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
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."
This set back the course of true reform for a century to come.
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 Radicalism" ("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 able-bodied 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 man-made 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 dragged the level of earnings
to the
minimum that an unemployed man would demand."
Campbell-Bannerman and Churchill grasped the nature of poverty, Hill
says, but Lloyd George didn't. Once Churchill attached himself to Lloyd
George as junior lieutenant, true reform was lost to political
expediency. Lloyd George had no political principles, Hill believes,
and attempts at land value taxation were gradually whittled down and
disappeared. Thus perished the opportunity truly to eliminate the cause
of poverty, giving way to government sponsored welfare schemes paid for
by direct taxation. "The people
may go about with state spectacles and
state dentures, but they may be made unemployed by the taxation
required to pay for these things. Whereas the individual can take steps
to remedy poor eyesight and poor teeth, he cannot overcome the
condition of poverty himself."
Almost alone among the Asquith
cabinet, Hill continues, Churchill saw
the truth but was unable to serve it. Yet his 1908 statements on
taxation "merit inscription in gold lettering wherever men deliberate
state expenditure":
Taxation,
raise it as you please, is
a gross and unredeemable evil....All taxation is an evil, a necessary
evil, if you will, but still an evil, in so far as taxation is
concerned, harsh, unmingled, and unmitigated.... When the state takes
arbitrarily from the savings or earnings of the people sums of money,
great or small, it withdraws that money from the healthy
fructifications of industry and trade and it diminishes cannot fail to
diminish the consuming & productive energies of the people.
It would take a better student of
taxation and economics than this writer to evaluate Mr Hill's argument.
For example, are the issues Turgot and George raised at the turn of the
last century valid in a world where land has long been enclosed, where
millionaires are created without any reference to landholdings? But
whatever his regrets over the opportunities squandered by Churchill's
radical decade, Malcolm Hill has rendered a detailed and useful account
of a little-known period in Churchill's career.
It may be ironic that modern admirers of Sir Winston point to his role
in creating the English Welfare State if, as Hill says, that concept
was wrong from the beginning because it failed to address the root
causes of poverty. It may also be that Churchill's accomplishments
during 1904-11 were comparable to what Larry Arnn has described as his
accomplishments at Yalta and Potsdam: "the best he could do in the
situation that then prevailed."