Layout 8 - Winston Churchill

description of Pitt, one cannot miss the way he identified
the very characteristics of a war leader that he
himself shortly afterwards would replicate. Churchill
wrote that “the whole struggle [of war] depended upon
the energies of this one man…..He broke incompetent
generals and admirals and replaced them with younger
men upon whom he could rely 7 ….He had used the
House of Commons as a platform from which to address
the country 8 …and brought the force of public opinion
to bear upon politics.” 9
But Churchill also knew that Pitt sat for Old
Sarum, one of the rottenest of rotten boroughs: constituencies
with small electorates, used by their patrons to
gain unrepresentative influence in Parliament. While
Pitt’s talents helped define what the office of prime minister
could and should be, representation in government
remained limited to the wealthiest men of property. Even
this elite group faced the frequent hazards of impeachment
and bills of attainder. Reform was required.
William Pitt the Younger, Churchill wrote, “saw
quite clearly the need and justification for reform,” but
“was overcome by the dead hand of eighteenth-century
politics.” 10 Instead the younger Pitt solidified the role of
prime minister-as-war-leader defined by his father, while
professionalizing the finances of the nation and creating
“the modern machinery of the ‘Budget.’” 11
Surveying the state of parliamentary debate at the
start of the nineteenth century, Churchill found the
scene uninspiring. But change finally started in 1828
with, first, the elimination of religious restrictions on
office holders and, second, the expansion of the franchise
in 1832. The Industrial Revolution, and the religious
diversity of a United Kingdom that then included Irish
Catholics and increasingly wealthy Nonconformists, had
forced changes to the British body politic, but great men
could still influence events. Of Prime Minister Sir
Robert Peel’s career-ending decision to repeal the Corn
Laws, Churchill wrote: “he understood better than any
of his contemporaries the needs of the country, and he
had the outstanding courage to change his views in order
to meet them.” 12
The expansion of the electorate resulted in the creation
of modern political parties and with it the need of
the parties to become responsive to the will of voters. Far
from ending the role of great parliamentary leaders,
however, the new situation brought forth a fresh generation
of Titans. Churchill himself was born in the
political age dominated by William Gladstone and
Benjamin Disraeli. He later recognized Gladstone’s
Midlothian Campaign as “the first broad appeal to the
people by a potential Prime Minister” and considered it
Disraeli’s “great task” to have persuaded the
Conservative Party “to face the inevitability of democracy,
and to endow it with the policies which would
meet the new conditions.” 13
Hastening this last development, Churchill
believed, was his own father, whose campaign for “Tory
Democracy” maintained that Conservatives should
enfranchise the working man and embrace his input into
the political system. But to this idea Lord Randolph’s
leader, Lord Salisbury, was unresponsive, leaving the
ground in Churchill’s view to the emergent Labour
movement.
Radicalism did not begin, however, with Labour.
Joseph Chamberlain epitomized the prosperous industrialist
but in middle age turned his great energies to
politics. In the process he transformed his native
Birmingham from a Dickensian slum into the self-confidant
Second City of Britain.
Radical Joe’s efforts to bring about similar change
on a national level were largely frustrated first by
Gladstone and then by Salisbury, but in an essay on
Chamberlain Churchill noted that by the 1930s it had
become “the axiom of the Tory Party that the well-being
of the people…is the first duty of the ruler, once the
preservation of the State is secured.” 14 Chamberlain had
the rare distinction of imposing his influence on two
major political parties by deriving his power direct from
voters and not from his political superiors.
The Parliament Act of 1911 and the Representation
of the People Acts of 1918 and 1928, which
Churchill characterized as “a tidal wave of democracy,”
combined with “the volcanic explosion of the [First
World] war swept the shores bare” of the sort of forces
that blocked Lord Randolph and Joseph Chamberlain.
Britain’s progress towards universal adulthood suffrage
culminated in the general election of 1929 when, for the
first time, all adult men and women could vote on an
equal basis.
“I cannot see any figure which resembles or recalls
the Liberal statesmen of the Victorian epoch,” Churchill
wrote in an essay about the respected John Morley: “The
leadership of the privileged has passed away,” he continued,
“but it has not been succeeded by that of the
eminent. We have entered the region of mass effects.” 15
Clearly the effects of the full democratization of
politics were much on Churchill’s mind in the Twenties
and Thirties. What sort of leaders, he wonders, would
now be produced
Churchill believed the great parliamentary leaders
of the past did much to lay the foundation of a free and
prosperous Britain. But personalities like Walpole, the
two Pitts, Canning, Castlereagh, Peel, Gladstone and
Disraeli had been produced by an age, as Disraeli
himself acknowledged, “when the world was for the few,
and for the very few.”
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