Beaconsfield Revisited: A question of which civilisation you prefer

‘One nation’ was Disraeli’s phrase. ‘Tory democracy’ was Lord Randolph’s, and it referred to the co-optation of social democracy into the Tory scheme: maintaining formal property rights but implementing regulations and welfare measures, to win the support of the ‘low’ for the ‘high’ against the ‘middle’ to maintain the hierarchy. The free market, which largely obtained in Britain in the 19th century, is fertile for driven upcomers and threatening to those of hereditary wealth and status, and the latter react by enticing a section of the poor to support them, usually by claiming to alleviate their destitution while casting a mirage of patriotism. The cost is seen as worthwhile, as power is more important than money; the producing of money can anyway be assigned mostly to the unborn. Noblesse oblige has always served as a pretext for the conservation of power.

It is illuminating to contrast Disraeli and the Churchills with their opposites in these matters: Gladstone, the 15th Earl of Derby, and Neville Chamberlain. Disraeli, made Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876, tried to have Britain enter the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 on the Turkish side. Lord Derby, the Foreign Secretary, steadfastly objected on grounds that included the effect on British state finances, which Disraeli appears to have disregarded. As John Charmley says, “Derby thought that Disraeli’s acuteness in seeing ‘what is most convenient for the moment’ was combined with ‘apparent indifference to what is to come of it in the long run.’ … The idea that he might compromise the ‘future of the country by reckless finance’ was, like ‘distant results of any kind’, foreign to Disraeli’s way of thinking.”5 Disraeli, like Edward VII and the Churchills, was a beneficiary of Rothschild favours from a young age, the point being not that that family swayed him, but that a habitual borrower is unsuitable to be an executive of anything that has a budget.

Allying against the middle classes applied in foreign policy, not only ‘social’ matters. “From the days of his early political novels through to the Reform Act triumph of 1867, Disraeli had liked to make rhetorical play with the notion of an alliance between the upper classes and the lower orders, and he did so now in late June [1877], pointing out to his colleagues that they ‘were united against Russia’. Derby’s contending view, that the ‘middle classes would always be against a war’, was dismissed by Disraeli with the comment that ‘fortunately the middle classes did not now govern’. … Derby recalled ‘many instances in which the majority of our class wished to interfere in European quarrels but no instance in which the nation agreed with them’. He did not ‘believe the majority of the public wants war with Russia, so long as it is honourably possible to keep out of one’. Here, side by side, were the old Tory tradition and the lineaments of what would supplant it. Disraeli was a ‘social imperialist’ long before anyone had invented the phrase.”6 Charmley adds that “As one contemporary commentator noted, ‘Disraeli-Toryism’… represented an ‘alliance between “society”, the music-halls and Lord Beaconsfield’.”7 ‘Jingoism’ comes from a song promoted in music halls in support of Disraeli and the Ottomans.

Disraeli was excited at the prospect of war. After he gained the upper hand in the Cabinet, “Derby found Disraeli ‘excited and inclined to swagger’, when he saw him on 11 February [1878]; he was ‘saying war was unavoidable’ and that although it would last ‘three years it would be a glorious and successful war for England’. Derby was ‘disgusted with his reckless way of talking, and evident enjoyment of an exciting episode in history, with which his name was to be joined’; this was the antithesis of Conservative statesmanship.”8 This is strikingly reminiscent of Winston Churchill. When war with Germany nearly came in the summer of 1911, Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, was impressed that while most ministers were away from Westminster, Churchill, “…not tied to London by official work, kept me company for love of the crisis. … his high-mettled spirit was exhilarated by the air of crisis and high events.”9 According to Roy Jenkins, in 1914, “Amid the gathering storm, Churchill was a consistent force for intervention and ultimately for war.”10 So was Lloyd George. “At 11 pm, August 4, as the ultimatum expired and the moment came when Britain was at war, a tearful Margot Asquith left her husband to go to bed, and as she began to ascend the stairs, ‘I saw Winston Churchill with a happy face striding towards the double doors of the Cabinet room.’”11 Churchill dreaded the thought of any end to the fighting. “On September 14, [Herbert] Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley, ‘I am almost inclined to shiver, when I hear Winston say that the last thing he would pray for is Peace.’”12 His exultation did not abate after the first battle of Ypres, when he told Asquith’s daughter Violet “I think a curse should rest on me because I am so happy. I know this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet — I cannot help it — I enjoy every second.”13 In January 1915: “Churchill, according to Margot Asquith’s diary account, waxed ecstatic about the war and his historic role in it: ‘My God! This is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling — it will be read by a thousand generations, think of that! Why I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me (eyes glowing but with a slight anxiety lest the word “delicious” should jar on me).’”14

