Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative
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Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique
French Journal of British Studies
XXVIII-1 | 2023
One Nation Conservatism from Disraeli to Johnson
Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative
Winston Churchill en tant que conservateur One Nation
Vernon Bogdanor
Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/10279
DOI: 10.4000/rfcb.10279
ISSN: 2429-4373
Publisher
CRECIB - Centre de recherche et d'études en civilisation britannique
Electronic reference
Vernon Bogdanor, “Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative”, Revue Française de Civilisation
Britannique [Online], XXVIII-1 | 2023, Online since 03 February 2023, connection on 01 March 2023.
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/10279 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.10279
This text was automatically generated on 1 March 2023.
Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 1
Winston Churchill as a One Nation
Conservative
Winston Churchill en tant que conservateur One Nation
Vernon Bogdanor
“‘This is a new reign’, said Egremont, ‘perhaps it is a new era […] say what you like,
our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed’.
‘Which nation?’ asked the younger stranger, ‘for she reigns over two’.
The stranger paused. Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly.
‘Yes’, resumed the stranger after a moment’s interval. ‘Two nations; between whom
there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s
habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or
inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by
a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the
same laws’.
‘You speak of –’, said Egremont hesitatingly.
‘THE RICH AND THE POOR’.
At this moment a sudden flush of rosy light, suffusing the grey ruins, indicated that
the sun had just fallen; and through a vacant arch that overlooked them, alone in
the resplendent sky, glittered the twilight star.”
1 (Disraeli, Sybil or the Two Nations, 1845)
*********************
2 Disraeli never actually used the phrase “One Nation”; nor did he speak of “One Nation
Conservatism”. The phrase was first used by a later Conservative Prime Minister,
Stanley Baldwin, in a speech at the Albert Hall on 4 December 1924 after leading his
party to a landslide electoral victory. “We stand”, Baldwin said, “for the union of those
two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago: union among our own people
to make one nation of our own people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters
in the world”. But the idea was Disraeli’s even if he did not use the phrase.
3
Churchill, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Baldwin government, did not
Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 2
use the phrase either, and, in retrospect at least, he had little time for Baldwin. As his
well known, the first volume of his war memoirs, The Gathering Storm, contains an
excoriating and in my view unfair criticism of Baldwin for failing to rearm Britain in
the face of the dictators. Rather than One Nation Conservatism, Churchill preferred the
slogan, bequeathed to him by his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, Chancellor of the
Exchequer in 1886, “Tory Democracy”. All the same, Churchill can certainly be
regarded as a One Nation Conservative.
4 But the paradox about Churchill’s career, however, is that the social reforms which
entitle him to be described as a one nation Conservative occurred when he was a
member of a Liberal government to which the Conservatives were opposed.
5 Admittedly, Churchill began his political life as a Conservative MP, for Oldham, in 1900
– but in 1904 he crossed the floor and became a Liberal. It was not until 1924 that he
returned to the Conservative party, though he always retained a soft spot for the
Liberals, and his wife, Clementine, remained a Liberal all her life. Anyone can rat but it
takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat, Churchill is supposed to have said on
reverting to the Conservatives.
6 Churchill’s switch to the Liberals came about while he was writing the life of his father.
Churchill had been bullied by his father but nevertheless worshipped him and indeed
modelled himself on him. The biography of Lord Randolph was published in two
volumes, of around 1,000 pages in 1906. It is a remarkable work for a man of 31 – and
remains of great scholarly value, being based on extensive quotations from his father’s
papers and interviews with his father’s political colleagues. But, in the course of
writing the biography, Churchill came to think that the Conservative government was
betraying his father’s legacy. His father had believed that Conservatives could only
prosper if they were a party of social reform. Instead, since Lord Randolph’s downfall,
they had become, in Churchill’s view, a reactionary party; and Conservative Prime
Ministers – Lord Salisbury and his nephew, Arthur Balfour – were leading the
Conservative Party in the wrong direction.
7 Churchill’s interest in social reform played a part in his decision in 1904 to cross the
floor and join the Liberals, though his main reason was to defend free trade which the
Conservatives were abandoning. But perhaps he had made a mistake in joining the
Conservatives in the first place. Lord Rosebery had written of Peel that he had been
“sworn to Toryism too young to know the meaning of the oath”. 1 Perhaps that was also
true of Churchill.
8 When the Liberals came to power in 1905, Churchill became Colonial Under-Secretary;
but in 1908, when Asquith replaced the dying Campbell-Bannerman, he was promoted,
at the age of just 33, to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade.
9 Churchill had become an ardent social reformer. He had been much impressed by a
book entitled Poverty: A Study of Town Life, by the social investigator, Seebohm
Rowntree, published in 1901. He wrote to an official of the Midland Conservative
Association in December 1901 of how much he had been “impressed” by Rowntree’s
book, and declared, “I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is
unable to flush its sewers” In a speech at Blackpool in January 1902, he said `I have
been reading a book which has fairly made my hair stand on end, written by a Mr.
