§ Mr. Stefan Terlezki (Cardiff, West)I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide for the discontinuation of May Day bank holiday and to establish the Sir Winston Churchill National Day on or near to 10th May.For the past 42 years, the people of this country have enjoyed freedom and democracy and peace and tranquillity—in contrast to other parts of the world where fighting and killing never stop, where poverty and slavery still exist and where freedom and democracy are never implemented. I have been privileged to share freedom, peace and democracy with the people of this country for the past 39 years and that is due to the dedication, steadfastness, resilience, patriotism and great sacrifices that the British people and their great leader, Sir Winston Churchill, made during the last world war. Sir Winston Churchill took Britain and its allies through the greatest war in history, and Britain won.
When I was a small boy still living in the Ukraine before the second world war I remember so well my father telling me that in Britain there was a man called Winston Churchill who liked to smoke cigars and who had great courage, foresight and dedication and the determination of a great fighter who believed in freedom and would never surrender. My father was right.
Sir Winston Churchill, throughout the second world war, and for that matter throughout his political life, never gave up. He fought not only for life but for the value of life and the British people came to realise the truth of his loyalty and the bond he formed. They cheered him when he and Britain stood together, but not alone.
I experienced slavery and oppression under Marxism-Communism, and many millions of people still do. I experienced Nazism, having been taught at school that Stalin was my father and later that Hitler was my fuhrer, when I was a slave. It was political indoctrination that made me think that I would never experience freedom and democracy and even wonder whether such things ever existed.
When I arrived penniless to Britain in 1948, I realised that I had arrived in heaven on earth. I experienced for the first time freedom and democracy, and all that was possible because of a man called Winston Churchill and the resilience of the British people.
This House, the mother of Parliaments, the cradle of democracy, still carries the scars of the second world war. Hitler wanted to destroy it, but it was saved by brave men of Britain, and Sir Winston Churchill was one of them. They saved it for us all to speak, to debate, to agree and to disagree and to keep the light of freedom burning. I am further convinced that I would not be here today doing what I do and speaking as I do, nor would there be right hon. and hon. Members of the House had it not been for Sir Winston Churchill who saved Britain from the Nazi holocaust and paved the way for the peace that we have all enjoyed over the past 42 years—[Interruption.]
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. We often hear things in the House with which we do not wholly agree.
§ Mr. TerlezkiThe purpose of my Bill is to remind the people of this country time and again, the old and the young—especially the young—who do not know or who may have forgotten, that, when Britain was in the grip of 168 the iron fist of Nazism and was bombarded indiscriminately, a man called Winston Churchill, with his determination, courage and dedication, together with the British people, made it possible for us all to be free today.
I am not in the habit of creating more public holidays just for the sake of it, nor am I willing to do so. Some people say that we have too many holidays already, and I agree. My reason for seeking to discontinue the first Monday in May as a national holiday and nominating 10 May or near to it as Sir Winston Churchill national day is that that is the day when he became Prime Minister of Britain in 1940. Furthermore, it is my heartfelt desire to establish a permanent reminder to the British people, some of whom tend to take freedom and democracy for granted, that had it not been for a man called Winston Churchill who made it possible for them all to live in a free and democratic Britain, the alternative would have been tyranny, slavery, extermination, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka, and Babi Yar.
I can almost remember Sir Winston Churchill saying that we had a rendezvous with destiny. Will we keep that rendezvous or spend our sunset years telling our children and grandchildren what it was like when men were free? What will our answers be when we are asked, "Where were you when freedom was lost?" and, "What did you find that was more precious to you than freedom?"?
Nothing must be more precious to us than freedom. It is like fresh air: if one has not got it, one misses it. I know that. That is why I ask the leave of the House to bring in my Bill and why I ask the House to give that Bill its full support and remind the people of this country, the old, the young and the generations still to come, of Sir Winston Churchill, his steadfastness and courageous leadership in the hour of this country's greatest peril. He captured the hearts and imagination of the people and saved Britain from Nazi slavery. In return we should give him a place in British history as the greatest freedom fighter in modern times.
§ Mr. SpeakerDoes the hon. Member seek to oppose the motion?
§ Mr. NellistYes, Sir.
If the hon. Member for Cardiff, West, (Mr. Terlezki) had been arguing for an extension to statutory holidays, this House would undoubtedly have welcomed it. Contrary to what the hon. Gentleman said, Britain has the lowest number of public holidays, in the whole of Europe, apart from the Netherlands. We have eight statutory days, but some countries have almost double that. Britain is in a minority in Europe in not having legal minimum standards of holiday entitlement for those in work. In many cases, the average allowed in Britain by employers is a week less than that given in many other EEC countries. Together with longer average hours of work and lower rates of pay, those facts knock on the head the Tory idea of lazy British workers.
