Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (18 page)

Churchill seemed to aspire to recreate the ‘Fourth Party’, the group of parliamentary guerrillas that had formed a springboard for his father’s career. He banded together with a few other like-minded young Tories, including Lord Hugh Cecil, a son of Lord Salisbury; the group became known as the Hooligans or ‘Hughligans’. Churchill explicitly took up Lord Randolph’s mantle – the cause of economy – in his first big act of rebellion, his attack on the army reform scheme introduced by the Secretary of State for War, St John Brodrick. Brodrick wanted to expand the army to comprise six corps. Three of these would form a potential expeditionary force (presaging a greater commitment to involvement in European warfare) and three were to be kept for home defence.
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Churchill was pledged to reform of the army but not to its growth, and in May 1901 he attacked Brodrick in the Commons, quoting Lord Randolph’s 1886 resignation letter which warned of the dangers of excess military spending. One army corps, the younger Churchill argued, was ‘quite enough to fight savages’ whereas three were not enough ‘even to begin to fight Europeans’. In case of war in Europe, he put his faith in the navy’s capacity to defend Britain until such time as land forces could be made ready; the Admiralty was the only department ‘strong enough to insure the British Empire’.
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Clearly riled, Brodrick hit back, offering up the hope that Churchill would in time ‘look back with regret to the day when he came down to the House to preach Imperialism, without being willing to bear the burdens of Imperialism, and when the hereditary qualities he possesses of eloquence and courage may be tempered also by discarding the hereditary desire to run Imperialism on the cheap’.
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Churchill was by no means the only Conservative to oppose Brodrick. Leo Amery, with whom Churchill was in touch over the question, was another notable critic, and in 1903 he published influential
Times
articles which were broadly in line with Churchill’s arguments.
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Such criticism contributed to the overall failure of Brodrick’s plans. But although Churchill was not a lone voice amongst Tories, his calls for retrenchment brought him closer to mainstream Liberal opinion. At the same time they raised suspicions on his own side that, having used ‘his graphic pen to excite a spirit of militarism’, he was making a U-turn in order to ride the changing tide of public opinion. His opportunism, it was thought, made him a true son of his father.
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By 1902 he had ceased to regard the Conservative Party as his long-term political home. He briefly put his hopes in the Liberal Imperialist Lord Rosebery, who had been a failure as Prime Minister in 1894–5, but who continued to hold an almost mystical sway over his supporters. When Rosebery appeared to hold out the prospect that he might emerge from retirement, Churchill commented that the ‘muddy waters of the Opposition’ were getting clearer, and ‘The slime, the sewage, and other Radical impurities are sinking slowly to the bottom, the clearer waters of Liberalism [are] rising steadily to the top’.
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He tried to persuade Rosebery that he should head ‘a central coalition’, together with Sir Michael Hicks Beach, the former Tory Chancellor. He noted: ‘The one real difficulty I have to encounter is the suspicion that I am moved by mere restless ambition: & if some definite issue – such as Tariff – were to arise – that difficulty would disappear.’
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Rosebery was to prove as elusive as ever and did not commit himself. However, Churchill’s desire that trade policy should emerge as an issue was to be fulfilled, and it was to provide him with his opportunity, even if not in exactly the form that he had sought. The idea of a centre party was to prove a mirage, but the grand upheavals of the next few years enabled him to find a new home with the Liberals.

It was the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, who was to shake the political kaleidoscope. In 1902 Arthur Balfour had succeeded Salisbury as Conservative Prime Minister. At sixty-six, Chamberlain must have known that he himself was unlikely ever to lead a government, not least because he was not universally trusted within the Tory Party, of which, as a Liberal Unionist, he was an ally rather than a member. Nevertheless, he was determined to leave his mark on the Empire. In May 1903 he gave a speech in Birmingham, his great power base, in which he argued for a system of imperial tariff preference; that is to say Empire countries would treat each other’s products more favourably than they did foreign goods. In his view, this was an essential means to consolidate the Empire ‘which can only be maintained by relations of interest as well as sentiment’, and which should, indeed, be ‘self-sustaining and self-sufficient, able to maintain itself against the competition of all its rivals’.
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The speech blew apart the broad free-trade consensus that had dominated British politics for decades. Tariff reform raised the unpopular prospect of tariffs on staple imports, which the Liberals quickly labelled ‘food taxes’. The controversy was bitter. As Chamberlain’s comments show, the argument was not just about economics. It was a debate about international power, and about the fundamental nature, even the very soul, of the British Empire.