Rowntree who deals with poverty in the town of York’.2 Here lay the germ of Churchill’s
concern with social reform, a concern which, together with free trade, led him towards
Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 3
the Liberals and was to make him, with Lloyd George, the leading social reformer of the
1905 Liberal government.
10 In 1907, Churchill told the editor of a Liberal newspaper, “minimum standards of wages
and comfort, insurance in some effective form against sickness, unemployment, old age
- these are the questions, and the only questions, by which parties are going to live in
the future”. 3The need for social reform was, Churchill wrote to Prime Minister,
Asquith, in December 1908 “urgent and the moment ripe. Germany with a harder
climate and far less accumulated wealth, has managed to establish tolerable basic
conditions for her people. She is organised not only for war, but for peace. We are
organised for nothing except party politics. The Minister who will apply to this country
the successful experiences of Germany in social organisation may or may not be
supported at the polls, but he will at least have left a memorial which time will not
deface of his administration”.4
11 In the Liberal government, Churchill worked in close tandem with Lloyd George,
Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908. Lloyd George’s interest in social reform came
largely from his own experience of poverty and insecurity, Churchill’s from wide
reading and reflection. Churchill’s concern with unemployment led him to bring
William Beveridge, author of the famous report of social insurance in 1942, into
government at the Board of Trade. “If you are going to deal with unemployment”, the
Webbs apparently told Churchill, “you must have the boy Beveridge”. 5 Churchill,
Beveridge was to reminisce in 1960, was “great fun to work with. He told us that he had
not himself many years to live; he expected to die young like his father Randolph. But
this was before he married”. In 1908, he was to marry Clementine Hozier, and after that
he “gave up any idea of dying young”. 6
12 First in Churchill’s list of reforms was “a system of labour exchanges”, which, so he
said, “stands at the gateway to industrial security. It opens the way to all immediate
practical reforms”. Men seeking work were handicapped by lack of information on job
vacancies. They had to hawk around personal applications for work in a humiliating
manner. The government, so William Beveridge wrote in the Morning Post in July 1907,
had “no control or supervision of the labour market. It must always rely on the
assumption that the applicant for help could find work if he looked for it, because it is
never in the position to satisfy itself that there is no work for him”. 7 Labour exchanges
would reduce friction in the labour market. They could, in Churchill’s words, be “the
Intelligence Department of labour. In constant touch with the employers on the one
hand, and with the elementary and technical schools on the other, they should be able
to ‘place’ numbers of boys in trades which offer a steady livelihood”.
13 Labour exchanges were an essential preliminary to compulsory unemployment
insurance which Churchill had in mind, since the exchanges enabled officials to
distinguish “between the worker and the loafer”, by testing willingness to work.
The establishment of Labour Exchanges is necessary for efficient working of the
insurance scheme; for all foreign experiments have shown that a fund for insurance
against unemployment needs to be protected against unnecessary or fraudulent
claims by the power of notifying situations to men in receipt of benefit so soon as
any situations become vacant. The insurance scheme, on the other hand, will be a
lever of the most valuable kind to bring the Exchanges into successful operation […]
The administration of the twin measures must be increasingly interwoven […]
together they organise in due proportions the mobility and stability of labour.
Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 4
14 Labour exchanges would facilitate the search for work while national insurance would
support the worker and his family while he was searching. The somewhat authoritarian
Fabian, Sidney Webb, wanted voluntary insurance but compulsory labour exchanges
with compulsory training for those refusing job offers.8 Churchill, however, took the
opposite view. He insisted that labour exchanges be voluntary, but insurance
compulsory. In this way, legislation would respect the rights of working men and of the
trade unions. Workmen would be allowed to refuse employment at less than trade
union rates so the exchanges would not be providing employers with “free” or blackleg
labour. Labour exchanges were a new departure for central government, which was no
entering into a new relation with the citizen, and providing him with a service that was
“personal, discretionary and infinitely various from one locality, or one industry to
another”.9
15 In 1909, a second instalment in Churchill’s wide-ranging programme, the Trade Boards
bill, provided for minimum wages in the sweated industries. These were industries such
as, for example, the clothing industry in the east end of London, characterised by long
hours, poor sanitary conditions, low wages and many underpaid female and home
workers. In such industries, it was difficult for workers to organise in trade unions and
bargain collectively for higher wages. In consequences, many working in these trades
had to resort to outdoor relief under the Poor Law. In a Cabinet memorandum of 12
March 1909, Churchill wrote that regulating wages by law was “only defensible as
exceptional measures to deal with diseased and parasitic trades […] A clear definition of
sweated trades must comprise a) wages exceptionally low, and b) conditions prejudicial
to physical and social welfare”.10 But the government would not itself fix the wages.
