Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [32]
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 post-war 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.
Churchill recognized the dangers to Britain’s war effort of the sort of parliamentary criticism, within the framework of Britain’s parliamentary democracy, that might give comfort to the enemy. With this aspect of free speech in mind, he told the House of Commons in 1942, during a no-confidence motion that was decisively defeated: “If democracy and Parliamentary institutions are to triumph in this war, it is absolutely necessary that Governments resting on them shall be able to act and dare, that the servants of the Crown shall not be harassed by nagging and snarling, that enemy propaganda shall not be fed needlessly out of our own hands, and our reputation disparaged and undermined throughout the world.”
At the beginning of 1942, while Churchill was in Bermuda on the way back to Britain after his first wartime visit to the United States, he set out in a public speech his thoughts on the importance of democracy, both in regard to the war then at its height and as a pointer to how the post-war world ought to look. “These ideas of parliamentary government,” he said, “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.” Churchill had no illusions about the weaknesses of democracy, but, as he went on to explain: “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 mass of the people—to take a conscious and effective share in the government of their country.”
Churchill was to return to this theme in public, and in the House of Commons, on several occasions during the war. When, in August 1944, he was in Italy, he was asked to advise on the system of government to replace Mussolini’s Fascist regime, which had ruled Italy for more than twenty years. “It is said,” Churchill told the Italian people, “that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” and he went on to ask rhetorically, “What is freedom?” There were, he answered, “one or two quite simple, practical tests by which it can be known in the modern world in peace conditions,” and he set out those tests in the form of seven questions that the Italian people should answer if they wanted to know whether they had replaced fascism by freedom:
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 from 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 fair play for poor as well as for rich, for private persons as well as for Government officials?
Will the rights