Never Give In! (10 page)

‘A VIOLENT RUPTURE OF CONSTITUTIONAL CUSTOM’

4 September 1909

Palace Theatre, Leicester

A constitutional crisis was looming in consequence of the threat of the House of Lords, which at the time represented the landed aristocracy, to reject the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George’s, ‘People’s Budget’. The Chancellor sought an extra £4 million to enable him to introduce retirement pensions for the elderly and to build seven new Dreadnoughts
(
battleships
)
for the Royal Navy. He proposed doing this by increasing taxation on the wealthier sections of society, especially the property owners. Churchill’s defiant threat to the House of Lords earned him an amazing rebuke from the King, in the form of an unprecedented letter to
The Times
from the King’s Private Secretary.

A general election consequent upon the rejection of the Budget by the Lords would not, ought not, and could not be fought upon the Budget alone. – (
Cheers.
) Budgets come, as the late Lord Salisbury said in 1894, and Budgets go. Every Government has its own expenditure for each year. Every Government has hitherto been entitled to make its own provision to meet that expenditure. There is a Budget every year. Memorable as the Budget of my right hon. friend may be, far-reaching as is the policy dependent upon it, the Finance Bill, after all, is only in its character an annual affair. But the rejection of the Budget by the House of Lords would not be an annual affair. – (
Loud and prolonged cheering.
) It will be a violent rupture of constitutional custom and usage extending over 300 years, and recognised during all that time by the leaders of every party in the State. It would involve a sharp and sensible breach with the traditions of the past. And what does the House of Lords depend upon if not upon the traditions of the past? – (
Cheers.
) It would amount to an attempt at revolution, not by the poor but by the rich, not by the masses but by the privileged few, not in the name of progress but in that of reaction, not for the purpose of broadening the framework of the State, but greatly narrowing it. Such an attempt, whatever you may think of it, would be historic in its character, and the results of the battle fought upon it, whoever won, must inevitably be not of an annual but of a permanent and final character – (
Cheers.
) The result of such an election must mean an alteration of the veto of the House of Lords. – (
More cheers.
) If they win – (
Voices: ‘They won’t’ and ‘Never’) –
they will have asserted their right not merely to reject the legislation of the House of Commons but to control the finances of the country. And if they lose we will smash to pieces their veto. – (
Loud and prolonged cheers.
)

I say to you that we do not seek the struggle. We have our work to do. But if it is to come it could never come better than now. – (
Loud cheers.
) Never again, perhaps not for many years in any case, will such an opportunity be presented to the British democracy. Never will the ground be more favourable. Never will the issues be more clearly or more vividly defined. – (
Cheers.
) Those issues will be whether taxation, which is admitted on all sides to be necessary, shall be imposed upon luxuries, superfluities, and monopolies, or upon the prime necessaries of life, whether you shall put your tax upon the unearned increment in land or upon the daily bread of labour, whether the policy of constructive social reform on which we are embarked and which expands and deepens as we advance, shall be carried through and given a fair chance, or whether it shall be brought to a dead stop, and all the energies and attention of the State devoted to Jingo armaments and senseless foreign adventure. And lastly, the issue will be whether the British people in the year of grace 1909 are going to be ruled through a representative Assembly elected by six or seven millions of voters and about which everyone in the country has a chance of being consulted, or whether they are going to allow themselves to be dictated to and domineered over by a miserable minority of titled persons – (
laughter
),
–
who represent nobody, who are responsible to nobody, and who only scurry up to London to vote in their party interests, in their class interests, and in their own interests. These will be the issues of the struggle, and I am glad that the responsibility for such a struggle, if it should come, will rest with the House of Lords themselves. – (
Hear, hear.
) But if it is to come we do not need to complain. We will not draw back from it. – (
Hear, hear.
) We will engage in it with all our hearts, it being always clearly understood that the fight will be a fight to the finish – (
loud cheers
),
–
and that the fullest forfeits which are in accordance with the national interests shall be exacted from the defeated foe. – (
Loud cheers.
)

‘THE MOST ANCIENT AND THE MOST GLORIOUS MONARCHY’

4 December 1909

Empire House, Southport, Lancashire

Churchill – the subject of fierce criticism from the Tories, who regarded him not only as a renegade, but a traitor to his class – was at pains to make clear his strong support for the institution of an hereditary monarchy, while all the while heaping scorn and ridicule upon the Upper Chamber of Parliament, which was based on the same principle.

There is no difficulty in vindicating the principle of an hereditary Monarchy, The experience of every country, and of all the ages, the practical reasonings of common sense, arguments of the highest theory, arguments of the most commonplace experience, all unite to show the profound wisdom which places the supreme leadership of the State beyond the reach of private ambition and above the shocks and changes of party strife. (
Hear, hear.
) And, further, let it not be forgotten that we live under a limited and Constitutional Monarchy. The Sovereign reigns, but does not govern. That is a maxim we were all taught out of our schoolbooks. The powers of government are exercised upon the advice of Ministers responsible to Parliament, and those Ministers are capable of being displaced, and are frequently displaced, by a House of Commons freely elected by millions of voters. The British Monarchy has no interests divergent from those of the British people. (
Cheers.
) It enshrines only those ideas and causes upon which the whole British people are united. It is based upon the abiding and prevailing interests of the nation, and thus through all the swift changes of the last hundred years, through all the wide developments of a democratic State, the English Monarchy has become the most secure, as it is the most ancient and the most glorious, Monarchy in the whole of Christendom. (
Cheers.
)

‘THE UPKEEP OF THE ARISTOCRACY’

17 December 1909

Victoria Opera House, Burnley, Lancashire

The previous day Lord Curzon, speaking in Churchill’s former constituency of Oldham, had stoutly defended the hereditary principle of the role of the unelected House of Lords. This was Churchill’s mocking rejoinder.

