City MPs at heart of a bitter row about Parliament’s role...
Comment
SHOULD Parliament have a say on a matter of foreign policy which will dramatically change Britain forever?
Facing a chorus of indignation from his own Conservative MPs as well as his Labour and Liberal opposition, the Prime Minister defends the temporary closure of Parliament.
Sound familiar?
No, this isn’t a piece of current political reporting. Eighty years ago, the Conservative prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, declared war on Germany.
Yet, less than four weeks earlier, Chamberlain was insisting Parliament could break for its traditional summer recess – not returning until October 3.
It was a decision derided in Parliament – and two Birmingham MPs were at the heart of a remarkable spat which saw both men wrestle for the right to speak for the people of the city. It is intriguing to wonder what Birmingham-born Chamberlain, who was MP for Edgbaston and whose father was a former mayor, thought as the city took centre stage in the summer adjournment debate.
The summer of 1939 saw a humiliating series of British capitulations to Hitler climax.
In March 1938, the Nazis had quietly absorbed Austria into the Reich and in September of that year Chamberlain attracted Winston Churchill’s outrage by allowing Hitler to take the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.
By the following March, breaking Hitler’s promise to Chamberlain, the Wehrmacht rolled into Prague Castle, confirming Czechoslovakia’s demise as an independent nation.
Then, in the summer of 1939, Churchill warned Chamberlain that “all along the Polish Frontier from Danzig to Cracow there are heavy massings of troops, and every preparation is being made for a speedy advance”.
Poland was next. Yet
Chamberlain, eager to start his Scottish fishing holiday, insisted Parliament could break, setting the stage for the parliamentary battle between two Labour MPs.
King’s Norton MP John “Ronald” Cartland – brother of Dame Barbara – told Parliament that many of his
constituents already believed Chamberlain was acting like a dictator and that breaking Parliament at such a time of national crisis would only reinforce that image.
Outraged, Sir Patrick Hannon, the MP for Moseley, heckled and interrupted, leading Cartland to inform Parliament that only that morning a King’s Norton lady had written to him worrying that “the prime minister is a friend of Hitler”.
Hannon called Cartland’s speech “poisonous” and dismissed his correspondent as “some ancient matron”!
Despite facing an onslaught of interruptions from four different MPs, Hannon bitterly thundered on, expressing “regret and disappointment that I had anything to do with [Cartland’s] selection as an MP”, and insisting that Cartland did “not represent in the smallest conceivable degree the opinion held of the prime minister by the people of Birmingham”.
In Hannon’s view, the people of Birmingham had “profound devotion” to the PM and “complete confidence” in his policy.
The bitter divisions between Birmingham’s MPs dragged on when Parliament met on September 2 to respond to the German invasion of Poland.
Remarkably, Chamberlain again wobbled, insisting negotiation with Hitler was still possible if the Germans were to withdraw from Poland. It was Birmingham
CS Sparkbrook’s kb k’ MP – th the Conservative ti Leo Amery – who called over to Labour’s acting leader, Arthur Greenwood, to “speak for England” in a moment of intense parliamentary drama.
The war which Chamberlain doggedly sought to avoid finally came on September 3, 1939.
Eighty years on, it is worth remembering the central role played by Birmingham’s MPs.
And what became of them? Despite playing such key roles in that parliamentary drama, only Hannon would find himself re-elected at the war’s end.
He remained an MP until 1950, when he turned his attention to football, becoming the president of Aston Villa, overseeing the club’s 1957 FA Cup victory.
Cartland’s bravery was not confined to the comfort of Parliament’s green benches.
He would face Hitler in war as much as in words. Despite being
d declared l unfit for military service, he joined the Territorial Army and was killed in the British Army’s retreat from Dunkirk in May 1940.
The voters of Moseley rejected Leo Amery in 1945 in favour of Percy Shurmer, after whom Percy Shurmer Academy in Balsall Health is today named. Neville Chamberlain, meanwhile, died of bowel cancer in November 1940.
The voices of Birmingham’s MPs have become easily forgotten in the drama leading to war.
Eighty years on, as Britain again faces a moment of intense national uncertainty, it should be remembered that the Second City and her representatives have a proud legacy of “speaking for England”.
Nathan Jones is a Churchill Fellow and deputy head teacher of Arena
Academy, Birmingham. He is currently working on a biography
of Arthur Greenwood,
ThThe voicesi of f Birmingham’s MPs have become easily forgotten in the drama leading to war.