211. Troubled times: India, Press Harlots, and Winston Churchill

This episode looks at the impact in Britain of continuing trouble in India. There Gandhi had launched his salt march, walking to the sea to make salt, in breach of the British monopoly and the heavy tax on salt inflicted by the colonial authorities. That had led to his being gaoled.

In Britain, the report of the Simon Commission recommended limited reform in India, but not the granting of Dominion Status. That was in spite of the view of one of the Commission’s co-chairs, Labour’s Clement Attlee, who had been convinced of the need for that status following his travels with the Commission around India.

The Prime Minister called a Round Table conference in London which had representation from many Indian groups, unlike the Simon Commission which had had none. Unfortunately, the gaoled Gandhi’s organisation, the Indian National naturally didn’t attend, and it was the most significant in the sub-Continent. That rather underlines how silly it is to label an opponent as criminal and then proclaim that you don’t talk to criminals – it makes negotiations meaningless.

Fortunately, the Viceroy of India Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax) released Gandhi and agreed the Gandhi-Irwin pact with him, which included his attendance at a second Round Table.

Winston Churchill was furious that any moves were being made towards Indian self-rule at all, and that his party leader Stanley Baldwin backed them. Baldwin was also under pressure from a campaign by press barons to make him adopt a policy backing tariffs on imports. Baldwin saw off that pressure, denouncing the newspaper proprietors for pursing power without responsibility, ‘the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’.

Even so, he began to soften his own opposition to tariffs, further adding to Churchill’s disquiet. By January 1931, he’d had enough and resigned from Baldwin’s leadership team. That, for him, was the start of what he would later call his ‘wilderness years’.

Illustration: Gandhi, for Churchill a seditious, half-naked fakir, visiting millworkers in Lancashire while in England for the Second Round Table conference. Photo by Keystone Press Agency Ltd. National Portrait Gallery x137614.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License