They were to be fixed and flexibly adjusted to local and industry-specific conditions by
statutory wages boards, composed of an equal number of workers and employers with
an impartial chair. The government could refer back any recommendations made by
the boards, but it could not amend them. The boards were in essence a substitute for
collective bargaining in industries where trade unions were weak or non-existent. The
first list of such industries included bespoke tailoring, cardboard box making, machine-
made lace and chain making, covering around 200,000 workers, of whom around two-
thirds were female. The Trade Boards bill was “intended to help the autonomous forces
of industry in arriving at a satisfactory agreement”.11 It was ideologically liberal, rather
than socialist or collectivist.
16 The Trade Boards bill was, Churchill wrote in 1907, “in embryo, the boldest and most
far-reaching of all the social reforms which separate modern constructive Liberalism
from the older policy that bore that name”.12 It would be extended by Churchill’s
successor at the Board of Trade, Sydney Buxton, in 1913 to industries with a high
proportion of female workers. And, despite Churchill’s disclaimer, the Act did create a
precedent, establishing the principle that wages could be regulated by law. 13
17 But these reforms, important though they were, paled in significance before the
National Insurance Act of 1911, the main legislative achievement of the Liberal
government. The Act has been characterised by one historian as “perhaps the single
most important measure of social reform ever to be carried by Parliament”. 14 It was
indeed a landmark measure. On April 4 1911, shortly before it was introduced into the
Commons, Churchill, who had been promoted to the Home Office in February 1910,
wrote to King George V to state his belief that it was
Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 5
far more important to the prosperity, contentment & security of Your Majesty’s
Kingdom than any other measure of our times. Henceforward everyone will have a
‘stake in the country’ in the remarkable rewards wh. Scientific organisation & the
strange power of averages can confer on thrift.15
18 The National Insurance Act was in two parts, the first dealing with sickness, the
responsibility of Lloyd George, the Chancellor, the second with unemployment, which
was Churchill’s responsibility. The complexities of developing a scheme for health
insurance, however, meant that, by the time the bill was introduced into Parliament,
Churchill was no longer at the Board of Trade, and unemployment insurance was
steered through the Commons by his successor, Sydney Buxton. In consequence,
Churchill never quite received the credit for unemployment insurance to which he was
entitled. Indeed, Lloyd George sometimes implied that he alone was responsible for
both parts of the bill, rather than just the part for health insurance. Unemployment
insurance was, however, the more novel of the two parts. For, while there was already a
scheme of health insurance in Germany, the unemployment scheme was the first, apart
from a brief experiment in the Swiss cantons of Berne and St Gallen, the latter of which
had become bankrupt after two years.
19 Fewer than 10% of the industrial working class were insured against unemployment.
Insurance was provided mainly by trade unions representing skilled workers in
precarious trades such as engineering, shipbuilding and metallurgy where there was
much seasonal unemployment. But, even in the precarious trades, not “more than one-
third or one-quarter of the people engaged in them are insured against
unemployment”.16 Only 5% in labourers unions were provided for, but even for skilled
workers the benefits were often insufficient.17 Contributions were generally of the
order of 3d or less. Benefits were rarely more than 10 shillings a week and often less,
and then only for a limited period not normally exceeding 26 weeks in the year.
Beveridge believed that the benefit was too small to provide subsistence and had “to be
supplemented […]by the earnings of wife and children, by private saving, by assistance
from fellow-workmen and neighbours […] and in other ways”. 18
20 Churchill saw the unemployment provisions of the National Insurance bill as but
“partial” and “tentative”. They were experimental, and “the counterpart and
companion of the national system of Labour Exchanges”.19 Labour exchanges tested the
willingness of the applicant to work, while insurance would provide an incentive for
men to sign on regularly at the labour exchange and find work since otherwise they
would exhaust their benefits.
21 Unemployment insurance would be compulsory. Otherwise, bad risks would
predominate. It would also be contributory. There would be contributions by
employers and employees, with a state subvention. There would be a maximum amount
of benefit in relation to contributions to deter malingering. It would be confined to
those working in particular trades in which there was high, chronic and seasonal, but
also predictable unemployment. It seemed less practicable to provide insurance for
those working in casual trades where unemployment was not so predictable.
