The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [27]
After giving a graphic account of the tyrannical nature of the Nazi regime in Germany, Churchill went on to ask:
Is there anything in all this which should lead us in the English-speaking world to repudiate the famous chain of events which has made us what we are?—to cast away our Parliament, our habeas corpus, our rights and many freedoms, our tolerances, our decencies? On the contrary, ought we not betimes to buttress and fortify our ancient constitutions, and to make sure that they are not ignorantly or lightly deranged?
What a lamentable result it would be if the British and American democracies, when enfranchised, squandered in a few short years or even between some night and morning all the long-stored, hard-won treasure of our common civilisation!
It must not be. If the present franchise were ever to be found incapable of defending the rights and liberties of British subjects or of American citizens against a vague and feckless mood of Caesarism, the franchise would have to be strengthened and weighted so as to assign due leadership to the more instructed and responsible elements.
Churchill had one caveat with regard to the existing franchise, which in Britain was then for both men and women over the age of twenty-one. “If we have gone too fast or too far in broadening the basis of full citizenship,” he wrote, “and the result endangers the permanent well-being of the community, we must not hesitate to retrace our steps for a short distance. If our legislation as at present constituted does not give expression to the true strength of the nation, we must not fear or delay to make the necessary modification. The good cause must not perish through lack of proper organisation.”
Churchill ended his Collier’s article with a declaration of his faith in the existing British system. “Elected parliaments,” he wrote, “in which all participate, with impartial courts of law and under a tradition-guarded constitution or limited monarchy, are the last words yet spoken in the honourable government of men.”
Two months after this powerful appeal, which had been directed principally to readers in the United States, Churchill addressed a British readership, when, on 17 April 1935, he wrote an article in the Daily Mail headed, provocatively, “Is Parliament Merely a Talking Shop?” “We must recognise that we have passed through a decade disastrous to Parliamentary institutions in almost every part of the world,” he declared bluntly. “Democracy in so many lands is turning blindly but irresistibly to dictatorship. No virile, educated, scientific nation is going to let itself be let down or brought to a standstill by what is called ‘Representative Government.’”
Churchill then wrote of the “amazing quality of the House of Commons is its power to digest, assimilate, conciliate, and tame all kinds of new elements,” and he went on to express this idea in animal imagery with the words: “The Mother of Parliaments combines the fecundity of the rabbit with the digestion of the ostrich. But most of her progeny die of the diet, and already hardly any of the poor foreign sprigs survive.”
It was in the context of the rise of dictatorships in Europe, and the dictatorial, aggressive government of Japan in the Far East, that Churchill wrote in his article for the Daily Mail: “There is no greater guarantee of our liberties than the House of Commons. Go at Question Time and listen to all the highest Ministers of State being questioned and cross-questioned on every conceivable subject and entering into the whole process with respect and with good will. Where else in the world can you see the representatives of democracy able to address the leading personages of a powerful government with this freedom?”
Seventy years later, Churchill might have written the same words.