The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [39]
8
Setbacks, Recovery and an Enduring Faith
For the workings of parliamentary democracy, the transition from wartime to peacetime, after five-and-a-half years, was not an easy one. Yet the instincts of parliamentary procedure and the paramountcy of the electoral process were able to survive and flourish as soon as the dark cloud of war was lifted. The process whereby this happened, and the result of the change from war to peace in 1945, are an object lesson in the resilience of parliamentary democracy and its essential superiority over the internal convulsions created by the dictatorial and totalitarian systems.
As the war in Europe drew to its end, Churchill envisaged maintaining his all-party coalition for a least a year after the defeat of Germany, hoping to use the combined, united force of the nation’s political parties to establish decent peacetime conditions for all. Among the measures he had in mind was a National Health Service, outlined in 1943 in the Government’s Four-Year Plan. He had been disappointed in 1918 when Lloyd George had not responded to his similar vision for the use of wartime organizations and energies to push forward domestic social reforms.
The war with Germany ended on 8 May 1945. Ten days later Clement Attlee went to see Churchill to tell him that he was “favourably disposed” to maintaining the coalition. So too were Ernest Bevin, A.V. Alexander and Herbert Morrison, the next three most senior Labour Cabinet Ministers in Churchill’s Coalition Government. All were agreeable to maintaining the coalition until the defeat of Japan, an event believed to be at least a year away. Attlee asked Churchill if, in his letter formally asking Labour to maintain the coalition, he could add a sentence about implementing the proposals “for social security and full employment” that had been put forward in the proposed Four-Year Plan by William Beveridge, who had been one of Churchill’s main advisers on social reform legislation before the First World War. Churchill readily agreed.
Attlee then took Churchill’s letter with him to Blackpool, where the Labour Party annual conference was in session. There, however, the decision to maintain an all-party Government was taken out of the Labour leaders’ hands by their own rank and file, who urged a swift end to the coalition, a return to party politics, and the prospect—so long denied the Labour Party—of political power. Attlee telephoned Churchill with this news on the evening of May 21.
Just as it had been the Labour Party members’ refusal to serve under Neville Chamberlain in May 1940 that propelled Churchill to the premiership, so their decision in May 1945 to insist on an immediate General Election brought his wartime coalition to an end. That demand cast a question over whether, once the votes were counted, he would remain Prime Minister.
Given the determination of the Labour Party to return to party politics, Churchill had no alternative but to dissolve the coalition, and at noon, on May 23, he went to Buckingham Palace to resign. Attlee had offered to keep the Labour Ministers in the government for another five months, but Churchill wrote to King George VI: ‘It would be no service to the nation to go forward with a pretence of union which had in fact lapsed with the attainment of complete victory over Germany.”
The King accepted the fact that the coalition was at an end. From that moment, Britain was plunged back into the unpredictable realm of party politics. Until a General Election could be called, Churchill remained Prime Minister at the head of an entirely Conservative administration, known as the Caretaker Government. “You know what it means to me,” he wrote to Ernest Bevin, “not to have your aid in these terrible times,” and, he added optimistically but in vain: “We must hope for re-union when Party passions are less strong.”
The House of Commons met on May 29 with the Labour Party in opposition. With the General Election set for July 5, politicians of all colours plunged into the cut and thrust of electioneering.