Churchill’s immediate response to Chamberlain’s démarche was sceptical. The Unionists should follow a policy of imperialism, he declared, ‘but not one of one-sided Imperialism’.
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However, his support for free trade was not of the knee-jerk variety. A year earlier, he had written privately that although his instinct was against an imperial customs union, he wanted to see the arguments for it ‘set out in black and white; for after all it is primarily a matter of profit and loss’. It might, he thought, be in Britain’s interests to give Empire countries tariff concessions ‘in return for some substantial accession of military strength – such as is undoubtedly in their power to confer’.
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He seems to have had his free-trade instincts confirmed by a book by Leo Chiozza Money, a radical journalist and future Liberal MP, in which it was argued that Britain could not afford to give preference to colonial goods, as her colonies simply could not produce enough food and raw materials to supply her in sufficient quantities.
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It took some months for his views to harden fully, but in November 1903, two months after Chamberlain had resigned from the Cabinet to pursue his campaign in the country, Churchill pulled out the stops in a speech made on Chamberlain’s home turf. The view of Empire he laid out was in clear contrast to the materialism of the tariff reformers. Drawing on his own experience, he ridiculed the idea that the loyalty of the Canadians and the Australians, who had given vital help during the Boer War, would melt away for ever unless it were purchased by a trifling preference on their exports.

I have seen enough in peace and war of the frontiers of our Empire to know that the British dominion all over the world could not endure for a year, perhaps not for a month, if it was founded upon a material basis. The strength and splendour of our authority is derived not from physical forces, but from moral ascendancy, liberty, justice, English tolerance, and English honesty.
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He developed this theme further in the years that followed. In a key speech at the 1907 Colonial Conference, he expanded on his view that the Empire was a family and not a syndicate. There was no anti-colonial party in Britain, he noted, but forcing the House of Commons to consider each year, through its regulation of preferential tariffs, the narrow ‘profit-and-loss account’ of Britain’s relations with her dependencies and Dominions, would be guaranteed to create one. Furthermore, any meaningful system of preference would involve taxing food imports. (This was because the Empire countries mainly produced food and raw materials, and so Britain could not give their exports
preferential
treatment unless she put tariffs on non-Empire goods of the same class.) And the ‘imposition of duties upon the necessaries of life and of industry’ would cause popular resentment, breeding amongst the poor ‘a deep feeling of sullen hatred of the Colonies, and of Colonial affairs’. It followed that preferential tariffs ‘
even if economically desirable
, would prove an element of strain and discord in the structure and system of the British Empire’ (emphasis added).
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They would, as he later put it, make the Empire odious to the British working people.
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These arguments point forcefully to the lesson that the electorate, when it rejected imperial preference in the Liberal landslide of 1906, was not, as is sometimes asserted, showing its indifference to the Empire as a whole. Rather, it was rejecting one particular concept of it. Likewise, when critics such as Amery (an ardent Chamberlainite) later bemoaned Churchill’s supposed Little Englandism, they were in fact denying the legitimacy of his actual imperial vision. It is worth noting, though, that Churchill seemed to think that the non-material ties of affection that in his view bound the Empire together could be damaged remarkably easily by material concerns such as higher food prices.

