The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [19]
Churchill’s speeches on the readings of the Irish Free State Bill—which enabled Southern Ireland to break free from British rule—were masterpieces of parliamentary presentation, as he led hostile Conservatives and sceptical Liberals carefully along the path of reason and logic towards the conclusion: Southern Ireland must be allowed to govern itself. One hitherto sceptical Conservative MP, Joseph Chamberlain’s son Neville, told the House that it was Churchill’s speech on the Ulster Boundary Commission that had made him “more convinced than ever” that the boundary would be drawn fairly.
On 31 March 1922 the Irish Free State Bill passed into law. The six counties of Ulster were to remain an integral part of Britain, henceforth designated “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” Throughout the negotiations and debates, and beyond them, Churchill acted as the conciliator between North and South, dependent on Parliament, and using all his parliamentary skills to establish a new national entity. “Tell Winston we could never have done anything without him,” the head of the Free State Army, Michael Collins, told a friend. A few days later Collins was shot dead by dissidents of the Irish Republican Army. But the Treaty held, and the Free State survived.
5
The Democratic Process Outside and Inside Parliament
The success of parliamentary democracy depends not only on the workings of Parliament and the life within its walls but on the relationship between the members of each parliamentary assembly and those who elect them. The very process of being elected is an integral part of the democratic procedure on which parliamentary democracy depends.
On 19 October 1922, after the withdrawal of the support of the Conservative Party on which it depended, Lloyd George’s coalition collapsed. Lloyd George resigned and the Conservative leader, Canadian-born Andrew Bonar Law, became Prime Minister. A General Election followed on November 15.
Churchill, having just had an operation for appendicitis, issued his election manifesto from his bed. He was standing, he said, “as a Liberal and a Free Trader.” Although he managed, two days before polling day, to travel by night sleeper to his Dundee constituency and to speak to his constituents from a special chair—he was in too much pain to stand up—he was defeated. In a two-member constituency, he came fourth: the victors were the Prohibitionist and Labour Party candidates, and Churchill was without a seat in Parliament for the first time since 1901. Battered and bruised by defeat, Churchill quipped: “In an instant I was without a constituency, without a seat—and without an appendix.” He was also without a place in Cabinet for the first time in eight years.
Churchill understood in 1922, as he would in 1945, that the electors expected more from their rulers than they had been getting, that their representatives in Parliament had failed them. T.E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia, who had worked under him at the Colonial Office—wrote to him in sympathy and anger: “What bloody shits the Dundeans must be.” But Churchill took a different view, writing to another friend: “If you saw the kind of lives the Dundee folk have to live, you would admit they have many excuses.”
The 1922 General Election wiped out the Liberals as an effective governing instrument. The Conservatives, with 354 seats, were back in power for the first time since 1905. The second largest number of seats, 142, went to Labour, which for the first time became the predominant Opposition party. The Liberal Party had split, 62