The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (19 page)

When the Tories said he was being soft on young criminals, he would even play the class card. A right-wing Tory called Lord Winterton was assailing him in the Commons for refusing to incarcerate some young offenders, and Churchill replied: ‘
I wanted to draw the attention of the country . . . to the evil by which 7000 lads of the poorer classes are sent to gaol every year for offences which, if the noble Lord had committed them at College, he would not have been subjected to the slightest degree of inconvenience.’ You can imagine
some MPs seething at the idea that their champagne-fuelled university high jinks were being bracketed with mere criminality—and this from a fellow who hadn’t even been to university. Most sensible people, of course, would have completely agreed with Churchill.

As for his handling of the strikes and riots that preceded the First World War, he has been grossly traduced by the modern Labour Party. In 1978 the Labour Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, said the Churchill family had a ‘
vendetta’ against the Tonypandy miners. As recently as 2010 a South Wales council tried to stop a local military camp being named after him; and there are still Labour MPs who will tell you that in 1910 Churchill brutally sent the army against defenceless working people. This is all tripe.

The record clearly shows that the troops at Tonypandy behaved with restraint. Indeed, Churchill was actually attacked by the Tories for being too soft, and holding the troops in reserve. It was true that he sent troops to try to contain the dockers rampaging through Liverpool in 1911, and true that they fired. But the destruction being caused was immense; the situation had to be brought under control and Churchill’s own personal sympathies were with the strikers—as they had been with the miners at Tonypandy. ‘
They are very poor, miserably paid, and now nearly starving,’ he said. Of dockers striking in London, he told the King they ‘
had a real grievance, and the large addition to their wages which they have secured must promote the health and contentment of an unduly strained class of workers, charged as has been realised with vital functions in our civilisation’.

Time and again we find him impatient with the boss class and siding with the unions. When he was Minister for Munitions in 1917 he faced a strike by armaments workers on the Clyde—and got them in for tea and cake at his ministry. He sorted it out by bunging them 12 per cent. He presented a Munitions Bill to allay some of the
workers’ grievances, and said ‘
no worker would be penalised for belonging to a trade union or taking part in a trade dispute’.

As for the General Strike of 1926, he certainly worked hard to bring the crisis to an end—but if anything he was on the conciliatory wing in his approach to the detail of the disputes. Throughout the summer and autumn he tried to bring the mine owners to accept that their impoverished workforce deserved a minimum wage, and declared that the capitalists were being ‘
recalcitrant’ and ‘unreasonable’. Once again he earned the scorn of the Tories, who felt he was trying to interfere with the right of management to manage.

There is plenty more. If we wanted to justify Churchill’s entry in the great pantheon of lefty legislators, we could add reducing the pension age from seventy to sixty-five (we have just had to reverse this excessive generosity), or his repeated calls for the nationalisation of the railways, his call for a windfall tax on war profiteers and his introduction to British industry of that favourite of bolshy 1970s shop stewards—the tea break.

So which is it? It is time for the real Winston Churchill to stand forward in his true colours. There is a line in Gilbert and Sullivan to the effect that ‘Every boy and every gal/ That’s born into the world alive/ Is either a little Liberal/ Or a little Conservative’.

The Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb hailed him, along with Lloyd George, as ‘the most advanced politicians of the time.’ At almost the same time his fellow Liberal MP Charles Masterman proclaimed him an ‘
aboriginal and unchanging Tory’. One or other view was misguided, surely?

Of course there are and were plenty of people who explain the mystery simply: that he was a weathervane, who said so many different things at different times that, in the words of Beaverbrook, he ended up holding all views on all questions. Or, as Asquith put it, ‘
Winston has no convictions’.

I am not sure I attach much weight to criticism from ineffectual mutton-like Asquith—a man who repeatedly shafted Churchill, and who spent cabinet meetings writing pathetic love letters to Venetia Stanley, and who was so drunk that he often had to get Churchill to take over for him. Churchill’s career covered a huge chunk of British history. He held high office more or less continuously from 1905 to 1922—a seventeen-year stretch that comfortably eclipses most modern politicians: and yet that was only his first period—before he had even become Chancellor, let alone Prime Minister.

Of course he sometimes said things that seemed to sit oddly with something he had said in response to another problem in another age. But those who accuse him of political inconsistency have underestimated the depth and subtlety of his political thought. My own view is that Churchill had a very clear political identity, and an unvarying set of principles.

He was both a reactionary and a liberal because he was essentially a buccaneering Victorian Whig. He believed in the greatness of Britain, in the empire, and the preservation of roughly the established order of the country in which he grew up. He also believed in science and technological progress and that government could and should intervene to help improve the condition of the people.

Above all he believed that there was a connection between those two objectives—the promotion and protection of Britain and the empire, and the promotion and protection of the welfare of the people—and that the second would help advance the first. That was the essence of his Whiggish Toryism.

Think of the kind of lives he would have seen when he walked out that night in wintry Manchester. In 1902 he had read Seebohm Rowntree, on the fate of the poor in York, and he said it had ‘
made his hair stand on end’. By 1906 the population boom meant that the squalor in the Manchester slums, if anything, was even worse.

He and Marsh saw houses with no running water, with no sewerage system, and with families living ten to a room. Here your baby had no more than a one in four chance of living to see its first birthday. In these slums Churchill saw people who were not just relatively poor—enduring poverty in the sense that we understand it; but absolutely poor: crushingly, grindingly, hopelessly poor in the sense that they were deprived of whole categories of things that most poor people these days would take for granted.

