Authors: Winston Churchill
Never Give In! (22 page)
‘YOU HAVE UNSETTLED EVERYTHING – YOU HAVE SETTLED NOTHING’
5 June 1935
House of Commons
This fierce attack on the Conservative Administration (his own party) marks the end of Churchill’s long battle over India, described by Sir Samuel Hoare, who, as Secretary of State for India (1931–35), had responsibility for piloting the Indian Bill through the Commons, as ‘Churchill’s Seven Years’ War’. He was convinced that the settled ‘scuttle and run’ policy of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Parties would bring only tragedy and bloodshed to the teeming millions of the Indian sub-continent, sharply divided as they were between Hindu and Muslim.
You have unsettled everything. You have settled nothing. Those whom you have sought to conciliate are those whom you have most offended. Those to whom your mission is most necessary are those whom you have most entirely abandoned. Those on whom you have to count most are those whom you are teaching least of all to count on you.
You must ask one final question – the greatest of all these questions. Does this Bill mean a broadening of Indian life, a widening and elevation of Indian thought? Does it mean that the Indian toiler when he rises to his daily task will have a better chance of, in the words of the American Constitution, ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’? India is a country, almost a continent, which responded to the influence of British peace, order and justice and all the applications of modern science, only by an increase of population. There has been a tremendous increase of population there. New wealth, new food, new facilities for locomotion, new hygiene, new canals, improvement in forestry and agriculture have not made the Indian masses better off. They have only brought into being in the last 50 years 100,000,000 more souls in India. A gigantic population has remained, upon the whole, at a very low level of human subsistence, but has become much more numerous.
Such a vast helpless mass requires extra British guidance, higher efficiency of government, more British civil servants and a stricter and more vigorous administration in all technical matters. All you offer them are liberal formulas, administrative relaxation and decline. The huge machine of Indian government is to be allowed to slow down, just at the time when the inhabitants of India have multiplied far beyond the limit of their basic food supply, just at the time when they require, above all things, a far higher measure of disinterested and enlightened autocracy. Just at that very time you offer this bouquet of faded flowers of Victorian Liberalism which, however admirable in themselves, have nothing to do with Asia and are being universally derided and discarded throughout the continent of Europe.
Mr Isaac Foot:
So much the worse for Europe.
Mr Churchill:
For this bouquet they have to pay a heavy price. Money raised by taxes in India which, like the salt tax, draw exactions from the poorest of the poor, from people whose poverty is inconceivable even to the poorest of the poor in this country – this money is needed and its extraction is only justified if it is used for hospitals, for plague prevention, for technical education, for improved irrigation and other modern apparatus. Only in this way can a population which is one-sixth of the human race be kept at its present artificial level of numbers. In the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation, and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people who have come into the world at your invocation and under the shield and protection of the British power. . . .
You have decided and you have the power. You have shown you have the power to force this through, and no doubt you have the power to force it upon the people of India. But it now appears that even these political classes are not satisfied with the government which you are going to give to them, with the constitution which you offer, or with the sacrifice which the Indian masses are to be asked to give. By every organ through which they can express their views, they reject your government and they spit upon your ill-conceived generosity, if generosity it be. Even the very classes of wealthy, small, unrepresentative minorities for whom you have set out to cater, have rejected the dish which you proffer to them.
This, then, is your plan for the better Government of India. We thank God that we have neither part nor lot in it. You have done what you like. You have now a harder thing before you, and that is to like what you have done. Only the years can make their proof of whether you will be successful in that or not. What has astounded me is that the Government should have pressed forward so obstinately with this Indian policy, which causes so much distress to many important elements in the Conservative party, at a time when the domestic political situation is so uncertain, when the Continent of Europe is drifting steadily nearer to the brink of catastrophe, when we have before us for so many months to come that awful hiatus in our air strength and in the vital defences of Great Britain. I should have thought that common prudence alone would have led them to make some modification of their plans which are admittedly makeshift, which conform to no logic or symmetry, which are not fixed by any agreement or treaty with any elements in Indian public life. It has astonished me that that has not occurred to them. . . .
I think it is a shortsighted Act. I am sure it is a wrongful Act. It is, to use the words of my Noble Friend, a fraud upon power and a malversation of political trust.
10 July 1935
House of Commons
As a signatory of the Treaty which brought the Irish Free State
–
later the Republic of Ireland – into being Churchill deplored the weakness with which the British Government accepted repeated repudiations of key elements of the Treaty by the Irish Prime Minister, Eamon de Valera.
I am a Treaty man. I am one of the signatories to the Irish Treaty. We have the great advantage that we are a self-contained British Parliament, but there were terrible arguments on the other side. At any rate, we signed this Treaty and Irishmen died to make it good and to keep it as a great instrument guiding our future relations. No one can possibly impugn the conduct of Great Britain. But what has happened to the Treaty now? It has been broken and repudiated. My right hon. Friend and the Dominions Secretary unfolded to the House part of that dismal catalogue of repudiation which has marked the last four years – the oath of allegiance, the abolition of the Senate, the last remaining vestige of the action of the Crown and the Governor-General, the right of appeal to the Privy Council, and the new law which makes a British subject a foreigner in the Free State if a proclamation is made under the Act.
