The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [8]
That summer Churchill joined forces with a number of other young Conservative Members of Parliament who were uneasy with their leaders’ policies. Every Thursday when Parliament was in session, they dined together in the House, inviting as their guest a senior politician with whom they could express their unease and discuss their ideas for reform. Among their guests was a former Liberal Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery. Churchill was also invited to dine with two leading Liberal Members of the parliamentary opposition—Asquith, and Sir Edward Grey, later the Foreign Secretary.
Churchill’s first serious breach with his party leaders came over the conduct of the Boer War. Even as the war was drawing to a close, Churchill protested publicly against the execution of a Boer commandant by the British military authorities in South Africa. He wanted to see reconciliation between “Boer and Briton,” not, as he told an audience at Saddleworth, in Yorkshire, in October 1901, a growing “gulf of hatred.” (In 1945 he was to say of the Germans: “My hate ended with their surrender.”)
During his speech at Saddleworth, Churchill raised one of the central issues of parliamentary democracy—the wide-ranging responsibilities of the Government party in the House of Commons. It was wrong, he insisted, for the Conservative leaders—his own leaders, the Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain—to say that responsibility for the execution of the Boer commandant was not theirs but that of the local military authorities. “I warn these two distinguished gentlemen,” he declared, “that they cannot devolve upon others the weight and burden of the war.” To Chamberlain he wrote directly: “Nothing can relieve the Government of their responsibility.”
Churchill wanted Parliament to move forward with wide-ranging measures of social reform—measures that were far more attractive to the Liberal Opposition than to his own Conservative leaders. In mid-December 1901, two weeks after his twenty-seventh birthday and less than a year since he had entered Parliament, Churchill dined with John Morley, a leading Liberal reformer. Morley recommended to Churchill that he read Seebohm Rowntree’s study of poverty in the city of York. Churchill was so struck by the book’s account of inequality that he set down his own reflections on it in writing. In his notes he stressed the need for Government to address the questions of poverty, unemployment and inadequate housing: “This festering life at home makes worldwide power a mockery.” It was “a terrible thing,” he told a Conservative meeting in Blackpool, that there were people, such as those in York, “who have … the workhouse or prison as the only avenues to change from their present situation.”
On 24 April 1902, Churchill raised this issue of urban poverty in Parliament, asking Balfour to appoint a Select Committee of the House “to report and consider whether national expenditure cannot be diminished without injury to the public service, and whether the money voted cannot be apportioned to better advantage than at present.” After some hesitation, Balfour agreed to a Select Committee and appointed Churchill one of its members, but the Conservative Party had no interest in promoting social reform on the scale Churchill believed essential.
Churchill believed that these social issues must be fought in civilized debate in the House of Commons, and not in violence at political meetings. When Conservative supporters in Birmingham turned in fury against the rising Liberal politician David Lloyd George, threatening him physically, Churchill was outraged. As far as he was concerned, he wrote in a private letter to a friend, Lloyd George was a “chattering little cad,” but every