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The Norway Debate, sometimes called the Narvik Debate, was a significant debate in the British House of Commons that took place on 7 and 8 May 1940. It immediately led to the formation of a widely-based coalition government led by Winston Churchill, which was to govern Britain until the end of World War II in Europe. The debate, following on from an adjournment motion and concerning the progress of the Norwegian Campaign, brought to a head widespread dissatisfaction with the adequacy of the Conservative dominated National Government, led by Neville Chamberlain, to the challenges of waging war. In the debate, Chamberlain's government was criticised not only by the Opposition but also by respected members of his own party. The Opposition forced a vote, effectively a motion of no confidence, which the government won with a greatly reduced majority. With over a quarter of Government members of parliament (MPs) voting with the Opposition or abstaining despite a three line whip, it was clear that support for Chamberlain in his own party was crumbling. Following ill-judged remarks by him in the course of the debate, it was not possible for him to form a coalition with the opposition Labour and Liberal parties. On 10 May, Chamberlain resigned, and was succeeded as Prime Minister by Churchill. == Background == In 1937, Chamberlain, previously Chancellor of the Exchequer, had succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister of a National Government, which in fact was overwhelmingly composed of Conservatives. It was opposed by the Labour and Liberal parties; there were small National Liberal, National Labour, and Liberal National parties supporting the National Government. Faced with a resurgent and irredentist Nazi Germany, Chamberlain had attempted to avert war by a policy of appeasement, only abandoned after Germany became more overtly expansionist with the annexation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. After Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. At this point a government supporter noted privately: }} Once Germany had rapidly overrun Poland, there was a sustained period of military inactivity lasting until 9 April 1940, when, days after Chamberlain had told a Conservative Party meeting that Hitler "had missed the bus",〔The Times, 3 April 1940〕 Germany ended this "phony war" by an attack in overwhelming force on neutral and unsuspecting Norway. In response to the German invasion, Britain sent limited land and naval forces to assist the Norwegians. Apart from the naval success at Narvik, the subsequent Norwegian campaign had gone badly for Britain for very basic reasons. }} At the time of Narvik, Chamberlain's eventual successor, Churchill, had had a brilliant political career up through World War I, some twenty years earlier; first elected as a Conservative MP, he had become a Liberal Home Secretary and then First Lord of the Admiralty. During WWI, as a result of the failure of the Gallipoli campaign he had been forced to take a more junior post, and then removed from government altogether by the Conservatives before becoming Minister of Munitions under Lloyd George, prime minister from the Liberal Party. After the war, he had served as a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, before entering the political wilderness. His past views and actions on domestic issues, most notably his very active exertions to break the 1926 United Kingdom general strike, did not make him a natural associate of the labour movement. He had vigorously urged various policies outside the political mainstream; when he had first warned against the rise of Germany and argued strongly for rearmament, he had largely been ignored. He had argued against appeasement even at the height of its popularity. On the outbreak of the World War II, Chamberlain brought Churchill into government as First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill therefore had direct responsibility for the conduct of naval operations, and was required to defend the government of which he was a member, whatever his private views. Churchill had pressed the Cabinet to ignore Norwegian neutrality and to mine Norwegian territorial waters, and to be prepared to seize Narvik, in both cases to disrupt the export of Swedish iron ore to Germany during winter months, when the Baltic Sea was frozen. On behalf of the Admiralty, he had also advised that a major landing in Norway was not realistically within Germany's powers. For the nation's political elite, the conduct of World War I offered both political and military parallels to the country's leadership and strategic questions. Politically, there were two obvious precedents: the reconstruction of the Asquith government in 1915 as a wartime coalition still led by the peacetime leader of the majority party, and more dangerously for Chamberlain, Asquith's subsequent replacement in 1916 by Lloyd George, of which Churchill later said: Militarily, speakers attempted to draw lessons from the experience (in many cases ''their'' experience) of the earlier war, explicitly mentioning the Antwerp expedition and the attempt to force the Dardanelles as relevant to the hazards which were run or should have been run in Norway. Churchill had been associated with both, so in part this was a coded discussion of the soundness of Churchill's military judgement, on which opinion was sharply divided. The debate was an adjournment debate, in which the motion technically is "that this house do now adjourn". Under Westminster rules in such debates, held to allow for wide-ranging discussion of a variety of topics, the question is usually not put to a vote, but in this case, the Opposition forced a vote to demonstrate their deep concern, and the vote was therefore effectively on a motion of confidence. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Norway Debate」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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