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By Root 297 0

are going forward for war purposes. But I am bound to say that I rank the House of Commons—the most powerful Assembly in the whole world—at least as important as a fortification or a battleship, even in time of war. Politics may be very fierce and violent in the after-war days. We may have all the changes in personnel following upon a General Election. We shall certainly have an immense press of business and, very likely, of stormy controversy. We must have a good, well-tried and convenient place in which to do our work. The House owes it to itself, it owes it to the nation, to make sure that there is no gap, no awkward, injurious hiatus in the continuity of our Parliamentary life.”

In wartime, the powers of Parliaments, as of all democratic legislative assemblies, are necessarily curbed by the urgent, often highly secret, daily demands of war-making. But Churchill did not want this fact to eclipse or weaken the importance of parliamentary systems or the regard in which those systems were held. During one of his wartime visits to the United States, he expressed his view of democracy in these words: “These ideas of Parliamentary government, of the representation of the people upon franchises, which extend as time goes on, and which in our country have reached the complete limits of universal suffrage, these institutions and principles constitute at this moment one of the great causes which are being fought out in the world. With all their weakness and with all their strength, with all their faults, with all their virtues, with all the criticism that may be made against them, with their many shortcomings, with lack of foresight, lack of continuity of purpose, or pressure only of superficial purpose, they nevertheless assert the right of the common people—the broad masses of the people—to take a conscious effective share in the government of their country.”

This speech was not mere rhetoric: Churchill’s words always meant what they said in practical terms. When, in March 1944, there was a mini-revolt on a progressive piece of domestic legislation, the Education Bill, he insisted on a full-scale debate. “I have had some little trouble here, which has been coming to a head for some time,” he telegraphed to Roosevelt, “which forced me to fall back upon the House of Commons, which as usual showed itself steadfast in the cause and put all the malignants in their proper places.” To his son, Randolph, he wrote more colloquially: “I am the child of the H of C, and when I was molested by a number of cheeky boys, I ran for succour to the old Mother of Parliaments, and she certainly chased them out of the backyard with her mop.”

On 4 April 1944 Churchill told the House of Commons: “It must be remembered that the function of Parliament is not only to pass good laws, but to stop bad laws.” He was content that the parliamentarians were vigilant with regard to all legislation, as he had been when in Opposition.

In the summer of 1944, shortly after Allied troops liberated Rome, Churchill was asked to set out for the Italian people the ideas that should guide them now that Italian Fascism had been overthrown—the harsh, totalitarian rule of Mussolini and his Fascist Party. Churchill’s message reflects his abiding personal concern for the restoration and preservation of democratic principles, wherever peoples and governments were prepared to uphold them. Echoing his Collier’s article of nine years earlier, he wrote, on 28 August 1944:

Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day?

Have the people the right to turn out a government of which they disapprove, and are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent?

Are their courts of justice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free of all association with particular political parties?

Will these courts administer open and well-established laws which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice?

Will there be