22 The scale of benefit was deliberately made low so as not to discourage thrift. Insurance
could, in Churchill’s words, “be only a foundation and an encouragement”, but would
nevertheless be sufficient “in the majority of cases” to “enable the workman to tide
over a temporary depression without selling up his home or losing his status”. And “It
will give him the necessary time to seek new employment if it is evident that the local
Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 6
stringency will be prolonged or perhaps permanent. And thus […] the stabilities of
labour will have been conserved and fortified”.20
23 Unemployment insurance would apply to around one-third of males in the industrial
population – around 2,250,000, employed in the precarious trades – building,
construction, shipbuilding and mechanical engineering. Of the remaining two-thirds of
industrial workers,
nearly half are engaged in the railway service or the mercantile marine, or in the
textile, mining or other industries, which adopt short time or ‘missing shifts’
systems in place of discharging workmen. Consequently the scheme may be said,
broadly speaking, to cover half the whole field of unemployment and that half the
worse half.21
24 But there would be a state subsidy for trade unions in trades other than the precarious
ones where national insurance did not apply. And the legislation made provision for
the extension of compulsory insurance to other trades by ministerial order. In 1914 it
was in fact to be so extended. But the scheme did not include dock and wharf labour
where casual unemployment was very prevalent. In 1913, Churchill argued that
insurance alone could do “comparatively little for such occupations. The evils of casual
unemployment required other measures of a preventive and curative character”. 22
25 Workers and employers in the insured trades would each be required to contribute 2.5d
while the state would contribute 1.66d. The employer, however, would be given an
abatement were he to pay annually rather than weekly, in which case he would pay just
15s rather than 21s 8d, and this would be an inducement, “to give regular employment;
it is a discouragement of casual labour; it is a reward to the employer who keeps his
workman for a whole year”. Trade unions would be reimbursed to the extent of three
quarters of the benefits that they provided.
26 The rate of benefit would be seven shillings a week after six months contributions, but
there would be no payment of benefit for the first week of unemployment, and no one
could draw more than one week’s benefit for five weeks of contribution, nor more than
fifteen weeks benefit in any twelve months period. These provisions insured against
the malingerer or the fraudulent applicant who would simply be using up his
contributions. There was, therefore, no need to apply a test, as some moralists wished,
as to whether unemployment might be due to personal failings such as laziness,
drunkenness or misconduct of some sort.; and in any case Churchill did not “like
mixing up moralities and mathematics”. His concern was “with the evil, not with the
causes, with the fact of unemployment, not with the character of the unemployed”. 23
The unemployment fund was constituted on the basis of what Churchill, somewhat
grandiloquently called, “the magic of averages to the aid of the millions” so that it
would be in balance when unemployment averaged 8.46%.24 The rate of unemployment
had been well below this level in recent years, except perhaps in 1908 and 1909. 25
27 The Act was a triumph for Churchill. Without his commitment and drive the legislation
on unemployment insurance would never have been enacted.
28 Churchill recognised that unemployment insurance could be no more than a palliative.
He accepted, on 25 May on the Second Reading of the National Insurance bill, that
“Unemployment and sickness will return to the cottage of the working man”. “But”, he
added, “they will not return alone”.26 He hoped that the Liberal reforms, would
increase the stability of our institutions by giving the mass of industrial workers a
direct interest in maintaining them. With a ‘stake in the country’ in the form of
Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 7
insurance against evil days, these workers will pay no attention to the vague
promises of revolutionary socialism […] It will make him a better citizen, a more
efficient worker, and a happier man.27
29 But the scheme of unemployment insurance was never to have a really fair trial.
Admittedly, during the immediate pre-war years, unemployment was low, and the
scheme was to be extended after the war to almost all manual workers and to non-
manual workers earning £250 a year or less, between 1921 and 1939. But
unemployment during the inter-war years remained above 10%, and in the staple
export trades it was much higher, far above the 8.46% level at which the insurance fund
balanced. The scheme was required, in the words of a Royal Commission appointed in
1931 to evaluate it, “to carry a load, which it was not designed to bear”. 28 It could deal
with temporary fluctuations in employment, but not with permanent under-
employment which was the result of a deficiency in aggregate demand. In 1921, the
maximum limit to benefit was abolished by the introduction of “extended” or
“transitional” benefit, and by 1931, if not before, the relationship between
contributions and benefits had been severed. The insurance principle had been, for all
practical purposes, abandoned. Relief was in effect to be based on need, not
contributions. Nevertheless, Churchill had in 1908 identified unemployment as the
problem of the age, declaring that it had become “a paramount necessity for us to make
scientific provision against the fluctuations and setbacks which are inevitable in world
commerce and in national industry”. There was a need, he argued, in a startling
anticipation of modern economics, to have “in permanent existence certain recognised
industries of a useful but uncompetitive character like afforestation, managed by a
public department and capable of being expanded or contracted according to the needs
of the labour market, just as easily as you can pull out the stops or work the pedals of
an organ”.29 On 10 October 1908, Herbert Samuel, then a junior minister at the Home
office, but a future leader of the Liberal Party, declared that Churchill recognised the
crucial elements of the problem,
first, that it is an essential duty of the State to deal with this evil; secondly, that it is
a permanent evil […] and must be dealt with not by machinery improvised for the
occasion[…] but by a standing organisation, thirdly, that in addition to whatever
localities may do, useful works should be organised on a national scale, set into full
operation in times of bad trade and reduced to a minimum in times of good trade;
fourthly, that a root of the evil is the wrong proportions of unskilled and skilled
labour in our society […] and to be cured mainly by technical combination schools.
30
30 The National Insurance Act marked a fundamental change in the relationship between
the citizen and the state. It proposed indeed a new relationship between the state and
the individual. For the first time the state would enter “the life of the ordinary adult
male able-bodied workman”.31 In May 1911, a Labour MP, George Barnes, told the
Commons that the bill marked
a great step forward because it brings many millions of workmen into direct
contact with the state and is therefore going to be of immense educational value.
