LETTER: Getting facts on Churchill right avoids fake news

I refer to Peter Meakin’s letter once again advocating a land tax (“Holding the liberal line is getting harder in SA”, October 1). In support he quotes from a speech allegedly delivered by Winston Churchill at the Kings Theatre, Edinburgh, on July 17 1909, directed at the benefits the landlord obtained from the making of roads and improvement of services — all while the landlord allegedly sits still.

What Meakin did not mention is that that speech would have been delivered by the young Churchill who had turned his coat from his natural Tory Whig landed interest and fallen under the malevolent influence of the “Welsh wizard” David Lloyd George.

In 1909 the constitutional crisis reached its height when the UK House of Lords continually blocked the passing of money bills passed by the House of Commons. This amounted to a rejection of a policy of “robbing Peter to pay the Pauls, when there are always more Pauls than Peters”. The young Churchill was then a virulent member of the anti-Peter group.

It is noteworthy that this constitutional impasse was broken by the threat by “Squiffy” Asquith’s party to create 500 peers. When it became known that Paul Kruger’s favourite, JB Robinson, was likely to be one of the new peers, the Tory Whig combination gave way to prevent this miscarriage, and the sovereign gave up his residual powers to legislate in return.

The judicial committee of the Privy Council considered whether these “residual powers” of the sovereign existed in the celebrated sacking by Sir John Kerr of Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s. The considered judgment by the Privy Council was that the sovereign’s residual powers had been abolished in the 1906-1910 constitutional crises.

Yet it was on the basis of the “residual powers of the sovereign” that the governor-general of the Union of SA, Sir Patrick Duncan, removed prime minister JBM Hertzog in September 1939 and replaced him with JC Smuts, a decision roundly condemned by then justice minister, later chief justice, HA Fagan.

It is important that your esteemed newspaper, possibly the last of the Mohicans, set the record straight by publishing the historical facts and refuting another set of “fake news” from the Bell Pottinger camp.

Errol Callaghan 
Goodwood

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