Thank you very much for inviting me here this evening.

I want to thank Christopher Hebb and the Sir Winston Churchill Society of British Columbia for this opportunity.

In the spring of 2010 I first gave a version of this talk in Victoria to the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Vancouver Island on the invitation of that great Churchillian Barry Gough.

When Barry and I had our discussion about speaking to the Victoria chapter we agreed that the combination of the perilous economic times, and the questions being raised about the role of government, might be an interesting place to consider what Winston Churchill thought about social justice.

Since that time there has emerged a great global conversation about the role of the state, the market, and individual freedom that turns on the question of social justice much of it we will see anticipated by Churchill.

Like all great people of history, as Winston Churchill’s life was being shaped by deep economic, political, and cultural forces, historical greatness came from an ability to insert himself into the direction those forces were going and change the outcome to a different place than would have occurred in his absence.

Probably the most important moment to our civilization was the British Cabinet meetings in May 1940 when Churchill drew the line on any accommodation with Nazi Germany despite immense pressure from within his Cabinet, and some would argue simple commonsense, to do so.

The historical memory of Churchill is rooted in his Second World War leadership because of his singular importance in defining the fundamental challenge that Hitler’s Germany posed to Western civilization that was confirmed by Nazi death factories, his complete grasp of the strategic risk to the well being of the United Kingdom by German domination of the European continent so well understood by generations of great British statesmen yet astonishingly ignored by his contemporaries, and his unparalleled ability to give to his citizens and other enemies of Nazi Germany not only unwavering clarity of what was at stake in the fight but with language that challenged anyone who listened to rise to meet a shared and fateful destiny even at the cost of their lives, and the lives of their loved ones.

In the year 2011 there is very little in the popular historical imagination about who Churchill was prior to the mid-1930s.

Of course, tonight’s audience will likely know that by 1933 when Hitler came to power Churchill had been a member of Parliament for 31 years, a member of Cabinet for 19, including Chancellor of the Exchequer for 5, and First Lord of the Admiralty for 4, he had contested 14 elections successful in 10, and had been thought of as the natural successor for two Prime Ministers, Herbert Asquith, a Liberal, and Stanley Baldwin, a Conservative.

Still there was a time when Winston Churchill was young, when he was desperate to make his mark, and found the old ways of thinking and doing things not only myopic but morally wrong.

This time in Churchill’s life coincided in his mind not with a threat from outside the country but inside, when domestic not foreign policy engaged his tremendous intellect and energy and sense of history and ambition and individual purpose.

The threat came from the growing voice of labour for a share in Great Britain’s present wealth and future promise against a self interested ruling class that was rapidly moving towards protecting the country against international trade by installing tariffs and confident in its ability to protect itself and its friends against the lower classes by using the privilege and power of an unelected Upper House.

In the first decade of the 20th century, the demand for social reform in the United Kingdom was the deep historical force that Churchill sought to promote, to ride, to steer, and to tie his bright star.

Between 1904 and 1910 Churchill with Lloyd George became the advocates of Liberal Party reforms that made them in the words of William Manchester, the ‘grandfathers of the British welfare state’.

Speaking to the International Churchill Society in 1988 the late Alistair Cooke said, “[t]o Americans It’s Franklin Roosevelt … who has gone down as the man who invented the New Deal. But FDR was years behind … Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.”

I would like to open a conversation with you tonight about Winston Churchill’s idea of social justice.

I will finish with a few thoughts about what we may be able learn from his idea of social justice as we enter the second century of Liberalism in what is likely to continue to be a period of great economic, political, and social change.

What was social justice to Winston Churchill?

It’s fair to argue that Churchill’s social justice was found in-between the old, bland, sterile, immoveable 19th century British Tories, and the frightening, misguided, reckless, grasping 20th century Socialists.

On this we can take his word, as we have ample both written and spoken.

