Parliament
Following the retirement of incumbent Labour M.P., Alexander Wilkie, Morel fought the two-member Dundee constituency as the Labour candidate in the 1922 general election. Although the polls showed him having fewer votes than Edwin Scrymgeour of the Scottish Prohibition Party, he won the seat, defeating the sitting MP – Winston Churchill – in the process. Morel regarded Churchill as a warmonger and took pride in having defeated him: "I look upon Churchill as such a personal force for evil that I would take up the fight against him with a whole heart."
With his foreign affairs specialty, he was expected to be appointed as Foreign Secretary in the government of Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, but MacDonald decided to serve as his own Foreign Secretary. MacDonald led an attempt to buy Morel off by gathering together a large number of senior Labour politicians to nominate him for the Nobel Prize for Peace, but it did not prevent Morel from remaining a forceful critic of MacDonald's foreign policy. In August 1924 he is believed to have persuaded MacDonald to recognise the communist government in the Soviet Union and nominations on the Anglo-Soviet trade treaty.
Shortly after his re-election in the 1924 general election, Morel suffered a fatal heart attack at the farm near Bovey Tracey, Devon where he lived.
Read more about this topic: E. D. Morel
Famous quotes containing the word parliament:
“The war shook down the Tsardom, an unspeakable abomination, and made an end of the new German Empire and the old Apostolic Austrian one. It ... gave votes and seats in Parliament to women.... But if society can be reformed only by the accidental results of horrible catastrophes ... what hope is there for mankind in them? The war was a horror and everybody is the worse for it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“At the ramparts on the cliff near the old Parliament House I counted twenty-four thirty-two-pounders in a row, pointed over the harbor, with their balls piled pyramid-wise between them,—there are said to be in all about one hundred and eighty guns mounted at Quebec,—all which were faithfully kept dusted by officials, in accordance with the motto, “In time of peace prepare for war”; but I saw no preparations for peace: she was plainly an uninvited guest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A Parliament is that to the Commonwealth which the soul is to the body.... It behoves us therefore to keep the facility of that soul from distemper.”
—John Pym (1584–1643)