The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [25]
It was on the question of Britain’s Imperial responsibilities that Churchill had his most difficult five years as a Member of Parliament. Throughout the India debates between 1929 and 1934, he looked to Parliament to take what he believed to be the right course. His major vexation from the outset of the discussions was that Stanley Baldwin, the Leader of the Conservative Party, without having a debate within the party, gave the Conservative Party’s support to Ramsay MacDonald’s India plans. Churchill, a member of the Conservative Shadow Cabinet and former Chancellor of Exchequer (often the stepping stone to the premiership), had not been consulted about this Conservative-Labour agreement, one that effectively removed India policy from meaningful parliamentary debate.
“So far as I could see,” Churchill later reflected with some bitterness in his war memoirs, “Mr Baldwin felt that the times were too far gone for any robust assertion of British imperial greatness, and that the hope of the Conservative Party lay in accommodation with Liberal and Labour forces, and in adroit, well-timed manoeuvres to detach powerful moods of public opinion and large blocks of voters from them.” Churchill added: “He was certainly very successful. He was the greatest Party manager the Conservatives ever had.”
When Baldwin accepted MacDonald’s plan for Indian self-government, Churchill resigned from the Shadow Cabinet on 27 January 1931. From that moment, for eight years and seven months, until the outbreak of war in September 1939, he was a backbench Member of Parliament, seeking to rally the relatively small number of Conservative MPs, seldom more than fifty, who were willing to go into the lobby with him to vote against the Government’s India policy.
With the creation of the National Government in 1931, headed by Ramsay MacDonald but with a predominance of Conservative parliamentary support, Churchill sought to raise parliamentary concern at the India policy. When the National Government called for a vote of confidence in its India policy, it was Churchill who moved an amendment—not from the government benches, but from his seat of seniority on the front bench just below the ministerial section. No question of self-government in India, he asked, “shall impair the ultimate responsibility of parliament for the peace, order, and good government of the Indian Empire.”
Fewer than fifty Members of Parliament supported Churchill’s amendment. But at no point during the India debate did Churchill part company with his conviction that the will of the House of Commons was the sole arena for political change. Indeed, it was when he believed that the Government was acting dishonestly in putting forward its arguments for Indian constitutional reform that he called upon a rarely used parliamentary device—the Committee of Privileges.
Churchill did not believe that India, in 1934, was ready for parliamentary democracy. But he accepted absolutely that, with regard to India, the will of the British Parliament had to be respected. When the India Bill that he had opposed so strongly became law, he gave it his support, sending a message to Gandhi through the Mahatma’s emissary and friend: “Tell Mr Gandhi to use the powers that are offered and make the thing a success…. You have got the thing now; make it a success, and if you do I will advocate your getting much more.”
For Churchill the great strength of parliamentary democracy was the ability of parliamentarians to present an unpopular, or even a complex, case to a sceptical or puzzled audience and to make that case by clear argument and patient debate. He recognized, as did all parliamentarians, that one of the weaknesses of democracy lay in one of its particular strengths: that a good argument could be rejected; that the correct course—the moral course—could be turned down. Those elected by democratic means do not always have the highest good at the top of their agenda.
During the intensely fought appeasement debate, between 1933 and 1939, Churchill