At the beginning of his political life the Conservative Party was the only place for Churchill to start a political career, nevertheless very early in his political awakening – age 23 -- he turned his newly minted verbal weaponry on the rising stars of the Conservative Party, Balfour and Curzon.

He wrote in a letter in early 1897, among the leaders of the Tory Party are two whom I despise and detest as politicians ….. above all others – Balfour and Curzon. The one – a languid, lazy, lack a daisical cynic – the unmonumental figurehead of the Conservative Party; the other the spoiled darling of … politics – blown with conceit – insolent from undeserved success – the typification of the superior Oxford prig.

In the same year he declared in a letter: “I am a Liberal in all but name”.

Although deeply respectful of British institutions, the House of Lords, the bastion of Tory privilege, was in those days, a favorite target for Churchill.

Churchill could rouse himself at the name of the House of Lords with a venomous stream of invective that some said ‘betrayed his class’.

In 1907, and by now a Liberal, he said that the House of Lords was, “one-sided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresentative, absentee.”

In 1909 during a constitutional crisis when the Upper Chamber ignored over 275 years of Parliamentary custom vetoing the Liberal Party’s famous ‘People’s Budget’ Churchill let loose:

“These unfortunate individuals who ought to lead quiet, delicate, sheltered lives, far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, have been dragged into the football scrimmage, and …they have got rather roughly mauled in the process … It’s almost like teasing goldfish.”

And finally, “the House of Lords is not a national institution but a party dodge, the Peers tolerated all these years because they were thought to be in a comatose condition” but now “if the struggle comes, it will be between a representative assembly and a miserable minority of titled persons who represent nobody, who are responsible to nobody, and who only scurry up to London to vote in their party interests, their class interests, and in their own ….. interests.”

Happily for the Tories, Churchill actually counted some of them among his best friends, so in contrast to what he said about Socialists, he was actually quite gentle.

If the Tories were a party whose leaders reeked of privilege that so offended Churchill, the Socialists were much much worse, a party led by wholly-headed dangerous collectivists blind to the soaring promise of individual achievement – of which Churchill of course was planning for himself.

For Churchill while the Tories threatened British progress, and therefore greatness, by a policy of trade protection and not extending the benefits of regular employment, basic education, and the science of good health to all British citizens, the socialists were a much greater risk, because in Churchill’s mind they threatened the very fabric of British society and its institutions.

To his credit, Churchill could early see the collectivist train wreck that Labour would cause.

For starters, Churchill said that socialism would bring Britain, a “government of the duds, by the duds, for the duds”.

In 1908, he said, “socialist society is a set of disagreeable individuals …. whose officials … on humanity through innumerable grilles and pigeon holes and over innumerable counters, and say to them, tickets please”.

What a marvelous insight, decades and decades before the gray, bland, shapeless, bureaucratic, depressing, damp, and heartless socialism that eventually suffocated Eastern Europe before finally, collapsing, in on itself.

So hateful of the socialists, his biographers agree, Churchill lost all sense of perspective.

William Manchester notes that “British socialism brought out the worst in Churchill” adding that “in his view, the Labour party was a sinister strand in a Bolshevik rope braided to lynch England’s political and social institutions”.

When Churchill insisted in 1928 that the socialists, “were mounting a great vehement, deliberate attack upon the foundations of society” even Stanley Baldwin, who had every reason to do so, didn’t agree.

Clementine Churchill urged him to “take a less hostile and negative attitude” toward the socialists.

Many decades later, even after having shared the cabinet table with members of the Labour Party in a Wartime coalition against Hitler, he would in a June 1945 radio address compare the Labour party, to the Gestapo.

Some commentators think this helped contribute to his subsequent electoral defeat.

This double barreled invective sets the stage to frame Churchill’s idea of social justice: at one extreme he is an enemy of privilege and a friend of those wanting to get ahead in their lives, and at the other end, an enemy of policies that uses the state to suffocate the glory of individual achievement in some terrible collectivist nightmare but a friend of social policies that could contribute to better education, health, and community outcomes, and soften, the vicious, capricious hand of the market.