Winston was a continuation of his father in this and other ways. Lord Randolph had, according to Edward Hamilton, “excessive intimacy” with the Rothschilds, especially Nathaniel. Reginald Brett, a friend of both, said that “Churchill and Natty Rothschild seem to conduct the business of the Empire in great measure together, in consultation with [Joseph] Chamberlain.” Niall Ferguson says that the wife of the Prime Minister, Lady Salisbury, spoke out “against Randolph who communicated everything to Natty Rothschild” and “hint[ed] that people did not give great financial houses political news for nothing”. He continues, “The evidence of an excessively close relationship seems compelling, especially in view of the precariousness of Churchill’s personal finances. As is now well known — though his earlier biographers suppressed the fact — he died owing the London house ‘the astonishing sum of £66,902’”.15 Ferguson minimises the accusation that Randolph’s annexation of Burma to India, with attendant financing opportunities, was a reward for Rothschild favours, but whoever gained, the taxpayers of India incurred the cost of the British forces sent to repel guerillas for the subsequent decade. According to R.F. Foster, the public were led to believe the cost would be one tenth of the actual amount.16 Ferguson is generous in saying that

“…it seems right to regard Natty’s bankrolling of Churchill after 1886 as primarily an act of friendship as syphilis inexorably took its toll; for politically and financially he was now more a liability than an asset. … It was less calculation than kindness to the increasingly pathetic Churchill which prompted the Rothschilds to take an interest in the career of his ambitious son, though no doubt they were gratified when young Winston opposed the Aliens Bill in 1904 as Liberal MP for Manchester.”17

No doubt they were, as,

“…when the idea of restrictions on immigration surfaced for the first time in the 1880s, the Rothschilds and their circle were disconcerted. As N. S. Joseph, the architect of Rothschild Buildings put it, ‘The letters which spell exclusion are not very different from those which compose expulsion.’ … When… the immigration question was referred to a Royal Commission… Natty made no secret of his opposition to ‘exclusion.’ … Natty dissented from the majority on the Commission, whose report called for ‘undesirable’ immigrants — including criminals, the mentally handicapped, people with contagious diseases and anyone ‘of notoriously bad character’ — to be barred from entry or expelled. In his minority report, Natty argued forcibly that such legislation ‘would certainly affect deserving and hard-working men, whose impecunious position on their arrival would be no criterion of their incapacity to attain independence.’” Implicitly the argument was that every criminal, beggar and invalid (and everyone else) should be free to move to Britain else the richest family in the world feared being expelled (by a government composed of their dinner guests). Nathaniel’s son Walter informed Britain that it “should be the refuge for the oppressed and unjustly ill-treated people of other nations so long as they were decent and hard-working.” A similar bill was passed in 1905, and Nathaniel cursed it as “‘a loathsome system of police interference and espionage, of passports and arbitrary power.’ … Nevertheless, he opposed petitioning for its repeal … on the ground that a renewed debate might lead to a tightening of the rules; instead he pinned his hopes on persuading governments to apply it leniently.”

Ferguson gratuitously adds that “if nothing else, the passage of the Aliens Act in 1905 gave the lie to Arnold White’s claim that ‘the Prime Minister and the Cabinet of England alter their policy … at the frown of the Rothschilds.’”18 Perhaps so, but the Rothschilds appear to have had their way regardless of the Act.

Ferguson attributes the Rothschilds’ support for the Churchills “less [to] kindness than calculation”, but it is both kind and provident for rich people to cultivate young politicians, with or without particular requests in mind. Disraeli, Randolph and Winston were all supported by and lived in the ambit of the Rothschilds and Jewish magnates in general, the same set who were so benevolent to the extravagant Edward VII. As Martin Gilbert says, “After Lord Randolph Churchill’s death in 1895, shortly after [Winston] Churchill’s twentieth birthday, his father’s Jewish friends continued their friendship with the son. Lord Rothschild, Sir Ernest Cassel and Baron de Hirsch frequently invited him to their houses.”19 He also became friends with (the younger) Lionel de Rothschild and Philip Sassoon, both closer to his age. Even considering the older men’s acts of real charity, including large donations to medical causes and Cassel’s support for the British Red Cross in the First World War, their generosity to particular individuals is remarkable. Lord Randolph looked on Cassel as a man to ask for favours, and after Randolph’s death Cassel employed Winston’s brother Jack. He paid huge sums for furnishings in at least two of Winston’s residences and often gave him smaller sums for other purposes.20 Just as Rothschild, Hirsch and Cassel helped manage Edward’s finances, Cassel did the same for Churchill. Nous was perhaps more valuable than munificence. “Cassel’s help to Churchill was continuous,” according to Gilbert, and was crucial at several vulnerable moments, as in late 1915 when Churchill, already heavily in debt, lost his main source of income. Cassel immediately provided enough money for Churchill’s crisis to pass and promised him, in Churchill’s words, “unlimited credit”.21