II

Churchill was far from the sole ‘Imperialist Free Trader’ in the Conservative Party, but the opponents of Chamberlain were increasingly beleaguered.
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Churchill himself ran into trouble with his constituency party. In November 1903 he was refused a hearing at one of the Oldham Conservative Clubs, a hard comedown for one who had so recently been ‘the demi-god of the local Tories’.
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The following January, the Oldham Conservative Association passed a resolution declaring its lack of confidence in him. By this time, with no sign that a centre party would emerge, he had already decided to join the reunited and invigorated Liberals. On 31 May 1904 he formally crossed the floor of the House of Commons, having already been chosen as Liberal candidate for North-West Manchester at the next election. The process of adaptation was assisted by the fact that his new colleagues had put their differences over the Boer War behind them, but it was not without its challenges. Although the Liberal Party as a whole was by no means anti-imperialist, there were Radicals within its ranks who were sceptical about British expansion and who were often critical of the way that the Empire was run in practice. As a junior minister in the Colonial Office, responsible for defending its activities in the House of Commons, Churchill would have to take some account of the humanitarian (some would have said sentimental) preoccupations of Liberal backbenchers. One cannot say, however, that his imperial discourse underwent any dramatic shift as a result of his switch of parties. This was because he already belonged to a centre-ground consensus about the Empire in British politics, of which prominent Liberals such as Sir Edward Grey and H. H. Asquith were a part, and from which it could plausibly be claimed that the Tories, under Chamberlain’s inspiration, were moving away.

So Churchill’s alliance with the Liberals, although undeniably helpful to his career, was no mere marriage of convenience. Aside from the crucial issue of trade, there was a growing congruence between his ideas and those of so-called New Liberals sympathetic to greater state involvement in social welfare. His interest in social reform was longstanding, and had been stimulated in part by imperial concerns. In
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
he had decried the state’s failure to take adequate care of discharged wounded soldiers.
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In 1901 he was shocked by the revelations in Seebohm Rowntree’s famous study of poverty in York. In an unpublished review of the book he wrote, with no small tinge of irony:

Let it be granted that nations exist and peoples labour to produce armies with which they conquer other nations, and the nation best qualified to do this is of course the most highly civilised and the most deserving of honour. But supposing the common people shall be so stunted and deformed in body as to be unfit to fill the ranks the army corps may lack. And thus – strange as it may seem, eccentric almost incredible to write – our Imperial reputation is actually involved in their condition.
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He wrote privately at this time that he could ‘see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers’.
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The Conservative Party was not innately hostile to social reform, but it had failed to deliver much of substance.
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Churchill did not have a clear set of plans – as late as the election of 1906 he argued for voluntary as opposed to state action to help the poor – but then neither, at this stage, did the Liberal Party.
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To ask if he was motivated by compassion, or by concern for the health of the Empire, is to miss the point. He was motivated by both these things; in his mind there was no tension between targeting help at the less well off for altruistic reasons and using social reform to increase ‘National Efficiency’, as the current slogan had it. From Churchill’s perspective, a strong Empire would itself benefit the working class, and a healthy working class would strengthen the Empire.

The Tory government staggered on, racked by its divisions over trade, until Balfour at last resigned in December 1905. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was called upon to form a new Liberal administration. Churchill did not get a Cabinet post, but was offered a junior ministerial role as Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Rather than accept this, he held out successfully for a job at the Colonial Office. As this was considered a less senior position, it seems clear that he was seriously committed to tackling imperial issues at this time. He may also have hoped that with the new Colonial Secretary, the Earl of Elgin, sitting in the House of Lords, his own position in the Commons would allow him the kind of dominance on colonial questions previously achieved by Chamberlain; but if so it was wishful thinking.
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The congratulations rolled in, including from J. E. C. Welldon, his old headmaster, but not everyone was pleased.
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W. L. Mackenzie King (now the top official in the Canadian Ministry of Labour) wrote in his diary that it was ‘a bad & dangerous appointment from [the] imperial point of view’.
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Of more immediate significance was the reaction in South Africa, where the view of the Cape Colony press was that Churchill had only a scanty knowledge of the opinions, aspirations and difficulties of the colonies.
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