We believe people have been too much inclined to look upon the state simply as a
big policeman and this Bill will enable a great many of them to realise that the state
after all is what they like to make it.32
31 In his volume in the Oxford History of England, A.J.P.Taylor declared “Until August
1914 a sensible law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the
existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman”, but in 1914, “The
Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 8
history of the English state and the English people merged for the first time”. 33 Yet the
crucial date was, surely, 15 July 1912 when the National Insurance Act came into
operation, not 4 August 1914 when Britain declared war. The Act brought the people
into a compulsory relationship with the state, and was far-reaching in that it affected a
large swathe of the population.
32 Liberal reforms were based on the radical principle of transferring income from the
taxpayer via the state for the benefit of specifically targeted individuals on the basis of
need and as of right. The fundamental principle behind the Act, and one basic to the
welfare state was that benefit would be given as of right in return for weekly
premiums. “You know”, Lloyd George told an official drawing up the legislation, “if this
bill goes through we shall do more to relieve human suffering than any measure which
has passed in England for hundreds of years”.34 Until 1911, such welfare legislation as
was on the statute book concerned those too young to enter the labour market- school
meals and medical inspection – or those who had left it – old age pensions. Everyone
else, so many believed, was, in a free society responsible for making their own
provision for their health and welfare. If they could not do so, that was a sign of moral
failure. They would be helped by the state through the Poor Law but would suffer
stigma as a result, a loss of freedom entailed by detention in the workhouse and a loss
of civil liberty entailed by disenfranchisement. The belief that the sick and
unemployed, who could not afford welfare, were guilty of moral failings, was fatally
undermined by the National Insurance Act.
33 Perhaps the significance of the National Insurance Act was best expressed in Churchill’s
eloquent speech on Second Reading.
The penalties for misfortune are terrible today. […] A man may have neglected to
make provision for unemployment; he may have neglected to make provision for
sickness; he may be below the average standard as a workman; he may have
contracted illness through his own folly or his own misconduct. […] But what
relation is there between these weaknesses and failings and the appalling
catastrophes which exceptionally follow in the wake of these failures; so narrow is
the margin upon which even the industrious respectable working class family that
when sickness or unemployment come knocking at the door the whole economy
and even the status of the family are imperilled. The sickness may not be severe;
the unemployment may not be prolonged. The good offices of friends and
neighbours may carry the family through the crisis; but they come out with an
accumulated weight of debt and with furniture and clothing scattered at ruinous
rates. Privation has weakened the efficiency of the bread-winner, and poverty has
set its stamp upon his appearance. If sickness and unemployment return and knock
again a second time, it is all over […] No one can measure the suffering to
individuals which this process causes; no one can measure the futile unnecessary
loss which the State incurs. We do not pretend that our Bill is going to prevent
these evils. Unemployment and sickness will return to the cottage of the working
man, but they will not return alone. We are going to send him by this Bill other
visitors to his home, visitors who will guard his fortunes and strengthen the force
of his right arm against every foe.35
34 The Liberal reforms were creative and path-breaking, and there had been few
precedents, principles or past experience to guide them. They were a clear departure
from much of what had gone before, in what Churchill in 1908 rightly characterised as
“The Untrodden Field in Politics”. 36
35 Churchill’s time at the Board of Trade was, Beveridge believed, “a striking illustration
of how much the personality of the Minister in a few critical months may change the
Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 9
course of social legislation”, and he added that Churchill was also “immense fun to
work for”.37
36 But Churchill’s perspective went far wider than the provisions of the National
Insurance Act. At the end of 1908, he urged Prime Minister, Asquith, to adopt in Britain
“a sort of Germanised network of State intervention and regulation”, instancing six
radical measures.
1. Labour Exchanges and Unemployment Insurance.
2. National Infirmity Insurance, etc.
3. Special Expansive State Industries – Afforestation – Roads:
4. Modernised Poor Law i.e. classification.
5. Railway Amalgamation with State Control and Guarantee.
6. Education compulsory till 17.38
37 The first three formed part of the programme of the Asquith government, and
Churchill was himself responsible for the first. The fourth had to wait until the 1920s,
the fifth to the 1940s, while the sixth was not achieved until 2013, over one hundred
years after Churchill had proclaimed it as an aim of public policy. But Churchill’s
imaginative sweep went even further, “Dimly across gulfs of ignorance I see the outline
of a policy wh. I call the Minimum Standard. It is national rather than departmental”.
