The Norway Debate, sometimes called the Narvik Debate, was a momentous debate in the British House of Commons from 7 to 9 May 1940, during the Second World War. The official title of the debate, as held in the Hansard parliamentary archive, is Conduct of the War. The debate was initiated by an adjournment motion enabling the Commons to freely discuss the progress of the Norwegian campaign. The debate quickly brought to a head widespread dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war by Neville Chamberlain's government.
At the end of the second day, there was a division of the House for the members to hold a no confidence motion. The vote was won by the government but by a drastically reduced majority. That led on 10 May to Chamberlain resigning as prime minister and the replacement of his war ministry by a broadly based coalition government, which, under Winston Churchill governed the United Kingdom until after the end of the war in Europe in May 1945.
Chamberlain's government was criticised not only by the Opposition but also by respected members of his own Conservative Party. The Opposition forced the vote of no confidence, in which over a quarter of Conservative members voted with the Opposition or abstained, despite a three-line whip. There were calls for national unity to be established by formation of an all-party coalition but it was not possible for Chamberlain to reach agreement with the opposition Labour and Liberal parties. They refused to serve under him, although they were willing to accept another Conservative as prime minister. After Chamberlain resigned as prime minister (he remained Conservative Party leader until October 1940), they agreed to serve under Churchill.
Background
In 1937, Neville Chamberlain, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, succeeded Stanley Baldwin as prime minister, leading a National Government overwhelmingly composed of Conservatives but supported by small National Labour and Liberal National parties. It was opposed by the Labour and Liberal parties. Since assuming power in Germany in 1933, the Nazi Party had pushed an irredentist foreign policy. Chamberlain initially attempted to avert war by a policy of appeasement, such as the Munich Agreement, but this was abandoned after Germany abandoned diplomatic means and became more overtly expansionist with the occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
One of the strongest critics of both appeasement and German aggression was Conservative backbencher Winston Churchill who, although he was one of the country's most prominent political figures, had last held government office in 1929. After Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany two days later. Chamberlain thereupon created a war cabinet into which he invited Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. It was at this point that a government supporter (possibly David Margesson, the Government Chief Whip) noted privately:
Once Germany had rapidly overrun Poland in September 1939, there was a sustained period of military inactivity for over six months dubbed the "Phoney War". On 3 April 1940, Chamberlain said in an address to the Conservative National Union that Adolf Hitler, the German dictator, "had missed the bus". Only six days later, on 9 April, Germany launched an attack in overwhelming force on neutral and unprepared Norway after swiftly occupying Denmark. In response, Britain deployed military forces to assist the Norwegians.
Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had direct responsibility for the conduct of naval operations in the Norwegian campaign. Before the German invasion, he had pressed the Cabinet to ignore Norway's neutrality, mine its territorial waters and 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. He had, however, advised that a major landing in Norway was not realistically within Germany's powers. Apart from the naval victory in the Battles of Narvik, the Norwegian campaign went badly for the British forces, generally because of poor planning and organisation but essentially because military supplies were inadequate and, from 27 April, the Anglo-French forces were obliged to evacuate.