When I began my campaign in Lancashire I challenged any Conservative speaker to come down and say why the House of Lords, composed as the present House of Lords is, should have the right to rule over us, and why the children of that House of Lords should have the right to rule over our children. – (
Cheers.
) My challenge has been taken up with great courage – (
laughter
)
–
by Lord Curzon. – (
Groans.
) No, the House of Lords could not have found any more able and, I will add, any more arrogant defender, and at Oldham on Wednesday – you have heard of Oldham – (
laughter
),
–
so have I. – (
Laughter.
) Well, at Oldham Lord Curzon treated a great public meeting to what I can only call a prize essay on the Middle Ages. . . .

The claim of the House of Lords is not that if the electors like the sons of distinguished men they may have legislative functions entrusted to them; it is that, whether they like it or not, the sons and the grandsons and the great-grandsons, and so on till the end of time, of distinguished men shall have legislative functions entrusted to them. That claim resolves itself into this, that we should maintain in our country a superior class, with law-giving functions inherent in their blood, transmissible by them to their remotest posterity, and that these functions should be exercised irrespective of the character, the intelligence, or the experience of the tenant for the time being – (
laughter
),
–
and utterly independent of the public need and the public will. That is a proposition which only needs to be stated before any average British jury to be rejected with instantaneous contempt. – (
Cheers.
) Why has it never been rejected before? In my opinion it has never been rejected because the House of Lords has never before been taken seriously by the democratic electorate, which has been in existence since 1885. They have never been taken seriously because they were believed to be in a comatose and declining condition, upon which death would gradually supervene-Now we see the House of Lords stepping into the front rank of politics; not merely using their veto over any legislation sent up by any majority, however large, from any House of Commons, however newly elected, but also claiming new powers over the whole of the finances – powers which would make them the main governing centre in the State. (
Cheers.
) That is why we are forced to examine their pretensions very closely; and when we have examined them, I venture to think there will not be much left of them. . . .

Now I come to the third great argument of Lord Curzon. ‘All civilisation,’ he said – he was quoting a great French writer, an Agnostic, Renan – ‘all civilisation has been the work of aristocracies.’ – (
Laughter.
) They liked that in Oldham. – (
Laughter.
) There was not a duke, not an earl, not a marquis, not a viscount in Oldham who did not feel that a compliment had been paid to him. – (
Loud laughter.
) What does Lord Curzon mean by aristocracy? It is quite clear from the argument of his speech that he did not mean Nature’s aristocracy, by which I mean the best and most gifted beings in each generation in each country, the wisest, the bravest, the most generous, the most skilful, the most beautiful, the strongest, and the most active. If he had meant that I think we should probably agree with him. Democracy properly understood means the association of all through the leadership of the best, but the context of Lord Curzon’s quotation and the argument of his speech, which was designed entirely to prove that the House of Lords was a very desirable institution for us to maintain in its present form, clearly shows that by aristocracy he meant the hereditary legislator, the barons, earls, dukes, etc. – I do not mean anything disrespectful by the etc. – (
laughter
),
–
and their equivalents in other countries. That is what he meant by aristocracy in the argument he employed at Oldham. Well, again I say this has only to be dismissed as absurd. – (
Cheers.
)

‘All civilisation has been the work of aristocracies.’ Why, it would be much more true to say the upkeep of the aristocracy has been the hard work of all civilisations. – (
Loud cheers and
‘
Say it again.
’) Nearly all great ideas and the energy by which all the great services by which mankind has been benefited have come from the mass of the people.

‘FOR SOLDIERS TO FIRE ON THE PEOPLE WOULD BE A CATASTROPHE’

7 February 1911

House of Commons

By now Churchill was Home Secretary and the outbreak of violence and destruction of property in the mining valleys of South Wales, as a result of the miners
’
strike, led to his being criticised by the Conservatives for not deploying troops sufficiently quickly, and by the Socialists for using excessive force. Arthur Balfour, Leader of the Opposition, led the Conservative attack on the Home Secretary’s handling of the crisis.

I was yesterday the subject of attack from no less a person than the Leader of the Opposition, and he has attacked me, not for the excessive amount of force employed, but for not employing sufficient force – for not sending military instead of police – for not sending military soon enough, and the right hon. Gentleman devoted so much time in the important speech which he delivered at the beginning of this Session to this subject that I am really surprised that in the course of this Debate, though I waited to give full opportunity for it, no Member of the Opposition has risen to support the charges which were made against the Government and the Secretary of State for Home Affairs. Let me just read to the House what the right hon. Gentleman says. He said;