We find evidence of continuous assistance but no quid pro quo as such.22 On grand matters, at least earlier in his life, Churchill and the Jewish elite could be at variance. In contrast with his enthusiasm, the Rothschilds do not appear to have welcomed war with Germany (especially in alliance with Russia) or benefited from it overall. Instead of a transactional relationship, I surmise that warmongering politicians, who tend to be reckless about state finances, often treat their own finances the same way, and rich men like Cassel appear to them as an answer to prayer. In that way, war, debt and Judeophilia go together. I suspect that not being asked for anything in return was deeply impressive to men like the Churchills and fostered a gratitude which the beneficiaries sought opportunities to show in their actions. Borrowing can engender obsequiousness. There is also tradition: Churchill’s ancestor’s famous campaigns in the War of the Spanish Succession were financed very profitably by Solomon de Medina; thus did the family gain its high status.23 For them and other aristocrats, and for monarchs in many times and places, borrowing from ‘the Jews’ was a habitual resort in funding war or luxury. Winston Churchill, no matter how many times he became dangerously indebted, appears to have treated the employment of valets and chauffeurs as indispensable, and his household, typically paying dozens of staff at once, consumed enormous amounts of wine, spirits and cigars even when he was insecure.24 It would be a surprise if such a man was unpliant to those who enabled him to live on his high plateau of indulgence. Churchill was aware that he reciprocated by being a friend to them in politics, and wrote to Cassel’s granddaughter Edwina after his friend’s death: “The last talk we had — about six weeks ago — he told me that he hoped he would live to see me at the head of affairs. I could see how great his interest was in my doings and fortunes.”25

To Jews who feared hostility from native populations, such relationships could bring security. Likewise, those who encounter exclusivity can identify gateways through it by observing who tends to fail to support themselves. These were probably the main attraction of Edward for Cassel, who according to Davenport-Hines “sought royal favour as compensation for prevalent anti-Semitism”.26 The same measures that grant security tend also to grant power.

Churchill was a friend to Jewry more broadly, not only rich men like Cassel. By Churchill’s stance on the Aliens Bill of 1904, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were making their presence known in politics; Britain began to experience the impact of refugees. Churchill started as a Tory MP in Oldham but rebelled in favour of the Liberals in Parliament, and his constituency party withdrew support from him in December 1903. Liberals in Manchester North-West invited him in early 1904 to stand there at the next election. As Martin Gilbert describes,

“One of Churchill’s principal supporters in the Manchester Liberal Party was Nathan Laski, a forty-one-year-old Manchester merchant, President of the Old Hebrew Congregation of Manchester, and Chairman of the Manchester Jewish Hospital, who enlisted Churchill’s support, as a matter of urgency for the Jews, in seeking to prevent the passage of the Aliens Bill through Parliament.”27

Alas, Gilbert does not give details of how Churchill was enlisted, but he was clearly devoted to the cause. Gilbert continues: “In May 1904, Nathan Laski sent Churchill a dossier of papers relating to the Aliens Bill, which included official government immigration statistics. Churchill prepared a detailed criticism of the Bill, which he sent both to Laski and as an open letter to the newspapers.”

The Guardian and Times published it, among others. Churchill referred to Laski’s figures in his letter: “What has surprised me most… is how few aliens there are in Great Britain. To judge by the talk there has been, one would have imagined we were being overrun by the swarming invasion and ‘ousted’ from our island”. Churchill remarked that the official rate was “only 7,000” immigrants per year and that “Germany has twice as large and France four times as large a proportion of foreigners as we have.” Therefore, “It does not appear… that there can be urgent or sufficient reasons, racial or social, for departing from the old tolerant and generous practice of free entry and asylum to which this country has so long adhered and from which it has so often greatly gained.”28

