The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [41]
The General Election result was a clear demonstration of the procedures of parliamentary democracy at work. When Churchill’s Principal Private Secretary, Leslie Rowan, spoke to him of the ingratitude of the British people, Churchill replied, “That’s politics, my dear, that’s politics.” To his doctor, who mentioned that same word, “ingratitude” when the results were known, Churchill responded: “I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time.”
Defeat in no way altered Churchill’s faith in democratic procedures. He neither despaired of the parliamentary process nor turned his back on it. In the words of his daughter Mary, in her biography of her mother: “Winston did not lurk long licking his wounds; when Parliament reassembled on 1st August, less than a week after the election results, he took his new place on the Opposition front bench.”
On 24 August 1945, within a month of becoming Leader of the Opposition and still holding his Epping seat, later delineated as Woodford, Churchill told the House of Commons: “This House is not only a machine for legislation; perhaps it is not even mainly a machine for legislation, it is a great forum of Debate.” It had to tackle the dominating issues of the day. If the House were not able “to discuss matters which the country is discussing, which fill the newspapers, which everyone is anxious and preoccupied about, it loses its contact; it is no longer marching step by step with all the thought that is in progress in the country.”
Public cynicism at the parliamentary process was something Churchill always sought to combat. On 11 November 1947, nineteen days before his seventy-third birthday, he told the House of Commons: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe … No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” But it was democracy that was the system in which the electorate was sovereign, not the legislature. As Churchill expressed it: “It is not Parliament that should rule; it is the people who should rule through Parliament.”
Churchill reiterated this theme when he spoke to the Norwegian Parliament in Oslo on 13 May 1948: “In both our lands, it is the people who control the Government, not the Government the people.” As Leader of the Opposition, Churchill was then engaged, with his Conservative colleagues, in a continual struggle against the Labour Government’s legislation.
One aspect of the British parliamentary system that displeased Churchill was the right of people not to vote. As he saw it, not voting was not a right but a sign of laziness or neglect, a failure to enter fully into the working of the society in which one lived. “I have a strong view,” he told the House of Commons on 23 June 1948, “that voting should be compulsory, as it is in Australia and in Holland, and that there should be a small fine for people who do not choose to exercise their civic duty.”
Another strong view Churchill held concerned the actual structure of the House of Commons. In maintaining the parliamentary system, Churchill saw particular merit in the physical nature of the debating Chamber of the House of Commons. It had been built in such a way that, by 1900, there was not enough room on the benches for more than two-thirds of the Members to find a place to sit. As a result, during important debates, many Members had to stand, emphasizing the sense of urgency and attentiveness. The Chamber, having been destroyed during a German air raid in 1941, was restored in 1950. Many people thought that the new Chamber should have room on the benches for every Member.
In this debate, Churchill supported the return to the pre-war arrangement. As he told the House of Commons on 24 October 1950:
It excites world wonder in