Gateway Chronicle 2021

49
Hidden Voices
Should Britain be Ashamed of
Winston Churchill?
Everyone knows who Winston Churchill is. Everyone
knows that his charismatic, pragmatic, and courageous
leadership throughout the Second World
War ensured final victory for the allies. Many such
as our current Prime Minister believe that without
him the War would have been lost. It is with good
reason that we remember Churchill as a hero, he
was an outstanding Military and Political leader
in World War Two. His actions from bombarding
the French Fleet on the 3 rd July 1940, to his rhetoric
to keep Britain going in the Summer of 1940,
to ramping up manufacturing capacity of planes,
to his persistence with Roosevelt that led America
to join the War effort. Churchill was even willing
to put aside his hatred of Communism to ally with
Stalin in May 1942 and went on national TV and
said that “the Russian danger is our danger.” For all
this Britain should rightly be proud of Churchill,
he stood up and defeated possibly the greatest ever
danger to the modern British values. The government’s
prevent strategy describes these modern
British values as democracy, respect and tolerance,
individual liberty, and the rule of law. There is no
doubt that Churchill defeated someone who went
against those modern British values. However, there
is also no doubt that Churchill himself failed to live
up those modern British values.
The first of Churchill’s views that undermine these
modern British values was one that he advocated in
his early Political career when he was Home Secretary.
From January 1899 a letter sent by Churchill
to his cousin shows that he was an advocate of
eugenics. This is shown by the fact that he stated
that “the improvement of the British breed is my
aim in life.” Churchill in one of his first speeches
to Parliament as Home Secretary in 1911 talked of
the need for Labour Camps for the “feeble minded.”
Not only did he want segregation for the feeble
minded, but he wished for their sterilisation to not
risk passing this onto to any future generation. He
also began as Home Secretary the early drafting of
the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. This supported the
transportation of those deemed to be idiots or imbecilic.
This led to 65,000 people being transferred
to Colonies. Churchill, however, did not feel the
eventual bill went far enough as it did not include
compulsory sterilisation. However, the fact that the
bill did go through with only 3 votes against it and
the fact that the Conservatives and Liberals set up
a Commission in 1904 to investigate would suggest
this view was commonly held at the time. Therefore,
for Churchill to support Eugenics may be just something
that can be put down to a commonly held
view of the time. This view in support of Eugenics
does however undermine those modern British values
of tolerance and individual liberty.
The view however that most undermines those
modern British values of tolerance and respect is
Churchill’s views on race. Thabo Mbeki who was
President of South Africa from 1999-2008 picked
up on this as he described Churchill’s views as racist
and patronising. This is accurate as Churchill’s
doctor Lord Moran at one point commented that
“Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin.”
Furthermore, he referred to Indians as “a beastly
people with a beastly religion,” and of the Chinese
said, “I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails.”
Churchill also supported the 1955 Conservative
slogan to “Keep England White,” as a response to
migration. Defenders of Churchill often argue that
these quotes have simply been taken out of their
original context, however historian Rahul Rao
repudiates this argument by accurately pointing
out that in no context would these views be acceptable.
Moreover, he points out the fact Churchill
was a fantastic orator and a Nobel Prize winner for
Literature in 1953. Therefore, the suggestion that
Churchill could misspeak or not know what he was
saying does not stand particularly strong. Unlike
his views on eugenics this is not something that can
be put down to Churchill just being a man of his
time either. Even right-wing cabinet members such
as Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India were
concerned. Amery even stated that “he could not see
much difference between Churchill’s outlook and
Hitler’s.” Therefore, the fact that even some of his
own Conservative colleagues were worried about
Churchill’s outlook on race would suggest this was
not a commonly held view of the time. This would
suggest that Churchill undermined the current British
value of respect and tolerance with his views
and even undermined what was at the time considered
to be respectful and tolerant.
Moreover, Churchill’s views on Indians led to the
deaths of 2.1 million Indians in 1943 due to the