Along with a lower retirement age and a shorter working week, an extension to public holidays would have been a useful step towards seriously reducing unemployment, or sharing out more equitably the available work. However, that was furthest from the hon. Gentleman's considerations.
169 Many Tories equate May day with tanks parading through the streets of Moscow. That is about as correct as slandering all Catholics with the Spanish inquisition. To set the record straight, the origin of May day was in 1886 in America when 350,000 workers in more than 11,000 establishments downed tools in a demand for an eight-hour day. It is a scandalous indictment of capitalism that in many industries in this country, such as bakery or the retail trades, that demand is still unfulfilled 101 years later. The centre of that movement was in Chicago, which was the fastest growing city of its day, the Mexico City or Caracas of America. It had a huge, developing factory system in which workers worked for between 10 and 18 hours a day.
In 1868, the United States passed an eight-hour law, but during the next decade and a half it was enforced only twice. That is only marginally worse than this Tory Government's enforcement of the Wages Council Act 1979. In the autumn of 1885, one of the workers' leading union organisations, the knights of Labour, planned rallies and demonstrations for the following May to enforce a law that the employers, especially the railway barons, treated with contempt, The slogan of the day was, in the words of one of the songs of that movement,
8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will.Those words are almost identical to those used by British trade union leaders of the time, such as Tom Mann of the engineers, who was born and bred in Coventry.
On 1 May 1886, the first national general strike in American history took place. As a direct consequence, more than 500,000 workers saw their hours of work substantially reduced—in many cases down to an eight-hour day with no loss in pay.
The employers lost no time in preparing their revenge. On 1 May the Chicago Mail named two union leaders and stated:
Mark them for today. Keep them in mind. Hold them personally responsible for any trouble that occurs. Make an example of them if that trouble occurs".That time was not long in coming.On 3 May, 500 police herded 300 scabs through a picket line at International Harvester's. When the pickets resisted, the police opened fire and several workers died. A protest meeting was organised for Haymarket square and towards its end, in the pouring rain with only a couple of hundred workers left, the police arrived to break it up. A bomb was thrown. It was never established by whom and at the subsequent trial of the union leaders the prosecution said it was irrelevant and the judge agreed. Seven police officers and an unknown number of workers died in that assassination. Hundreds of union activists were arrested throughout the country and eight union leaders were put on trial. Seven of them had not been at the demonstration and the eighth was the speaker on the platform, so he could not have thrown the bomb.
Legality was never the aim of that trial; revenge was. The Chicago Tribune of the day gave the game away with the headline:
Hang an organiser from every lamp-post".The trial was absurd: the jury even included relatives of the dead policemen witnesses and jurors were bribed; and the judge played noughts and crosses with young society ladies during testimony. A local business man summed up the employers' view with the words: 170I don't consider these people to have been guilty of any offence, but they must be hanged … the labour movement must be crushed. The Knights of Labour will never dare to create discontent again if these man are hanged.International protests followed the inevitable verdict of this scandalous frame-up and judicial murder. Huge meetings were addressed in England and Wales by people, including Eleanor Marx, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and William Morris. The city council of Paris protested at the "political crime" and when five of the union leaders were executed, a quarter of the population of Chicago turned out for their funeral.
From that day on, 1 May has grown to an international day of solidarity among working people. Its first celebration took place in 1890 on the slogans of "An 8-hour day", "International solidarity" and "Against militarism". As workers emerge from tyranny and repression in whatever country, they adopt that day as theirs. The most recent example is perhaps the most down trodden exploited people in the world—the black workers of South Africa, especially mineworkers who, in the past three years, have struck for the demand that May day be a paid public holiday. Now the hon. Gentleman wishes to change that tradition, which was introduced in the United Kingdom in 1978 by a Labour Government.
If the hon. Gentleman gets his way this afternoon and is given leave to introduce his Bill, which Winston Churchill will we be celebrating? Is it the one who said in October 1903:
I am an English Liberal. I hate the Tory Party, their men, their words and their methods."?Is it the Home Secretary, who personally drafted troops into the South Wales coalfields in 1911? Is it the Secretary of State for War who in 1920 called for military intervention in Russia? Or is it the man who, appointed Tory Chancellor in 1924, yet without rejoining the Tory party until the following year, put Britain back on the gold standard, which led to increased export prices and substantial wage cuts? Is it the man who advocated the use of tanks, machine guns and armoured cars during the general strike of 1926? Or is it the prolific writer who, in the 1939 editions of his books "Step-by-Step" and "Great Contemporaries", wrote about Hitler's rise to power:The story of that struggle cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance, the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy, conciliate or overcome all authorities or resistance which barred his path…I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war, I hoped that we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations.That is the same Churchill who echoed the same unbounded approval as Tory newspapers of the day of the rise of Mussolini and Franco.While Fascism was carrying out the physical elimination of workers' organisations, many sections of the British ruling class gave it their support. Only when it began to encroach on British capitalist markets and areas of influence did Churchill and others change their tune. For them, not for my hon. Friends, the war was about prestige and global influence, not the methods of Mussolini and Hitler. Those who died, including more than 20 million Russians and hundreds of thousands of Allied troops, genuinely abhorred Fascism.
