The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [29]
Churchill was convinced that, given the nature of the Nazi regime and the gulf between the democratic and totalitarian systems, no such understanding was possible. His Paris speech, delivered on 24 September 1936, was a clarion call in defence of parliamentary democracy. In the course of it he asked:
How could we bear, nursed as we have been in a free atmosphere, to be gagged and muzzled; to have spies, eavesdroppers and delators at every corner; to have even private conversation caught up and used against us by the Secret Police and all their agents and creatures; to be arrested and interned without trial; or to be tried by political or Party courts for crimes hitherto unknown to civil law?
How could we bear to be treated like schoolboys when we are grown-up men; to be turned out on parade to march and cheer for this slogan or that; to see philosophers, teachers and authors bullied and toiled to death in concentration camps; to be forced every hour to conceal the natural workings of the human intellect and the pulsations of the human heart?
There were still some people, Churchill commented, who saw no alternative to the two totalitarian systems of Nazism and Communism. This was not his view. As he told his Paris audience: “Between the doctrines of Comrade Trotsky and those of Dr. Goebbels there ought to be room for you and me, and a few others, to cultivate opinions of our own.” Aggressive action should not be judged from the standpoint of Right and Left, but of “right and wrong.” The democratic nations “are the guardians of causes so precious to the world that we must, as the Bible says, ‘Lay aside every impediment’ and prepare ourselves night and day to be worthy of the Faith that is in us.”
Reflecting on Churchill’s continued exclusion from government, one British newspaper commented: “We should like to hear Mr Churchill’s defence of democracy reverberate from the sounding board of high office.” But it was not to be. Both Stanley Baldwin and his successor, Neville Chamberlain, were convinced that some middle ground could be established whereby British democracy and German totalitarianism could find the means to live and work together. In Cabinet, on 7 November 1936, the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, Sir Thomas Inskip, suggested that, in place of the support for the collective security of threatened States—as envisaged by the League of Nations and strongly urged by Churchill—a policy aimed at “the appeasement of Germany’s economic conditions” would be one “for which there was some hope.”
While not informed of this specific suggestion, Churchill knew that the arguments in favour of collective security—of rearmament and recourse to the Covenant of the League of Nations—were not supported by the Cabinet. “All I can say,” he told the House of Commons on the day after Inskip’s remark, “is that unless there is a front against potential aggression there will be no settlement. All the nations of Europe will just be driven helter-skelter across the diplomatic chessboard of Europe until the limits of retreat are exhausted, and then out of desperation, perhaps in some most unlikely quarter, the explosion of war will take place, probably under conditions not very favourable to those who have been engaged in this long retreat.”
On 11 November 1936 Churchill moved an amendment stating that Britain’s defences were no longer adequate to face the threat of war. One suggestion he put forward was a Ministry of Supply, so that the government could coordinate the preparation and expansion of war industries. The Government had said that it was “always reviewing the position.” “Anyone can see what the position is,” Churchill declared. “The Government simply cannot make up their mind … So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolute to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.” But his real accusation was against his fellow MPs:
I have been staggered by the failure of