A War Cabinet
By Bruce Walker (07/05/07)
The response of Prime Minister Gordon Brown to the terrorist attacks in Scotland and in England was encouraging. Although it was obligatory for him to make comments about re-evaluating British policy in Iraq, etc., his simple and clear words had a ring of calm firmness. If he did not get it before, he gets it now: Great Britain is being warred upon by an enemy who it has for decades appeased.
Brown is the leader of the Labour Party, that party farthest to the Left among the major parties in Britain. He, like Blair, is more out of synch with their own party members than the members of the opposition. We should hope that this Scotsman now will recall the words of that great Scottish poet, Robert Burns, when facing an intractable enemy centuries ago: “Let us do or die.” The British people are in a fight for survival, much more than Americans, who have a much smaller indigenous Moslem population and who, unlike Britain, was not a colonial power over many nations now Moslem, like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iraq.
Under the British parliamentary system, Brown is Prime Minister until the next election, and that will be several years from now, unless he calls for a new election (Blair could have done that, but he chose not to do so) he runs Britain. Public opinion polls in Britain change often, but the Conservative Party has the upper hand if a general election were to be called.
Labour has a working majority in Parliament, but that could vanish if backbenchers revolt and ask that Brown be removed as Prime Minister. Is there a solution to the problem? Yes, and it is both simple and workable. Do what Winston Churchill did in 1940 and form a War Cabinet composed of members of the two largest political parties. A new position could be created for David Cameron, Conservative Party Leader – something like Deputy Prime Minister – which would give him and his party a share of power and a share of accountability.
More importantly, it would send a powerful message to all terrorists that the British people were not going to be divided politically about the need for victory over terrorism. The only way that the terrorists can win is by weakening the will of democratically elected leaders through a weakening of public will. But that will not happen if the two major political parties are standing together.
I proposed recently a “fusion” ticket of Fred Thompson and Joe Lieberman for the 2008 race. That is as close as Americans could come to having a War Cabinet, because our legislative and judicial branches are separate and we have a bicameral legislature in which both houses have real power (in Britain only the House of Commons really matters.)
If the British did this, it could pave the way for other parliamentary democracies to do the same. Moreover, the mere offer to form a War Cabinet would be hard to turn down. If Harper in Canada, for example, followed suit and asked the Liberal Party to join in a War Cabinet to show unity against terrorism, what would the Liberal Party do? If it declined, and if there were terrorist attacks, it would be blamed. If it accepted, and if there were terrorist attacks, it would have to become part of the solution.
Most democracies are parliamentary democracies – America and France are the biggest exceptions – and unless the peoples of those democracies do not wish to face the reality of terrorism, then a formation of many war cabinets in these free, tolerant democracies would remove the ability of terrorists to disrupt democracies by playing with the electoral process or trying to intimidate a rather new, rather weak Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Would this work? It did work in 1940, when Churchill brought the leader of the Labour Party, Clement Atlee, into his cabinet. Both men were telling Hitler and the world that political fissures within the parliamentary democracy of Britain would not divert that nation from the long term strategic goal of victory.
Parliament operated quite freely during the Second World War. There were times in which the Churchill administration faced threats from within the cabinet and votes of no confidence from Parliament. After victory in Europe, Churchill and his party lost the next general election. The Tories and Labour did not form a War Cabinet to win the next election, but to keep Britain from losing the war to a great evil. It worked.
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