The forgotten side of Churchill

There is yet another film, after so many films and TV movies, portraying Winston Churchill as the great war leader. At the same time, a recent book celebrates Churchill the young warrior and the calumny that he shot the miners in Tonypandy is being revived on social media. But all this obscures an important aspect of Churchill's character, the liberal social reformer. As the synopsis of a 1996 book puts it:

Winston Churchill ranks as one of the founders of the welfare state. With Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George, he was the principal driving force behind the Liberal Party's welfare reforms of 1908–1911. At the Board of Trade, he pioneered measures to reduce poverty and unemployment through state intervention in the labour market. In 1909, he toured Britain campaigning for the ‘People's Budget’ and its radical proposals for the taxation of wealth. At the Home Office, his penal reforms as well as his measures to improve working conditions in shops and coal-mines were reflections of a continuing drive for social reform that was cut short by his transfer, in 1911, to the Admiralty. In the course of a lifetime in party politics, Churchill often touched on social questions, and there were other phases of his career in which he bore some responsibility for the development of social policy.

Those reforms sprang from an unlikely alliance between Lloyd George, a man who had worked his way up through the law and politics from a poor North Wales village and Churchill, from a patrician family - aided by William Beveridge, a prickly, self-assured, scion of the Raj who argued for social reforms backed by dogged research into existing schemes on the continent. Churchill and Ll G eventually fell out, and one wonders whether history would have been different if their alliance had continued.

Churchill never lost his feeling for social justice as his giving a free hand to RA Butler to draw up the 1944 Education Act showed.- and of course the Beveridge Report was published under the wartime coalition government which he headed.