Churchill also raised the prospect of “an intolerant or anti-Semitic Home Secretary” and criticised the fact that the bill would require police and customs officials to be “the judges of characters and credentials.” He was concerned with the effect on the “simple immigrant, the political refugee, the helpless and the poor” who would not have “the smallest right of appeal to the broad justice of the English courts”.29 He said that the bill served “to gratify a small but noisy section of [the government’s] own supporters and to purchase a little popularity in the constituencies by dealing harshly with a number of unfortunate aliens who have no votes… It is expected to appeal to insular prejudice against foreigners, to racial prejudice against Jews, and to labour prejudice against competition.” Churchill then referred to the bill as “a measure which, without any proved necessity, smirches those ancient traditions of freedom and hospitality for which Britain has been so long renowned.’”30 Put in newer terms, Britain was a nation of immigrants, built by diversity and defined by tolerance, and should #standtogether against those who would whip up fears of being swamped and spread anti-Semitic replacement theories.

Churchill, in his own words, “ratted” from the Tories to the Liberals on the same day his letter to Laski was published.31 A week later, he spoke against the Bill in the Commons, but it passed its first stage, and went to committee for review, wherein Churchill and his comrades effectively filibustered, challenging every word. As Gilbert says, “by the seventh day of the committee’s deliberations, only three lines of a single clause had been discussed. A further ten clauses and 233 lines remained to be examined. Anxious to avoid the continuation of such thorough scrutiny, the government abandoned the Bill. Churchill had supported the Jews, and prevailed.”32

The Liberals formed a minority government in December 1905 and passed their own, less restrictive bill into law; Churchill was unable to stop it. While Lord Rothschild argued for “persuading governments to apply it leniently”, other Jewish activists were squarely for repeal. An editorial in the Jewish Chronicle proclaimed criminal intent: “On our part the Act should be fought … as the laws against free speech were eluded. … Let not anyone be afraid of the epithet ‘evading the law’.”33 Churchill showed a modicum of independence from Rothschild by siding with the repealers in a letter to the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone. Though he had already publicly attacked the idea of restriction on principle anyway, he found every possible fault in the detail too, and summarised the Act as “useless and vexatious”.34 Nathan Laski’s gratitude notwithstanding, his constituents voted him out in 1908; as a rising star of the party, he was offered a safe seat in Dundee.

Five days after his party formed the new government in 1905, Churchill spoke at a rally in Manchester prompted by the Kishinev riots that had occurred six weeks before (and in April 1903). The Chronicle approvingly reported his extensive use of pathos and said that he spoke of these ‘pogroms’ as “not spontaneous but rather in the nature of a deliberate plan”, a canard levelled at the Russian administration since the 1881 riots in the Pale of Settlement and contradicted by all archival evidence.35 His father had spoken at a similar event in 1881. There appears to be no record of either man saying a word about the thousands of Bulgarian civilians killed by Ottoman forces in 1876 or the same regime’s sequence of enormous massacres of Armenians in the decade preceding the rally in Manchester; this was not only because those nations had not colonised Cheetham. Disraeli had mocked the true reports of the crimes in Bulgaria. As Michael Makovsky says, “Lord Randolph Churchill … considered himself a protégé of Disraeli. … Young Winston imbibed Lord Randolph’s devotion to Disraeli and philo-Semitism.” The father and the son both imitated Disraeli in piously intoning, through their lives, a blasphemous threat dressed as a proverb: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.”36 Under the Ottomans, Jews had prospered with little disturbance; perhaps the Christians could bear subjugation more demurely. At the Manchester rally, condemning the Ottomans’ arch-enemy, Churchill spoke alongside his friend Chaim Weizmann, who came from the Russian Empire and was a leader of the world Zionist movement. Churchill sent a message to the annual conference of the English Zionist Federation in January 1908, based on a draft by Moses Gaster, a friend of Nathan Laski. Churchill declared “I am in full sympathy with the historical traditional aspirations of the Jews. The restoration to them of a centre of true racial and political integrity would be a tremendous event in the history of the world.”37

Churchill wore openly his intent to deny to Britons what he was determined to provide for “the Jews”. Jews must have their own homeland, and anywhere else they chose to live should be treated as their land too. As David Cesarani relates, “During 1902 and 1903, there were disturbances in South Wales at Dowlais and Pontypridd during which Jews were physically assaulted. At Limerick, in Southern Ireland, a local priest incited his congregation to mount a crippling boycott of Jewish traders.”38 [but see here for Andrew Joyce’s take.]Later, “During the years before the First World War, anti-Jewish feeling in Britain intensified appreciably. The most dramatic eruption occurred in August 1911, in the valleys of South Wales. For three days the small, isolated Jewish communities suffered intermittent rioting and vandalism.”39 According to Gilbert,

“In the days after the attacks, Churchill ensured that as many as possible of the participants in the riots were arrested, brought before the courts, and sentenced to up to three months’ hard labour. After the passing of the sentences, local populations called mass meetings and decided to collect signatures for a petition protesting against them. A deputation presented this petition to the Home Secretary, but Churchill replied, as the record of the meeting noted, that after having given the evidence ‘his careful and serious consideration, he cannot interfere with the decision of the local justices.’”

