Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative

Abstract

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.