Churchill's place will never be missing from the history books, although the interpretation of his importance will no doubt change. If the House genuinely wants to commemorate and commiserate with those who fell, it 171 could do worse than organise an additional public holiday for the millions of unsung heroes who have died consistently opposing Fascism over the past 65 years.
§ Question put, pursuant to Standing Order No. 19 (Motions for leave to bring in Bills and nomination of Select Committees at comencement of public business):—
§ The House divided: Ayes 160, Noes 80.
172| Division No. 124] | [4.00 pm |
| AYES | |
| Alexander, Richard | Hayhoe, Rt Hon Sir Barney |
| Alison, Rt Hon Michael | Heseltine, Rt Hon Michael |
| Ashby, David | Hickmet, Richard |
| Aspinwall, Jack | Hill, James |
| Atkins, Rt Hon Sir H. | Hind, Kenneth |
| Atkinson, David (B'm'th E) | Hirst, Michael |
| Baker, Nicholas (Dorset N) | Holt, Richard |
| Batiste, Spencer | Howarth, Gerald (Cannock) |
| Beaumont-Dark, Anthony | Howell, Ralph (Norfolk, N) |
| Best, Keith | Hubbard-Miles, Peter |
| Bevan, David Gilroy | Jackson, Robert |
| Blackburn, John | Jessel, Toby |
| Blaker, Rt Hon Sir Peter | Kellett-Bowman, Mrs Elaine |
| Boscawen, Hon Robert | King, Roger (B'ham N'field) |
| Bottomley, Mrs Virginia | Knight, Dame Jill (Edgbaston) |
| Bowden, A. (Brighton K'to'n) | Knowles, Michael |
| Bowden, Gerald (Dulwich) | Lamont, Rt Hon Norman |
| Braine, Rt Hon Sir Bernard | Latham, Michael |
| Browne, John | Lawrence, Ivan |
| Buck, Sir Antony | Leigh, Edward (Gainsbor'gh) |
| Budgen, Nick | Lewis, Sir Kenneth (Stamf'd) |
| Butler, Rt Hon Sir Adam | Lightbown, David |
| Carlisle, John (Luton N) | Lilley, Peter |
| Carlisle, Rt Hon M. (W'ton S) | Lloyd, Sir Ian (Havant) |
| Carttiss, Michael | Lloyd, Peter (Fareham) |
| Cash, William | Lord, Michael |
| Chapman, Sydney | McCrindle, Robert |
| Churchill, W. S. | McCurley, Mrs Anna |
| Clark, Sir W. (Croydon S) | MacKay, Andrew (Berkshire) |
| Colvin, Michael | McLoughlin, Patrick |
| Conway, Derek | McQuarrie, Albert |
| Coombs, Simon | Malone, Gerald |
| Cope, John | Marshall, Michael (Arundel) |
| Cormack, Patrick | Mather, Sir Carol |
| Couchman, James | Maude, Hon Francis |
| Dorrell, Stephen | Merchant, Piers |
| Douglas-Hamilton, Lord J. | Meyer, Sir Anthony |
| Durant, Tony | Miller, Hal (B'grove) |
| Emery, Sir Peter | Monro, Sir Hector |
| Eyre, Sir Reginald | Montgomery, Sir Fergus |
| Fairbairn, Nicholas | Morris, M. (N'hampton S) |
| Fallon, Michael | Moynihan, Hon C. |
| Finsberg, Sir Geoffrey | Mudd, David |
| Fookes, Miss Janet | Neale, Gerrard |
| Forsyth, Michael (Stirling) | Nicholls, Patrick |
| Fox, Sir Marcus | Norris, Steven |
| Franks, Cecil | Page, Sir John (Harrow W) |
| Gale, Roger | Percival, Rt Hon Sir Ian |
| Garel-Jones, Tristan | Pollock, Alexander |
| Glyn, Dr Alan | Portillo, Michael |
| Goodhart, Sir Philip | Powell, William (Corby) |
| Gorst, John | Raffan, Keith |
| Gow, Ian | Rathbone, Tim |
| Gower, Sir Raymond | Rhodes James, Robert |
| Grant, Sir Anthony | Rhys Williams, Sir Brandon |
| Greenway, Harry | Roe, Mrs Marion |
| Gregory, Conal | Ross, Stephen (Isle of Wight) |
| Griffiths, Peter (Portsm'th N) | Rowe, Andrew |
| Grylls, Michael | Rumbold, Mrs Angela |
| Hamilton, Neil (Tatton) | Ryder, Richard |
