In June 1945, at the opening of the general election campaign, Winston Churchill gave a speech that was broadcast over the BBC. Having recently read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, Churchill observed:
My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. Although it is now put forward in the main by people who have a good grounding in the Liberalism and Radicalism of the early part of this century, there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism….
The following paragraph has gone down in infamy, but it now reads like another example of Churchill’s power of prophecy:
I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are short-sighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them. No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and on longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America – where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?
Churchill’s reference to the Gestapo has branded the speech. However, in his 2018 biography Churchill: Walking With Destiny, Andrew Roberts notes that Churchill himself said the following month that the time would come when the speech “would be recognized as one of the greatest he had ever delivered,” but — Roberts drily commented — “that has not happened yet.”
In light of the arrest of Graham Linehan for three tweets, perhaps the time is coming soon. I would like to get the opinion of Sir Andrew on that.
