The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [35]
Canada had no intention of quitting. Churchill knew of Canada’s contribution to the war effort. More than a hundred Canadian pilots had flown in the Battle of Britain. In the many battles that lay ahead, nearly one thousand Canadian soldiers were to be killed at Dieppe, and a further five thousand in Sicily and Italy. In the Normandy landings, 358 gave their lives. Thousands more were to be killed in the fight for the liberation of France, Belgium, and Holland in 1945. Canadian sailors and merchant seamen faced, from the first days of the war, all the perils of the war at sea.
Churchill returned to Canada in 1943 to confer at Quebec with Roosevelt and the Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. In a later broadcast from Quebec on 31 August 1943 Churchill declared: “Here at the gateway to Canada, in mighty lands which have never known the totalitarian tyrannies of Hitler and Mussolini, the spirit of freedom has found a safe and abiding home.” Because the Soviet Union was an Allied Power, he could not with prudence include Stalin in his list of dictators.
War created situations in which the workings of Parliament were hampered and frustrated, not least because so many Members, including Churchill’s son, Randolph, were serving in the armed forces far from home. Contested by-elections were suspended, since electioneering was not practicable in wartime. The bombing of the Chamber forced the debates to be held elsewhere— at Church House, Westminster. The secrecy of so many matters meant a resort to the Secret Sessions, as had happened during the First World War, with no report of the debate being made public. “Thus we arrive,” Churchill told the House on 8 September 1942, “by our ancient constitutional methods, at practical working arrangements which show that Parliamentary democracy can adapt itself to all situations and can go out in all weathers.”
Jock Colville, who served in Churchill’s Private Office in both his premierships, commented that, even at the height of his power, “when he could have got away with almost anything,” Churchill always reported to the House of Commons “the main principles accepted by the Cabinet on matters affecting the conduct of the war, and told the House of the results, good or bad, that had been achieved. Having done so, he asked the House of Commons for its approval and never shrank from a vote of censure.” “I am,” he used to say, “the servant of the House of Commons.”
As setbacks and defeats marked the desperate course of the war, Churchill spoke with confidence about the role of the House of Commons, telling Members of Parliament about their bombed and battered institution on 23 October 1942: “There is no situation to which it cannot address itself with vigour and ingenuity. It is the citadel of British liberty. It is the foundation of our laws.”
Churchill explained to Roosevelt: “Democracy has to prove that it can provide a granite foundation for war against tyranny.” The preservation and enhancement of democracy was an integral part of Churchill’s war leadership, a vision of the world that would follow an Allied victory. Upholding democratic values, both in Britain and throughout postwar Europe, where democracies had been submerged by Fascism and Nazism, became a task and a call. “It was Parliament,” Churchill told his fellow parliamentarians—many of whom were serving officers—that constituted “the shield and expression of democracy,” and it was in Parliament that “all grievances or muddles or scandals, if such there be,” should be debated.
Even in 1940, when