The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [33]
On 12 April 1939, as war clouds loomed, he wrote to one of his literary assistants about that history he was writing: “In the main, the theme is emerging of the growth of freedom and law, of the rights of the individual, of the subordination of the State to the fundamental and moral conceptions of an ever-comprehending community. Of these ideas the English-speaking peoples were the authors, then the trustees, and must now become the armed champions. Thus I condemn tyranny in whatever guise and from whatever quarter it presents itself. All this of course has a current application.”
On 18 April 1939 Neville Chamberlain finally agreed to establish a Ministry of Supply, to coordinate industrial production in the event of war. “Winston has won his long fight,” Brendan Bracken wrote to a friend. “Our Government are now adopting the policy he advised three years ago. No public man in our time has shown more foresight, and I believe that his long, lonely struggle to expose the dangers of dictatorships will prove to be the best chapter in his crowded life.”
As Churchill saw it, parliamentary democracy and dictatorship not only stood at opposite poles but had no common ground. Democracy had to defend itself. “Appeasement from weakness and fear is alike futile and fatal,” he told the House of Commons on 14 December 1950, during a debate on the Korean War. “Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble, and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.” It was to oppose the “futile and fatal” form of appeasement that he had fought so hard in Parliament after Hitler had come to power.
The idea of the abdication by Parliament of its responsibilities was abhorrent to Churchill: hence his objections to the two-month adjournment of the House of Commons that the Government instituted on 2 August 1939. There was, Churchill warned the House, “a definite movement” of German troops and supplies through Austria “towards the east.” Angrily he continued: “At this moment in its long history it would be disastrous, it would be pathetic, it would be shameful for the House of Commons to write itself off as an effective and potent factor in the situation, or to reduce whatever strength it can offer to the firm front which the nations will make against aggression. …”
Chamberlain would not agree to let the House remain in session. Within a month of the adjournment, Hitler invaded Poland, and both Britain and France declared war on Germany. The rights of the individual were trampled upon by Hitler from the first days of the invasion of Poland. “This is no war,” Churchill told the House of Commons in his first wartime speech, “of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.”
7
Parliament in Time of Total War
The greatest challenge to parliamentary democracy is the threat of defeat at the hands of a dictator regime. It is to avert the curse of totalitarian rule that parliamentary democracy asserts itself as the essential governing system. Yet, faced by the threat of military aggression and defeat, Parliament itself has to accept a diminution of its authority, as harsh measures are required to secure national survival.
On 10 May 1940, as German forces invaded Belgium, Holland and France, Churchill became Prime Minister. He at once brought the leading figures of the opposition Labour and Liberal parties into central positions of war policy and war direction. By this act, he ensured that the elected representatives of the people across the political spectrum would have whatever