That was the policy to be put forward by Beatrice Webb in the Minority Report to the
Poor Law Commission in 1909 and to be carried into effect by Attlee’s Labour
government after 1945, which provided a universal right to pensions, health care and
unemployment benefit. In 1909 Churchill envisaged a “comprehensive, interdependent
scheme of social organisation” to be achieved through “a massive series of legislative
proposals and administrative acts”.39 And in recognising the need for better technical
education, Churchill showed himself nearly forty years if not nearly a century ahead of
his time. For the reforms of further education by the Blair government in the early part
of the 21st century and the governments of Theresa May and Boris Johnson in its second
decade were responding to that very need.
38 Churchill was, so one historian has concluded, “equalled only by Lloyd George among
his contemporaries in his capacity to diagnose and effectively treat the worst social
evils of his day”.40 But he saw even further than Lloyd George, regarding the various
social reforms as an interconnected whole. So even if Churchill’s political career had
ended in 1914, he would still deserve to be remembered as a prime architect of the
welfare state.
39 But of course Churchill’s political career did not end in 1914. He was to serve in the
Asquith wartime government from 1914 to 1915, then in the Lloyd George coalition
from 1917-22, and in Stanley Baldwin’s second government between 1924 and 1929; yet
all this was but a prelude to his glorious wartime premiership from 1940 to 1945. Social
reform, however, was not his central concern during these years.
40 In 1951, Churchill had a second innings as prime minister, remaining at No 10 until
1955. His peacetime government is sometimes regarded as a rather disappointing coda
to his wartime premiership. One of his biographers, the former Labour Cabinet
minister, Roy Jenkins declares him, “gloriously unfit for office”. 41 His period in office in
the 1950s has even been seen as “senile self-indulgence”. 42 The Labour Party believed in
1951 that a Churchill government would be a reactionary one, that it would not be able
or even willing to maintain the social gains of the Attlee government – full
Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 10
employment, the welfare state and the National Health Service. This of course was a
grave misunderstanding of Churchill. It was highly unlikely that he would dismantle
the very welfare state that he had been so instrumental in creating. And indeed his
peacetime government both preserved and improved the welfare state, as well as
maintaining full employment. Churchill took particular care to ensure good relations
with the trade unions, appointing conciliators to the key positions in his government –
R.A. Butler at the Exchequer and Sir Walter Monckton at the Ministry of Labour. Indeed
the Churchill government has been criticized, anachronistically in my view, for not
being radical enough, for rejecting the idea of the floating pound as proposed in the
Robot scheme in 1952, for not taking a stronger stand against wage claims and for not
enacting legislation curbing the privileges of the trade unions. Such measures,
however, would have shattered the atmosphere of consensus carried over from the war
which Churchill sought to preserve.
41 In 1940, Churchill had given expression to the underlying attitude of the British people,
that they were determined not to give in to Hitler. In 1951, too, he detected the
underlying attitude of the British people. They wanted a period of peace and quiet, they
yearned for consolidation after the reforms of the Attlee years. They did not want
upheaval. After being elected in his constituency in 1951, Churchill declared “We have
all felt that we have a great deal in common and now perhaps there may be a lull in our
Party strife”. And in a party political broadcast later that year, he said that on the social
services, nine-tenths of the people agreed on nine-tenths of what had been done. 43
“What the nation needs”, Churchill told the newly elected House of Commons in 1951,
“is several years of quiet, steady administration, if only to allow socialist legislation to
reach its full fruition”.44 That was what he provided. By 1955, the country was far more
united than it had been in 1951. Indeed, Churchill probably left behind him a more
united country than any other post-war prime minister has done. And the Churchill
government was the only one in the 20th century whose percentage of the vote
increased after a full term in office, the Conservatives gaining in 1955 1.5% more of the
vote than in 1951.45 Churchill’s peacetime government, therefore, has a claim to be the
most successful Conservative administration since the war.
42 In the years before the First World War, Churchill had served the cause of social reform
by vigorous action. In the years after the Second World War, he served that same cause
by inaction, or rather by a policy of incremental improvement of the welfare state
inherited from Attlee’s Labour government. He helped to create a new consensus which
was to serve Britain well until the 1970s. He was indisputably a One Nation
Conservative.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Addison, Paul, ‘Churchill and Social Reform’ in Robert Blake and William Roger Louis (eds),
Churchill (Oxford, Oxford University Press 1993).
Addison, Paul, Churchill on the Home Front (London, Jonathan Cape, 1992).
Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 11 Beveridge, Power and Influence (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1953). Beveridge, William, Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909) (London, Longmans, Green and Company, 1930). Boyer, George R., ‘The Evolution of Unemployment Relief in Great Britain”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 34:3 (2004), pp. 393-433. Boyer, George R. and Timothy J. Hatton, ‘New Estimates of British Unemployment 1870-1913”, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Sept. 2002), pp. 643-675. Henry N. Bunbury (ed.), Lloyd George’s Ambulance Wagon: Being the Memoirs of William J. Braithwaite, 1911-1912 (London, Methuen & Co Ltd, 1957). Cabinet Memorandum: National Insurance Act (Part II) Unemployment, November 1913, CAB 37/117 1913. Cabinet Memorandum: Unemployment. Insurance: Labour Exchanges, December 11 1908, CAB 37/96/159 1908, pp.1.Cabinet Memorandum: CAB 37/99/69, April 17 1909. Churchill, Winston, Liberalism and the Social Problem (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1909). Churchill, Randolph S., Winston S. Churchill, Companion (London, Heinemann 1969), vol. ii, Part 2, 1907-1911. Churchill, Randolph S., Young Statesman: Winston S Churchill 1901-1914 (1967) (London, Minerva edition, 1991). Clarke, Peter, Liberalism and Social Democrats (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978). Evidence to Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance (Holman Gregory Commission), Cmd.3872, 1931, para.31. Finlayson, Geoffrey, Citizen, State and Social Welfare in Britain 1830-1990 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994). Gilbert, Bentley B., The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain: The Origins of the Welfare State (London, Michael Joseph, 1966). Harris, Jose, Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, 2 nd edition). Hastings, Max, `We shouldn’t hanker for giants to lead is’, The Times, 23 December 2021. House of Commons Debates, 24 May 1911, vol. 26, col. 312. House of Commons Debates, 25 May 1911, vol. 26, col. 509, 510. House of Commons Debates, 4 May 1911, vol. 25, col. 611. Jenkins, Roy, Churchill (London, Macmillan, 8th edition, 2001). Kahn-Freund, Otto, ‘Labour Law’ in Morris Ginsberg (ed.), Law and Opinion in England in the 20 th Century (London, Stevens & Sons, Ltd. 1959). Pelling, Henry, Winston Churchill (London, Macmillan 1974). Rosebery, Lord, ‘Sir Robert Peel’ in Miscellanies (London, Hodder and Stoughton 1922, 5 th edition), vol. 1. Taylor, A.J.P., English History 1914-1945 (1965) (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992). Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023
Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 12 NOTES 1. Lord Rosebery, ‘Sir Robert Peel’ in Miscellanies (London, Hodder and Stoughton 1922, 5th edition), vol. 1.p. 189. 2. Randolph S Churchill, Young Statesman: Winston S Churchill 1901-1914 (1967) (London, Minerva edition, 1991), pp. 31-2. 3. Paul Addison, ‘Churchill and Social Reform’ in Robert Blake and William Roger Louis (eds), Churchill (Oxford, Oxford University Press 1993), p. 60. 4. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, Companion (London, Heinemann 1969), vol. ii, Part 2, 1907-1911, p. 861. 5. Beveridge, Power and Influence (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), p. 68. 6. Jose Harris, Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, 2nd edition), p. 169. 7. Beveridge, Power and Influence, p. 60. 8. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. ii, part 2, pp. 851-3. 9. Beveridge, Power and Influence, p. 74. 10. Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front (London, Jonathan Cape, 1992), pp. 78-9. 11. Otto Kahn-Freund, ‘Labour Law’ in Morris Ginsberg (ed.), Law and Opinion in England in the 20th Century (London, Stevens & Sons, Ltd. 1959), p. 254. 12. Peter Clarke, Liberalism and Social Democrats (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 115. 13. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. ii, part 2, p. 879. 14. Henry Pelling, Winston Churchill (London, Macmillan 1974), p. 126. 15. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. ii, part 2, p. l064. 16. Lloyd George in the House of Commons, 4 May 1911, vol. 25, col. 611. 17. George R Boyer, ‘The Evolution of Unemployment Relief in Great Britain’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 34:3 (2004), pp. 393-433, p. 414. 18. William Beveridge, Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909) (London, Longmans, Green and Company, 1930), p. 225. 19. Cabinet Memorandum: Unemployment. Insurance: Labour Exchanges, December 11 1908, CAB 37/96/159 1908, pp.1.Cabinet Memorandum: CAB 37/99/69, April 17 1909, p. 1. 20. CAB 37/96, pp. 1-3 passim. 21. CAB 37/99, p. 2. 22. Cabinet Memorandum: National Insurance Act (Part II) Unemployment, November 1913, CAB 37/117 1913, p. 3. 23. Bentley B Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain: The Origins of the Welfare State (London, Michael Joseph, 1966), p. 272. 24. House of Commons Debates, 25 May 1911, vol. 26, col. 509. 25. George R. Boyer and Timothy J. Hatton, ‘New Estimates of British Unemployment 1870-1913’, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Sept. 2002), pp. 643-675, especially pp. 662 and 667. 26. House of Commons Debates, 25 May 1911, vol. 26, col. 510. 27. Quoted in Geoffrey Finlayson, Citizen, State and Social Welfare in Britain 1830-1990 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 186. 28. Evidence to Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance (Holman Gregory Commission), Cmd.3872, 1931, para. 31. 29. Randolph S. Churchill, Young Statesman, pp. 303-4. 30. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. ii, part 2, 1907-1911, p. l841. 31. Gilbert, National Insurance, p. 287. 32. House of Commons Debates, 24 May 1911, vol. 26, col. 312. 33. A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (1965) (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1992), pp. 1-2. Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023
Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 13 34. Henry N. Bunbury (ed.), Lloyd George's Ambulance Wagon: Being the Memoirs of William J. Braithwaite, 1911-1912 (London, Methuen & Co Ltd, 1957), p. 152. 35. House of Commons Debates, 25 May 1911, vol. 26, col. 510. 36. Randolph Churchill, Young Statesman, p. 276. 37. Beveridge, Power and Influence, p. 87. 38. Pelling, Winston Churchill, p. 128. 39. Winston Churchill, Liberalism and the Social Problem (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1909)., pp. 237-8. 40. Pelling, Churchill, pp. 128-9. 41. Roy Jenkins, Churchill (London, Macmillan; 8th edition, 2001), p. 845. 42. A view attributed to the journalist, Geoffrey Wheatcroft. See Max Hastings, ‘We shouldn’t hanker for giants to lead is’, The Times, 23 December 2021. 43. The Times, 27 October 1951, 24 December 1951. 44. House of Commons Debates, 5th series, vol. 495, col. 68, 6 November 1951. 45. This achievement was to be emulated by Labour after the short parliaments of 1964 to 1966 and February to October 1974, but never by a government after a full term. Margaret Thatcher increased her majority in 1983 from what it had been in 1979; but her percentage of the vote was lower, since in 1983, by contrast with 1979, the opposition was divided. Churchill’s achievement was, however, to be emulated by David Cameron in 2015, but his government lasted only a year before he resigned following his defeat in the Brexit referendum. ABSTRACTS Paradoxically the social reforms which entitle Churchill to the title of One Nation Conservative were enacted when he was a member of a Liberal Cabinet after 1908. Indeed, it was partly because he believed that the Conservatives had ceased to be a party of social reform that he crossed the floor to the Liberals in 1904. Churchill pioneered the welfare state – measures such as labour exchanges, minimum wages in sweated trades, and the world’s first system of unemployment insurance. All this was in his words “the untrodden field of politics”. To help him, he brought into government in an advisory role, William Beveridge, later to be author of the famous report on social insurance. Churchill is best remembered of course for his leadership in war from 1940 to 1945. But in 1951, he had a second innings as peacetime prime minister. Here too he made his contribution to One Nation Conservatism, not by action as had been the case before 1914, but by inaction. He preserved the welfare state measures enacted by Attlee’s Labour government after 1945, rather than dismantling them as some Conservatives had wished. His peacetime government cemented his reputation as a One Nation Conservative. Paradoxalement, les réformes sociales qui donnent à Churchill le titre de « One Nation Conservative » ont été adoptées alors qu’il était membre d’un cabinet libéral après 1908. En effet, c’est en partie parce qu’il pensait que les conservateurs avaient cessé d’être un parti de réforme sociale qu’il a quitté les libéraux en 1904. Churchill a été le pionnier de l’État-providence, avec des mesures telles que les bourses du travail, le salaire minimum dans les métiers pénibles et le premier système d’assurance chômage au monde. Tout cela était, selon ses propres termes, « le domaine inexploré de la politique ». Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023
Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative 14 Pour l’aider, il fait entrer au gouvernement, dans un rôle consultatif, William Beveridge, qui sera plus tard l’auteur du célèbre rapport sur l’assurance sociale. On se souvient bien sûr surtout de Churchill pour son rôle pendant la guerre de 1940 à 1945, mais en 1951, il a eu une seconde chance en tant que Premier ministre en temps de paix. Là encore, il a apporté sa contribution au conservatisme One Nation, non pas par l’action comme cela avait été le cas avant 1914, mais par l’inaction. Il a préservé les mesures de l’État-providence adoptées par le gouvernement travailliste d’Attlee après 1945, au lieu de les démanteler comme certains conservateurs l’avaient souhaité. Son gouvernement en temps de paix a cimenté sa réputation de « One Nation Conservative ». INDEX Mots-clés: Churchill, réforme sociale, bourses du travail, salaire minimum, assurance chômage, État providence Keywords: social reform, labour exchanges, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, welfare state, Churchill AUTHOR VERNON BOGDANOR Vernon Bognador CBE is Professor of Government, King’s College, London, and was formerly Professor of Government at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences. He has been an adviser to a number of governments, including Albania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Kosovo, Israel, Mauritius, Slovakia and Trinidad. He has written widely on constitutional issues and is a frequent contributor to TV, radio and the press. In 2008, he was given the Sir Isaiah Berlin Award by the Political Studies Association for Lifetime Contribution to Political Studies. He is a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur, an Honorary Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford, an Honorary D. Litt. of the University of Kent, and an Honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple. He was also given a knighthood in the New Year Honours List 2023. His books include: The New British Constitution, 2009; Beyond Brexit: Towards a British Constitution, 2019; Britain and Europe in a Troubled World, 2020; The Strange Survival of Liberal Britain, 2022. Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXVIII-1 | 2023
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