The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [26]
Churchill saw it as his task to challenge the unwisdom of his British fellow parliamentarians. He spent hundreds of hours collecting and preparing the facts and statistics on which he based his speeches. In detailed warnings and appeals for a foreign policy that could find a way to prevent the onward march of German force, he advocated creating alliances with other threatened countries and working together within the Covenant of the League of Nations. That Covenant could mandate collective action against a potential aggressor.
This was a time of anguish for Churchill, confident that he was in the right but aware that it was only through Parliament that he could make his case and change the policies. “At Westminster,” he later wrote in his war memoirs, “I pursued my two themes of India and the German menace, and went to Parliament from time to time to deliver warning speeches, which commanded attention, but did not, unhappily, wake to action the crowded, puzzled Houses which heard them.”
It was not that Churchill lacked listeners in the Chamber. That aspect of parliamentary democracy served him well, even if the end results were disappointing. On one occasion, after the House had filled up to capacity to hear another of his powerful warnings about German intentions and the British lack of adequate response, a cynical MP called out: “Here endeth the Book of Lamentations.” Quick as a flash another MP remarked: “Followed, it seems, by Exodus”—as the Chamber emptied out as soon as Churchill had finished speaking.
Both on India and on defence issues, Churchill was not alone among the senior figures in the Conservative Party. “I found myself working in Parliament with a group of friends,” he wrote in his war memoirs. These friends were influential party members who could, in his words, “at any time command the attention of Parliament and stage a full-dress debate.”
On 16 February 1935 Churchill published an article in Collier’s magazine entitled “Why Not Dictatorship.” In it he wrote strongly against those in Europe, and even in Britain, who argued that dictatorship might be the best way forward for modern society. It was essential, in order to protect society “from the ambition, greed, malice or caprice of rulers,” to ensure what he set out as the “inviolability of even the humblest home; the right and power of the private citizen to appeal to impartial courts against the State and against 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 government; the power to turn out a government and put another set of men in its place by lawful, constitutional means; and finally the sense of association with the State and of some responsibility for its actions and conduct.”
These were the elements underpinning parliamentary democracy that Churchill believed were essential for the well-being and, indeed, the survival of civilized society. It was also essential, he wrote, that the English-speaking peoples—above all those in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—first fight against “all this loose talk of dictatorships and one-man power. Secondly, they must guard with the utmost vigilance their own individual rights of citizenship. Thirdly, by the exercise of a far-seeing, enduring patience, they must submit themselves to the established and regular processes of law