The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [32]
Churchill stressed in this article the need to maintain good relations in the House of Commons between men and women of all parties and points of view. Reflecting on the crisis between the democratic and anti-democratic nations, he wrote: “Our institutions threatened, on trial, and to some extent in eclipse in this harsh totalitarian world, depend for their life and vigour mainly upon good feeling and decent behaviour.” It was the public who were most endangered by an intensification of political conflict beyond the civilities of the House of Commons. “The only foundation for good government and happy results for the people,” he wrote, “is a high standard of comradeship and fellowship between those who are called upon to handle their affairs.”
The 1930s was a period in which there were people even in Britain who argued that totalitarianism was preferable to democracy. Both Communism and Fascism had their advocates in many parliamentary countries: indeed, several European countries had succumbed to, or were dallying with, dictatorial systems. The question remained, in Churchill’s mind, “whether our ancient Parliamentary institutions can survive.” They would be able to do so, he wrote, only “if they show themselves capable of upholding the same national discipline and intense effort for survival which are undoubtedly realised in the Dictator States.” In times of danger, “sacrifice and common exertion” would be required. “But we must still hope that the House of Commons, although it no longer represents the strong life force of the nation, but rather a vague, floating, half-focused public opinion, will nevertheless rise to the level of its dangers, and prove itself a worthy inheritor of the great traditions and achievement which have called it into being.”
These high hopes were not to be realized until the coming of war nine months later. Meanwhile, to Churchill’s distress, Conservative Central Office made a second attempt to find a would-be Conservative candidate to challenge him in his constituency, so that, if defeated in the party caucus, he would have to leave the House of Commons altogether. On 10 March 1939 he asked his fellow Members of Parliament: “What is the value of our Parliamentary institutions, and how can our Parliamentary doctrines survive, if constituencies tried to return only tame, docile and subservient members who tried to stamp out every form of independent judgement?”
One of Churchill’s favourite Gilbert and Sullivan couplets comes to mind, from HMS Pinafore, in which “the ruler of the Queen’s Navee”—a post that Churchill held twice as First Lord of the Admiralty—explains how he rose to such a prominent position in government:
I always voted at my Party’s call.
I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
On 22 May 1939, two months after lamenting “the tame, docile and subservient members” during a debate on the government’s restriction of Jewish immigration to Palestine, Churchill commented on the fact that the “supreme argument” on which the government was relying was the Three-Line Whip—the order for all party members to attend and to vote. This, he pointed out, had been brought in only after a poor performance by the Minister defending the Government’s policy: “Not only the Landwehr but the Landsturm were called out. That was not because the case was found to be exceptionally strong. It was because the case was weak, and because it was thought necessary to override arguments by a parade of numbers.”
Churchill found all such tampering with parliamentary democracy detrimental to what he believed were the strengths it had acquired after many centuries of conflict, civil war, and the slow but steady evolution of parliamentary