| Hannam, John | Sackville, Hon Thomas |
| Hargreaves, Kenneth | Sainsbury, Hon Timothy |
| Harris, David | Sayeed, Jonathan |
| Hawkins, C. (High Peak) | Shaw, Giles (Pudsey) |
| Hawkins, Sir Paul (N'folk SW) | Shaw, Sir Michael (Scarb') |
| Hayes, J. | Shepherd, Colin (Hereford) |
| Shersby, Michael | Thompson, Patrick (N'ich N) |
| Smith, Tim (Beaconsfield) | Thurnham, Peter |
| Speed, Keith | Townend, John (Bridlington) |
| Speller, Tony | Tracey, Richard |
| Spicer, Jim (Dorset W) | Twinn, Dr Ian |
| Stern, Michael | Walker, Bill (T'side N) |
| Stevens, Lewis (Nuneaton) | Wardle, C. (Bexhill) |
| Stewart, Allan (Eastwood) | Wells, Sir John (Maidstone) |
| Stewart, Andrew (Sherwood) | Winterton, Nicholas |
| Stokes, John | Wood, Timothy |
| Stradling Thomas, Sir John | Woodcock, Michael |
| Taylor, John (Solihull) | Yeo, Tim |
| Taylor, Teddy (S'end E) | |
| Terlezki, Stefan | Tellers for the Ayes: |
| Thomas, Rt Hon Peter | Mr. Peter Bruinvels and |
| Thompson, Donald (Calder V) | Mr. John Watts. |
| NOES | |
| Ashley, Rt Hon Jack | Jones, Barry (Alyn & Deeside) |
| Ashton, Joe | Lamond, James |
| Atkinson, N. (Tottenham) | Lewis, Ron (Carlisle) |
| Banks, Tony (Newham NW) | Lloyd, Tony (Stretford) |
| Barron, Kevin | Lofthouse, Geoffrey |
| Beckett, Mrs Margaret | McKay, Allen (Penistone) |
| Benn, Rt Hon Tony | McNamara, Kevin |
| Bennett, A. (Dent'n & Red'sh) | Madden, Max |
| Blair, Anthony | Marek, Dr John |
| Boyes, Roland | Marshall, David (Shettleston) |
| Brown, Hugh D. (Provan) | Maxton, John |
| Brown, N. (N'c'tle-u-Tyne E) | Maynard, Miss Joan |
| Brown, Ron (E'burgh, Leith) | Michie, William |
| Caborn, Richard | Mikardo, Ian |
| Campbell-Savours, Dale | Millan, Rt Hon Bruce |
| Carter-Jones, Lewis | Nellist, David |
| Clark, Dr David (S Shields) | Oakes, Rt Hon Gordon |
| Clarke, Thomas | O'Brien, William |
| Clay, Robert | O'Neill. Martin |
| Clelland, David Gordon | Park, George |
| Corbyn, Jeremy | Patchett, Terry |
| Crowther, Stan | Pike, Peter |
| Cunliffe, Lawrence | Raynsford, Nick |
| Davies, Ronald (Caerphilly) | Rees, Rt Hon M. (Leeds S) |
| Dixon, Donald | Richardson, Ms Jo |
| Dubs, Alfred | Roberts, Ernest (Hackney N) |
| Eadie, Alex | Sheldon, Rt Hon R. |
| Eastham, Ken | Short, Ms Clare (Ladywood) |
| Evans, John (St. Helens N) | Skinner, Dennis |
| Fisher, Mark | Snape, Peter |
| Foot, Rt Hon Michael | Stewart, Rt Hon D. (W Isles) |
| Foster, Derek | Straw, Jack |
| Fraser, J. (Norwood) | Thorne, Stan (Preston) |
| Garrett, W. E. | Torney, Tom |
| Golding, Mrs Llin | Welsh, Michael |
| Hamilton, James (M'well N) | Wigley, Dafydd |
| Hamilton, W. W. (Fife Central) | Williams, Rt Hon A. |
| Harrison, Rt Hon Walter | Winnick, David |
| Haynes, Frank | |
| Heffer, Eric S. | Tellers for the Noes: |
| Hoyle, Douglas | Mr. Harry Cohen and |
| Hughes, Roy (Newport East) | Mr. Eddie Loyden. |
§ Question accordingly agreed to.
§ Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Stephan Terlezki, Sir Anthony Grant, Sir Marcus Fox, Sir Anthony Kershaw. Sir John Stradling Thomas, Sir Geoffrey Finsberg, Mr. George Gardiner, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Robert Rhodes James, Mr. Ivan Lawrence, Mr. John Watts and Mr. David Atkinson.
-
c172
- SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL NATIONAL DAY BILL 58 words