For our purposes, early in his life, and importantly well before the successful Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, which created a whole different Churchillian conversation around socialism mostly because of the relentless Bolshevik violence against capital and personal freedom that followed that revolution as well as the slaughter of the Russian Royal family, Churchill did say very constructive things about the differences between liberalism and socialism that helps us flesh out our understanding of his idea of social justice.

Churchill approached the idea of social justice by arguing of the ‘natural’ existence of duality of the human condition in a 1906 speech entitled “Liberalism and Socialism” that can be found in his book Liberalism and the Social Problem published in 1909.

In Liberalism and the Social Problem he argued that, “no man can be a collectivist alone or an individual alone. He must be both, an … individualist and a collectivist. The nature of man is a dual nature …. No view of society …can possibly be complete which does not comprise within its scope both collective … organization and individual incentive.”

In 1908 in Dundee, he said: “socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty; Socialism … would …destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference”.

A key ingredient of Churchill’s idea of social justice is the importance of work.

Core Churchillian policy prescriptions designed to reduce the risk of the market included labour exchanges, unemployment insurance, and a guaranteed minimum wage.

In the same Dundee speech he argued, “I said that the disturbances of our industrial system are often started from outside this country by causes utterly beyond our control … The social and industrial conditions in Great Britain at the present time cannot be described as healthy”.

So he advocated for government contracts to help the unemployed when the economy weakened arguing that, “there is nothing economically unsound in increasing temporarily and artificially the demand for labour during a period of temporary and artificial contraction.”

To 21st century ears, particularly in light of how governments have reacted to the recent downturn in the global economy, this may not seem very radical or the construction of the argument very sophisticated, but in the first decade of the 20th century, it was.

The Churchillian construction of the vagaries of the market, and the role of the state in smoothing the economic cycle pre-dated Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by thirty years, and anticipated the core thinking behind Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Churchill understood that the market is not the economy; the economy is what societies make of the market with public policy and custom.

Churchill’s engagement with this issue over hundred years ago led him to put his finger right on the heart of the problem of the modern just society: how to balance the right of the individual to prosper or fail with the responsibility of the community to provide each of its citizens with the skills and support required to be successful, and yet, avoid the moral hazard of dependency.

There isn’t a political conversation that has occurred since that could not be framed by Churchill’s construction of the challenge of the mutual responsibility between the individual and the modern state.

Yet, it would be a mistake to simply let the Liberal-Socialist divide frame Churchill’s thinking about social justice.

I think, that there is something more compelling, more vital, and rooted perhaps in the essence of Churchill’s soul; that is, his belief in the opportunity and dignity in a single human life.

Martin Gilbert argues that Churchill’s moment of political transformation came at a dinner in 1901 when he was introduced to the book Poverty by Seebohm Rowntree.

In a speech in 1902 in Blackpool, Churchill made his first public foray into social policy by talking about Rowntree’s book which was a study of poverty in the county of York.

Churchill said, “I have been reading a book which has fairly made my hair stand on end …. where it’s written that poverty extends to nearly one-fifth of the population” among many of which, he went on to point out, that did not have enough to eat.

More powerfully are Churchill’s closing lines in a review of the book he published soon after.

He wrote, and hold on to your hats, “consider the peculiar case of these poor, and the consequences. Although the British Empire is so large, they cannot find room to live in it; although It’s so magnificent, they would have had a better chance of happiness if they had been born cannibal islanders of the Southern seas; and although its science is so profound, they would have been more healthy if they had been subjects of Hardicanute,” who was for the record, a very nasty 11th century Danish king.

Although Rowntree’s book seems to have put him on a straight path out of the Conservative Party there is evidence of a deep earlier personal commitment to the dignity of the individual, and the problem of poverty.

