speech to put forward his thoughts on the unfairness of a parliamentary system where vested interests dominated the political structure. “It was always found in the past,” he said, “to be a misfortune to a country when it was governed from one particular point of view, or in the interests of any particular class, whether it was the Court or the Church, or the Army or the mercantile or labouring classes. Every country ought to be governed from some central point of view, where all classes and all interests are proportionately represented.”
In March 1904 Churchill supported a Liberal