Seebohm Rowntree was very strict in deciding who could fairly be called poor. You could only be classed as poor, he said, if you couldn’t afford any kind of transport at all, and if you had to walk if you wanted to visit relations or go to the countryside. To be poor, you had to be unable to buy postage stamps to write letters; you had to be unable to buy any tobacco or alcohol whatever; you had no money to buy dolls or marbles or sweets for your children, and no money to buy any clothes except the barest essentials. To be classed as poor, you had to be unable to afford to miss a single day’s work. Those were the urban poor when Churchill began his political career—living in filth and destitution that would be unimaginable today. They made up fully 25 per cent of the population.

When Churchill made that remark about their lives, he was actually reflecting his own shock at the immensity of the gulf between their lives and his, and trying—as far as he could—to put himself in their broken shoes.

He had all sorts of reasons for caring about them, and wanting to help. Some of those reasons were selfish, some of them less obviously so. The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest; and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.

He wanted to do something about the condition of the poor because, as I say, he believed in Britain and in the empire. He had seen
how German systems of
paritatisch
—cooperation between bosses and workers—were delivering results, and like all members of the British ruling class he could see Germany’s growing industrial strength. He could see that the British economy would need a workforce that was fit and healthy and motivated, if the country as a whole was to compete.

He had fought in the Boer War, and he knew that in 1899 the army’s recruiting officers had been stunned to find that 50 per cent of working-class volunteers had been simply unfit—through childhood disease or malnourishment—to be soldiers. Churchill wanted an army physically able to run an empire.

What is more, he wanted to improve the condition of the poor as a political precaution, because he could see that if poor people continued to be so humiliated, they would refuse to take it any longer. The early years of the twentieth century were a period of alarming political instability. There were great numbers of strikes, many of them violent, and with running battles between working men and the police.

Lenin said that in 1910–14 the spirit of revolution stalked England. Lenin was right; and Churchill was the very opposite of a revolutionary. He knew how precarious was the position of the minority to which he belonged. ‘
It was the world of the few,’ he said of the society he grew up in, ‘and they were very few.’ Or, as he might have put it, never in the field of social conflict was so much owed to so many by so few.

He was radical precisely because he was conservative. He knew what all sensible Tories know—that the only way to keep things the same is to make sure you change them; or as Burke puts it, a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. He grasped that. He saw that the only way to be successfully and effectively reactionary was to be more than a little bit liberal. As
Charles Masterman said: ‘
he desired in Britain a state of affairs where a benign upper class dispensed benefits to a bien pensant and grateful working class’. Which, by the way, is still the unspoken position of quite a few good-hearted metropolitan liberals today.

And then there is the final reason why Churchill championed social reform. He didn’t just do it because it was in the interests of the economy and the army and the empire and, of course, in the interests of the poor themselves. He did it because it was in the interests of Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill. From the very beginning of his political career we find him ‘triangulating’—developing a centrist position that enables him to call on the broadest possible support. In 1902 he wrote that the answer to the country’s political problems was a
great central party, ‘free at once from the sordid selfishness and callousness of Toryism on the one hand, and the blind appetites of the radical masses on the other’. On another occasion he said the key thing was to be ‘
Conservative in principle but Liberal in sympathy’.

This is partly how he felt about the world, and partly positioning. He saw how he could himself incarnate this coalition, how he could be the giant straddler, the colossus with one foot on either side of the entrance to the harbour. He dreamed of that role from the beginning. The Second World War gave him his cue.

It is unfair on Churchill to say he swung around with the wind. If anything, he showed more consistency than the Tory Party itself. When he wrote to Hugh Cecil in his famous and unsent letter of 1904, saying that he hated the Tory Party, their men and their methods, it was largely because they were abandoning the cause of free trade—which was then seen as essential for providing cheap food for the urban poor. The Tories were ditching his father Randolph’s concept of ‘Tory Democracy’, which, if it meant anything, meant
stitching together a coalition between the moneyed classes and the working people.

He was a free trader more or less without deviation (apart from a wobble in 1931, and some insignificant protectionist flourishes such as a duty on imported American films), and only returned to the Tory Party once the Tories had themselves returned to free trade. He was not just a free trader; he was a capitalist. As he said in 1924, ‘
the existing capitalist system is the foundation of civilisation and the only means by which a great modern population can be supplied with vital necessities’. He spoke out repeatedly against the pointless persecution of the rich. But he believed in capitalism with a human face, or compassionate conservatism.

At the very beginning of his career he emerges as a man determined to palliate the suffering that free markets and capitalism can cause. Yes, he was a tough antagonist of rioters and strikers, but he was also a noted conciliator, using his charm and grasp of detail to get a deal.

By the 1950s that suppleness had become perhaps less desirable. The country was richer than it had been when Churchill began in politics; the gap between rich and poor had been greatly reduced. It has been argued that Churchill’s second premiership was too relaxed about union dominance, and therefore helped create the sclerosis of the 1960s and 1970s.

But if we think back to the state of the country in the years before the First World War, we can see that his instincts were right for the time. Look at the shambles in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s: a murderous communist revolution in Russia, and other communist uprisings in eastern Europe, and then a great rash of fascist dictators across the continent.

There was hardly a country that did not suffer some major
upheaval or constitutional abomination. Italy had Mussolini, Portugal had Salazar, Poland had Piłsudski, Austria had Dollfuss, Croatia had some Ustasha creep or other, Germany had Hitler—and Britain had good old avuncular Stanley Baldwin, with his air of a small-town bank manager.

All sorts of factors prevented Britain from suffering the fate of its continental counterparts. The country had not been invaded for almost a millennium. Its institutions had deeper roots. Parliamentary democracy was longer established. The English invented cricket, and so on. But surely in the mix we must add the wisdom and foresight of the young Winston Churchill and his friend Lloyd George; in seeing that it was time to allay discontent; to abate the anger of the dispossessed; to help stave off revolt by providing the first state-financed response to the manifest social injustice that he saw.