The whole of this great transition has speedily transformed the Ireland we settled with as a Dominion within the Empire but with the full rights of the Canadian Dominion into an alien republic. The whole of that great transition has taken place during these four years in which we have had our own troubles to worry about, and no one has concerned himself with it. But there it is. It is not complete. There are a few remaining steps to be taken but not many. They are going to be taken. The whole of this thing is going to happen. Let me point out that it has been perfectly legal. When you passed that Statute of Westminster and when the Chief Whip assembled for the first time his mighty legions returned at the General Election and rolled them through the Lobby over the 50 who stood out on that occasion, when that happened and a refusal was made by the Government to exempt the Irish Treaty from the operations of the Statute, when that happened you regularised every necessary step, every necessary step that has been taken and may be taken in the future, to destroy and sweep away every vestige of the Treaty made between the two countries.
I have no doubt that we shall hear from the hon. and learned Gentleman speaking from the benches of the Labour party that de Valera has acted only within his legal rights. He may have broken every kind of good faith between nation and nation, and every kind of agreement between man and man, and made it quite clear that the word of Ireland entered into by people who were his colleagues and with whom he worked in bygone days is not of consequence to him, and that he has been the injured party for all time and that the small nations and the good faith of small nations has been impugned. But that is not a matter that affects the issue. He is legally entitled, as I understand, according to highest authority, to take all the steps he has done, and when we were advised he would not be so legally advised, we were voted down when we did not accept that.
I do not hesitate to draw a moral, which the House will quite readily accept from me, that in this great Indian Constitution Bill there are a great many things on which you have been advised by legal authority and of which the House has accepted the opinion which, when you come to look at their working out in practice year after year, will be found equally fallacious and equally injurious to what has occurred in Ireland, and injurious upon a far more immense scale in the history of the world and in the wealth and strength of this country. We are bound to draw attention to the past because it is the guide, and the only guide we have, to the immediate future, and we are bound to say that Ministers who were giving all these airy assurances about Ireland have repeated them during the whole course of this vast Indian Constitution Bill.
24 July 1935
Harlow
We are approaching a General Election of the utmost consequence. If a wrong decision is taken it would certainly be disastrous and might be fatal. The election might result in a Socialist Government, and I cannot think of anything that would be more disastrous. In 1931 they reduced a wealthy, powerful Empire to the appearance of bankruptcy and ran away from their duty in the hour of need.
The Government have been aroused to take action with the air policy, and they also propose to build a larger Navy, I was present at the recent naval review and it was a fine sight, but it was an extraordinary experience to me, who, as First Lord, was at another naval review 20 years ago. Out of 17 ships, including two aircraft-carriers, 14 were ships for which I was responsible during the years in which I was in office. Both in the air and in the Navy we will have to make substantial preparations to put ourselves in a state of security.
8 October 1935
Chingford
On 3 October the Italian Armies of the Fascist Dictator, Benito Mussolini, invaded the ancient East African kingdom of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). The League of Nations branded Italy the aggressor and imposed economic sanctions, except in the one field where it might have been effective: oil.
Since I spoke in the City of London things have become more serious, but also more simple. The outlook is lamentable, but we can discern its features more plainly. We know where we are and what we are going to do, and we also know what we are not going to do.
We can see the limits of our immediate commitments and dangers. The overwhelming mass of the nation and all parties in it are broadly agreed in supporting the policy of his Majesty’s Government. The Ministers have explained it so clearly that no one can be in any doubt.
Let us see, then, what that policy is. First, we stand by all our obligations under the Covenant of the League of Nations. We will bear our part to the utmost of our ability in any measure which the Council of the League of Nations may prescribe against the declared aggressor in the present war.
The Government have, very rightly and very wisely, taken all the necessary precautions to put the British fleets and squadrons in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea in a condition of security during what may be a protracted period of tension. There is no reason to suppose that our historic control of the Mediterranean will be challenged. On the other hand, we have declared that we will not take single-handed action or go farther than the other countries are ready to go. I believe the great mass of the British people are profoundly agreed both upon our policy and its limitations.
No one can suggest that his Majesty’s Government have not fulfilled every obligation into which they have entered not only in the letter but also in the spirit. Indeed, we have gone beyond our strict obligations. We have taken the lead, and we are taking the lead, in urging the League of Nations to assert its authority in the most effective way; and we have, no doubt, incurred a great deal of odium in Italy in consequence.
Whether we ought to have taken the lead as we have done is a matter for argument. It is certainly the course with which the most generous elements in British public life will sympathise. But no one can accuse us of having failed in the slightest degree in our international duty. On the contrary, we have, as usual, been better than our word, and I hope our friends in France will weigh and ponder over that pregnant and far-reaching truth.
Having taken our course and made up our minds, there is nothing to do but to carry it out with composure and consistency. It is very difficult to see far ahead. War has begun between Italy and Abyssinia. Abyssinia has been invaded. Abyssinian tribesmen are being attacked by very large Italian armies equipped with all the most terrible weapons of modern science. They are being bombed from the air, bombarded by cannon, trampled down by tanks, and they are fighting as well as they can in their primitive way to defend their hearths and homes, their rights and freedom.