The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [15]
One particular achievement was Churchill’s abolition of police supervision of released convicts. He replaced this practice with a central agency for the care of prisoners after their release. It was no longer to be the police, but representatives of the existing Prisoners’ Aid Societies, who would monitor prisoners after release. Police supervision, Churchill explained to the House, failed altogether “to enable or encourage a convict to resume his place in honest industry. A supervision more individualised, more intimate, more carefully considered, more philanthropically inspired, is necessary.” The Probation Service was born—through Churchill’s imaginative humanity and the parliamentary process.
Churchill saw a role for parliamentary democracy even with regard to convicted criminals. On 10 July 1910, he urged the House of Commons to accept “a calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the State, and even of convicted criminals against the State, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes, and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if only you can find it, in the heart of every man.” These qualities, Churchill added, “are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.” Fifty-three years later, Robert Kennedy, then Attorney-General of the United States, asked me to read Churchill’s words to him over the telephone. He later wrote of the impact they had made on him as he grappled with his own criminal justice legislation.
Churchill also told the House of Commons: “We must not forget that when every material improvement has been effected in prisons, when the temperature has been adjusted, when the proper food to maintain health and strength has been given, when the doctors, chaplains and prison visitors have come and gone, the convict stands deprived of everything that a free man calls life. We must not forget that all these improvements, which are sometimes slaves to our consciences, do not change that position.”
Once again, the question of Ireland’s political future threatened to disrupt and even destroy the British parliamentary system—as it had done in 1893 when the young Churchill watched as Gladstone introduced his Home Rule Bill. In the second General Election of 1910, held in December, the result of which was almost identical to the first, the Irish Nationalists, with 86 seats, held the balance of power. Liberals and Conservatives were almost equally balanced, 272 against 270. Labour won 44 seats. Given the Irish parliamentary stranglehold, the Liberal Government had to go ahead with Home Rule legislation. But the Conservative opposition, within a few votes of equality on the floor of the House, had the power to disrupt government business.
As the Irish crisis intensified and the Parliament Act of 1911 stripped away the Money Bill veto of the House of Lords, an intensification of political passions arose that threatened the very fabric of parliamentary democracy. Irish, Liberal and Conservative factions spoke in the language of growing extremism and violence. An essential part of Churchill’s concept of parliamentary democracy was his belief that nothing, even in the bitterest political controversy, must be allowed to damage the fabric of