In a letter Churchill wrote to the Westminster Gazette in 1894 at the age of 19, “the improvement in the standard of public decency is due rather to improved social conditions and to the spread of education.”

The emphasis on education and the idea of individual improvement was at the centre of Churchill’s idea of social justice; just give citizens the chance at good education and good health, a fair chance in the economy and then they, and society would prosper.

After a century of liberalism there can be little doubt that we are better off for having adopted Churchill’s faith in using the state to promote the individual, however, this has come with many unexpected costs, some that are potentially fatal to the project in the first place.

Where did Churchill’s idea of, and commitment to, social justice come from?

I ask this question because I think it will help frame how his idea of social justice may speak to the issues facing us today.

William Manchester suggests four reasons.

First, his great “resentment of the Tory hierarchy” that had “ruined his father, driven him out of their Party, and treated him viciously since.”

Although a product of the Tory establishment he was always on its fringes, bullied terribly at school, forced to scheme -- with his mother’s help -- his way up the chain of command in the military to get what he wanted, and always, always hard up for money.

Second, he was an intuitive rebel, and his intense preparation of his mind for argument by a veracious reading of the classics and study of debate led him to relish in taking and winning the opposing, minority view.

This of course meant that he often saw further ahead than most so he was naturally early to truth of an argument.

This of course also meant that he sometimes took positions that proved very wrong.

Third, were the times.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Great Britain was ripe for change, and there were many great writers who gave voice to the need and language for what that change must be.

It was an astounding time for new ideas just as Churchill was coming into his own at the age of 26.

Queen Victoria died in 1901 and like the great aunt whose furniture stayed in the same place for decade after decade after decade, so English social life had become frozen by convention even though breath-taking technological and economic changes were rapidly reshaping the society, and many young writers were imagining a very different Britain than the one they had inherited.

The nine-year reign of Edward VIIth set the stage for the bright light of ‘the new thinking’, writers like Wells and Shaw gave it the script, and politicians like Churchill, Lloyd George, and Asquith gave it voice and expression in public policy.

At this stage in his career Churchill chose butter over guns, and he worked with Lloyd George to make the rich pay for it.

As under secretary of state for the colonies he cut his reform teeth on adopting a programme of unemployment compensation in South Africa.

As President of the Board of Trade, and now a full member of the cabinet, Churchill established a maximum workday for miners, trade boards with minimum wages and labour exchanges for the unemployed attacking ‘sweated labour’, worked with Lloyd George to introduce old age pensions, an expanded National Health Insurance Act, and an unemployment insurance bill.

More revolutionary was the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 that introduced the concept of progressive taxation as a means of redistributing wealth.

“Taxes”, Manchester concludes, “were raised on everything” and “on the rich … who ran the country.”

And as Home Secretary, Churchill pushed through a number of prison reforms.

The fourth reason for Churchill’s embrace of social reform was political.

The Liberals had to move fast to cut off the rapid rise of Labour and protect their left flank from desertion.

The hope was that by dulling the consequences of rapid industrialization and raising the chances of participating in the wealth created that the Liberals could play off the Labour and Conservative Parties.

I would like to add a fifth reason for Churchill’s embrace of social justice, that is, his unbending faith in the potential of our species to lead better lives; and in the potential for greatness in a community of people.

All his public statements on the dangers of poverty, importance of education and good health, confirms that he embraced a key premise of social justice, that every individual is of equal worth, that an independent and free citizen is ultimately made not born, something achieved by in great measure by the institutions – legal, economic, political, cultural – that make up a community.

In his words, “[I see] little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers … The state must concern itself with the care of the sick and the aged, and above all, of the children.”

He would add, “we want to have free competition upwards; I am sure that if the vision of a fair Utopia which cheers the hearts and lights the imagination of the toiling multitudes, should ever break into reality, it will be by developments through, and modifications in, and by improvements out of, the existing competitive organization of society .. [I]t is the rearguard of the army that attention should be directed … to bring the rearguard in, to bring them into the level plain, so that they too may dwell in a land of peace and plenty.”

