journal of the churchill center and societies - Winston Churchill

Succeed Admirably,
Fail Anyway
Richard M. Langwortn
Churchill: His Radical
Decade, by
Malcolm Hill.
London: Othila
Press 1999. 144
pp., large format,
illustrated.
Published at $35,
member price $30
In 1854 in the United States, President
Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill to
finance a federal hospital for the mentally
ill because "I find nothing in the
Constitution to authorize this." In
1896, President Grover Cleveland opposed
a bill for federal flood relief on
the same grounds. Ten years later in
Britain, when the Liberal Party swept
into power in a landslide election, the
ground shifted. The Liberal Government
of 1906 held it a State responsibility
to create what Churchill called "a
Minimum Standard," below which no
citizen should be allowed to fall. Not
until the Franklin Roosevelt's New
Deal did similar ideas arrive in America.
Churchill's Liberals created a rudimentary
welfare state twenty years before
FDR, and might have extended it
had World War I not intervened.
Little has been published on
Churchill's decade as radical-Liberal
(roughly the first decade of the 20th
century) when he became disenchanted
with the Conservative Party, crossed
the floor to the Liberals and, encouraged
by Lloyd George, railed against
the privileges of his class. Criss-crossing
the country in what Alistair Cooke
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compared to "a gigantic vaudeville act,"
Churchill and Lloyd George championed
old age pensions, prison reform,
unemployment insurance, public
health care, and reform (if not elimination)
of the House of Lords. Malcolm
Hill, whose book addresses this obscure
period, believes Churchill's quest was
"hopeless" because he did not believe
the state should "take responsibility by
taxation for retirement, education,
health and welfare"; but that Churchill
showed "unusual stature" in his efforts
to mitigate poverty, far in advance of
better known reformers like Franklin
Roosevelt.
Hill argues that Churchill was as
great a statesman in peace as well as
war, and that his first decade in Parliament
was his finest in peacetime. Nevertheless,
Hill continues, the premature
death in 1908 of the first Liberal Prime
Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman,
irrevocably altered the course of
Churchill's party. From basic reforms
to eliminate poverty, the Liberals
moved to mitigate poverty's effects:
treating the symptoms rather than the
disease. Campbell-Bannerman's successor,
Herbert Asquith, "had no creative
political imagination" and allowed
David Lloyd George, "a dazzling performer,"
to formulate domestic policy,
with Churchill as his "admiring lieutenant."
Together they devised "popular
schemes for national insurance
against unemployment and sickness,
labour exchanges, schemes against
'sweated labour' and the like, without
thought of the reason why the great
majority of society found themselves in
such a condition of poverty." Hill
claims this set back the course of true
reform for a century to come. Really
Hill considers Churchill's radical
years in twelve chapters ranging from
his entry into Parliament through the
Parliament Bill debate of 1911, and in
a final chapter, "The Passing of Radi-
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calism" ("The End of Radicalism" as
the chapter heads read in a rather
loosely edited book). By 1912, Hill
concludes, "the issues were slipping
from political life. Churchill's love of
the bright lights and ambition allowed
the question to fade in his political
thinking....The First World War finally
buried liberal thinking." The promises
of free trade and taxation reform,
which Hill thinks would have helped
to eliminate poverty at its root, were
lost with the Great War. "Political
thought has not recovered its pre-war
scale. The people have become more
heavily oppressed and government has
become increasingly powerful, but impotent."
The question Churchill asked
still remains: "...what is the general
cause in society of poverty among ablebodied
persons That alone contains as
large a question in peacetime as survival
does in war. Why should such a
noble creature as man live under injustice
when not at war"
The author, a biographer of
Anne-Robert Turgot and Henry
George, believes that their concept of
community land value taxation was the
key to eliminating poverty at its source.
Turgot and George saw that "communities
created land value as a natural
fund for taxation and that all manmade
things should be exempt from
taxation." During settlement of the
American West, wrote the American
George, all went well "as long as settlers
would work on free land. Earnings
rose to what a man or woman could
earn by themselves on their own land.
But once land was fully enclosed...new
arrivals had to seek work in competition
with each other from landlords.
Earnings fell to the least that a man
would accept and that depended on
the state of competition between those
seeking work. A pool of unemployed
FINEST HOUR JOS / 38