CHURCHILL AND THE TRADE UNIONS

Abstract

WINSTON CHURCHILL combined a rhetoric of Tory democracy with a shrewd political realism in his approach to the trade unions. When class conflict was strong and law and order under threat, as in 1911–26, the rhetoric evaporated and Churchill became the champion of the anxious propertied classes. So much so that his persistent Dundee opponent, Edwin Scrymgeour, observed during the 1922 general election campaign, shortly after Mussolini took power in Italy, that it would not surprise him in the event of civil war in Britain ‘if Mr Churchill were at the head of the Fascisti party’. While this view ignored Churchill’s deep commitment to democracy and the British constitution, it did reflect concerns about his apparent revelry in the role of Defender of Order. Yet both before and after 1911–26 his approach to the trade unions was emollient.