There is much evidence that Churchill’s commitment to social justice remained ingrained in his thinking.

Famously in 1944, on health he said, “the discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman simply on the ground that It’s the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion… Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.”

You know, perhaps President Barack Obama should have thought twice before removing Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office and returning it to London.

The President does seem to have quoted Winston rather liberally in defense of extending health care to all citizens.

In 1954 Churchill said, “[The Conservative Party] has improved all the social services and we are spending more this year on them than any Government at any time. That is true of education, health, housing, family allowances and the whole field of the social services.”

This is born out by the facts according to Anthony Seldon in his book Churchill’s Indian Summer a study of Churchill’s last government.

From 1951 to 1954, real spending in social services increased at a pace faster than overall spending, mostly due to a new focus on housing and health.

But, at the very moment of extreme social reform zeal the world shifted, and Churchill with it.

The foreign began to overtake the domestic as the great force of history with which Winston Churchill would have to contend.

In fact, the Churchill we are more familiar with surfaced just over 100 years -- July 1st, 1910 -- when the Kaiser sent a German gunboat to Morocco to press a claim from the French.

Churchill’s social reform zeal was eclipsed from this day forward as he was distracted by increasingly belligerent German leaders particularly as they sought a large navy that threatened Britain’s strategic position.

From then Germany would be Churchill’s chief concern.

So what can we learn from Churchill’s idea of social justice that speaks to the issues we face today?

The world that Churchill sought to reform 111 years ago still faces many of the same issues albeit of an entirely different scale: a boom and bust economic cycle, and too many children in poverty, with unequal education, health and community outcomes that are a consequence of social circumstance.

These things concerned Churchill then, it’s likely they would concern him now.

However, the tremendous transition over the last century in the role and size of the modern state, which seems to be constantly on the lookout for our well being, whether we want it or not, raises important questions for answering how Churchill’s idea of social justice might be applied today.

What we eat, where we can smoke, what and how we can say things to each other, helmets for bikes, crosswalks, human rights tribunals, rules and regulations and taxes and fees.

It’s reported that there are over 5 million surveillance cameras in the United Kingdom, one for every twelve people.

This I think would cut against what Churchill saw as the proper balance between the individual and the community in a healthy society.

In fact, the potential evasiveness of the state – arbitrary authority – is drawn from the collectivist nightmare that Churchill fought against because of the breakdown in the mutual responsibility between the citizen and the state.

In conclusion, at the heart of Churchill’s view of social justice is the duality of the relationship between the individual and community, a relationship built on mutual responsibility.

The community provides the tools and gives content and context so that individuals can live their lives, independent and free.

He trusted that individuals would seize the opportunity that independence and freedom provided as long as citizens were not suffocated by the state’s embrace or poisoned by moral hazard.

Independent and free by virtue of a good education, good health, access to adequate nourishment and employment, protected by the law, and free, free to succeed, and free to fail.

A society made up of independent citizens where the state is the means to an end, and not an end in itself, will over time become richer, freer, more democratic, and more humane, because the community is enriched by the success of its citizens freeing them from market and the state.

It is Churchill’s unwavering faith in the individual which ultimately roots his idea of social justice.

This, I think, is the source of the ground spring of Churchill’s optimism that got him through so much travail so many times for so long including his own battle with depression.

And yet this might also be Churchill’s blind spot; that his faith that the individual would always strive to improve blinded him to the risk that the tools of social justice can also have the perverse effect of trapping people into a thick web of hopeless dependency and entitlement.

Moreover, as is being played out in Europe today, and the public schools of this province, the risk of dependency and entitlement applies equally to those charged with delivering social justice as well as those receiving it.

It remains to be seen in the second century of the Great Liberal Experiment, whether, as in May 1940, we truly deserve his faith.

Thank-you