I don’t know much about Winston Churchil. (I could probably find this out easily on’thold inturnet but I thought it would be better/more potentially fun to ask the dopers first)
I knew He defected from the Labour party to the Conservatives (correct me if I am wrong) That defection, and his popularity has made me wonder what his political beliefs/persuasion was deep down?
Was he a liberal? If so why did he switch parties?
Put this somewhere else mods if you like - I never mind that, it will probably turn into a general discussion about Churchill, but it should start with one or two factual answers (if it starts at all)
Really? Makes me wonder why mo mowlam (a labour mp and probably sociallist) had Churchill as her ‘Great Briton’. She mentioned some stuff he did that seemed socialistic to me.
(I am quickly realizing that I am out of my depth here)
Criticising Mowlam’s appearance is pretty cheap. She didn’t look like that before she had chemotherapy and radiotherapy for cancer. If you wanted to know why she backed Churchill in the Greatest Britons poll, Lobsang, you could’ve watched the TV documentary she presented about it.
This summary reminds us that he defected from the Tory Party to the Liberals in 1906. The Labour party was only founded in 1900 and wasn’t a government party until 1916, so there wouldn’t have been much point in Churchill joining Labour even if he’d been of a mind to (which he wouldn’t).
Arghhh, I do wish people when people asked for cites they would tell what exactly they disagreed with and why. If you want one just out of interest then you should really find it yourself.
I should of said secular left-wing Jews, because of course Churchill was a staunch zionist
Don’t over-react everton. We were not criticising her appearance. merely commenting on it. I am sure her resemblance to WC has nothing to do with chemo or radiography. Our ‘joke’ was not about her loss of hair or anything. It was about her facial resemblance.
I would note that the famous quotation “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain” is often attributed to Churchill.
Sorry, that link doesn’t work. It’s to a cached (expired) page on Google that can be found by searching on “Winston Churchill quotations liberal conservative”
Let me take a stab at answering the now almost forgotten OP.
Churchill was elected to parliament as a Conservative on Feb. 14, 1901. His politics were already somewhat askew from the Conservatives because his experiences in the Boer War had left him with an admiration with the Boers and an aversion to high military expenditures. (He wanted to build up the Navy over the Army as well.)
He was also at the time a free trader, during a period when the Conservatives were strongly for tariffs. This policy was to hurt farmers and workers, and Churchill had been influenced by his father’s commitment to “Tory Democracy” and wanted to resurrect the appeal that Disreali had had to the workers.
It was a small step from being identified as a Tory Radical to breaking loose from the party. He “crossed the floor” to sit with the Liberals on May 31, 1904. Realistically, his positions had fit very uncomfortably with the Conservatives the whole time; only his heritage and social status made him a Conservative.
In the 1920s he was voted out of office, part of a major shift in the political forces of the day. The Labour party, with a major socialist bent, had been gaining power after WWI. As said above, Churchill was anti-socialist his entire life and he pragmatically made the decision to go with the party that had the greatest chance for fighting the Labour forces. The fading Liberal party had little ability to do this. Even though he was still technicially a Liberal, he accepted a nomination for a safe Conservative seat in Epping in April 1924. He won and would continue to represent that seat for the rest of his parliamentary career.
This is all greatly oversimplified, of course. Churchill was a man of huge opinions and some huge contradictions. He was extremely foresighted on some issues and equally blinkered on others. But I think it’s fair to say that his basic positions did not change as much as did the parties around him. He moved where he was most ideologically comfortable, even if it meant changing parties, rather than fit his convictions to the party line.
It’s worth reading up on what Churchill and Lloyd George accomplished between 1908 and 1914 as leaders of the radical activist wing of the Liberal Party.
Churchill quit the Liberals in 1923 after standing for election as a Liberal and losing his seat. After a term as an “Independent Constitutionalist” he made his peace with the Conservatives, the only viable anti-Socialist party at the time.
In this instance you were making a very narrow, but clearly possibly contentious, assertion. I didn’t necessarily think it was wrong, merely that it raised an eyebrow. In that sense, I was asking out interest. Even so, given the very purpose of the board, it’d be slightly silly to expect me to look elsewhere, rather than just ask.
Actually, even with the quote in hand, it was not obvious how to easily establish the validity of your assertion. For instance, passing it through Google is of no help: the only sites that mention it are anti-Semitic ones, either of an Islamic or Holocaust denier variety. I’m not inclined to trust either when it comes to quote mining.
It was only when I guessed why the assertion was ringing vague alarm bells at the back of my mind, that I could find a professional historian taking its validity for granted, though arguing that its use out of context can be unfair. Following Churchill coming top in the BBC’s Great Britons poll, the Guardian (aka the Straightdope Newspaper of Record) ran a selection of unflattering quotations from him, including this one. That led to a complaint from Geoffrey Best on their letters page.
I originally heard that Churchill was antisemtic on another(left-wing) forum
I managed to track down the orginal website that produced this quote (I was pasting it from another forum), and it appears you are right. On the face of it the website does not appear racist but reading through some of the other articles (the quote came from a page of random quotes) it does appear to have strong racist undertones therefore I withdraw my assertation.