As with the riots in the Russian Empire, most historians seem to neglect attempting to explain the violence. Gilbert shows no curiosity, only satisfaction: “From his position of authority, Churchill had acted without hesitation to stamp on violence in Britain.”40

Given the example set by Churchill, it is small wonder that the party of which he is the icon is now importing thousands of people per day from all over the world. The Chronicle’s call for immigrants and their helpers to evade the law is now fulfilled by organised criminal networks operating brazenly. Everyone who objects is likened to a fascist and an anti-Semite, upon which their targeting by state surveillance and repression is deemed legitimate. ‘Tory democrats’ only ever regarded working class support as a means of preventing a new ruling class supplanting their own, and in that endeavour they find social democrats congenial; their shared fear is of genuine conservatives and patriots. For Churchill, there was only ever ‘one nation’ that mattered: Israel, first as a global ‘nation’ working across many countries, and after 1948 as a nation-state. He committed his life to his own pleasure and to Jewish power, hence his exaltation by its champions. Martin Gilbert, as a Zionist Jew, was a fitting choice as his official biographer.

Gilbert relates Churchill’s advocacy for replacing Arabs with Jews as the majority in Palestine at the Peel Commission in 1936:

“Returning to the British conquest of Palestine in the First World War, [Horace] Rumbold remarked: ‘You conquer a nation and you have given certain pledges the result of which has been that the indigenous population is subject to the invasion of a foreign race.’ Churchill did not accept that the Jews were a ‘foreign race’. ‘Not at all,’ he said. It was the Arabs who had been the outsiders, the conquerors. ‘In the time of Christ,’ Churchill pointed out, ‘the population of Palestine was much greater, when it was a Roman province.’ That was when Palestine was a Jewish province of Rome. ‘When the Mohammedan upset occurred in world history,’ Churchill continued, ‘and the great hordes of Islam swept over these places they broke it all up, smashed it all up. You have seen the terraces on the hills which used to be cultivated, which under Arab rule have remained a desert. … It is a lower manifestation, the Arab.’”

Professor Reginald Coupland “complained that the Jewish Agency … had its representatives in London ‘and they can speak to the Colonial Office and the Arabs feel on their side they are rather left in the cold. They have not the great engine the Jews have.’ Churchill replied brusquely, not hiding his preference: ‘It is a question of which civilisation you prefer.’”

Referring to the Balfour Declaration, “Sir Horace Rumbold then asked Churchill, ‘When do you consider the Jewish Home to be established? You have no ideas of numbers? When would you say we have implemented our undertaking and the Jewish National Home is established? At what point?’ Churchill’s answer was unequivocal. Britain’s undertaking would be implemented ‘when it was quite clear the Jewish preponderance in Palestine was very marked, decisive, and when we were satisfied that we had no further duties to discharge to the Arab population, the Arab minority.’”

Churchill rejected the idea that Palestinian Arabs had good reason to complain about the rapid Jewish immigration into Palestine, and “allowed himself to be drawn into a more contentious discussion. ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger,’ he told the commissioners, ‘even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.’”41

Britain is undergoing a disaster comparable to that endured by the “lower manifestation” in Palestine. The Christians there are spat upon in their own land by some of the “higher grade race”, and, just as the Palestinians have found, the ascent of that “race” in our land is coeval with our decline. A glance at a few of those close to Churchill at the time of the Aliens Act is illustrative: Jacob Gaster, son of the senior Zionist Moses Gaster, was a lifelong communist. His sister Phina married Neville Laski, a judge, a senior figure in the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, and the son of Nathan. Neville’s brother Harold was a Marxist, a Zionist, a BBC broadcaster, and a supporter of Stalin and the Frankfurt School before he became Chairman of the Labour Party, which then completed the welfare state Churchill and Lloyd George had begun.

We have spoken here only of the earlier part of Winston Churchill’s career. Our theme of the confluence of war, debt, socialism and Judeophilia will be continued in the next article.