{65}
Often embedded in the stiff and unreal ritual of our Parliamentary system you will find some fragment which seems peculiarly fantastic and unmeaning, because it is really, so to speak, the fossil of a forgotten reality. One such case is the rule which compels persons accepting office to submit themselves to their constituents for re-election—a rule dating from the time when the House of Commons was supposed to be returned not to “support” the Government, but to oppose and criticise the Government. Another is the form gone through at every opening of Parliament of giving a first reading to a dummy bill before the King’s Speech is delivered.
The object of this curious ceremony is to affirm the ancient privilege of the Commons to transact whatever business they chose without reference to the wishes of the Crown or its Ministers. It dates from the time when the Crown and the House were at war, and it emphasises the doctrine {66} that the House can consider any subjects it likes, and consider them in any order it likes, and is not bound to deal first with the matters brought before it by the Ministers. In other words, it affirms the absolute control of the House over its own time.
The symbol is still visible, but, alas! the fact it represented is gone. The House no longer controls its own time; the House no longer chooses its own subjects for discussion. These things are now done for it by the Ministers of the Crown.
Five-sixths or more of the time of the House is, under the present Standing Orders, at the absolute disposal of the Government. It is devoted to the discussion of Bills proposed by the Ministers, or to the voting of supplies demanded by the Ministers. A certain amount of time is assigned by the Ministers to each matter, and at the end of that time the closure automatically puts an end to discussion. It is true that it is a part of the game for the Opposition to protest against such procedure, but the protest is merely ceremonial; for when a change takes place, the new Government invariably forgets its past utterances and uses the precedent set by its predecessor to restrict even more closely the rights of private members. Indeed, the farce of the Opposition protest has begun to pall even on politicians, and Mr Balfour has shown a disposition to drop it.
The private member has two and only two opportunities (apart from Supply, which we shall {67} discuss later) of bringing any question in which he or his constituents may be specially interested before the House. In the ordinary way one afternoon a week is set aside for the discussion of business not brought forward by the two Front Benches. Even this privilege is held on a very insecure tenure. The Government can at any time demand all the time which this nominally representative and legislative assembly can give, and towards the end of a busy session it usually does so; but during the early part of the session a private member who is fortunate enough to secure a day may bring any question he likes before the House. The order of precedence for such questions is settled by balloting among the members.
The mode of bringing forward such a question may take the form either of a Bill or a resolution, but no opposed Bill has the smallest chance of passing into law unless the Ministers are prepared to grant special facilities. If this is not the case, the Bill, even if it passes its second reading by a large majority, is indefinitely shelved. We do not believe that there has been within recent years a single case of a private member’s Bill, to which any opposition was offered, passing into law without special facilities from the Government. There have been innumerable cases of such Bills passed by large majorities in successive sessions, and even in successive Parliaments, yet never getting any further.
{68} If the member confines himself to a resolution, desiring only to test the opinion of the House, it is by no means certain that he will be able to do so. It rests entirely with the Speaker to decide whether he will accept the closure at the end of the debate, so that a division may be taken before the House automatically adjourns, and very frequently he refuses to do so.
Moreover, it is nearly always possible for the Government to prevent a division on an inconvenient resolution by putting up one of its henchmen to move a shelving amendment. No better example of this could be chosen, nor any better test of the breakdown of representative institutions, as we now have them, than the lack of all machinery for the bringing forward of public questions. This is sufficiently proved when we say that so contemptuous a method as the above must, under the present procedure of the House, be necessarily successful. A good illustration of this method was afforded when one of the authors of this book raised the question of the secrecy of the Party Funds. A “Liberal” barrister, Mr Buckmaster, was approached by the officials of the Executive, after full consultation with the Opposition Front Bench, asking whether he would undertake to nullify the debate. The matter was a ticklish one; when the motion was first tabled, many “experts in procedure” gravely hinted that it would be “out of order”—and it should be noted that whether a motion is declared out of order or {69} not may not be known until the very moment before it is supposed to come on for discussion. Other hints were dropped as to the “pressure”—that is the promise of advantage or the refusal of advantage—that would be brought to bear; that is, that would be offered or threatened. The task of nullifying the debate was refused by more than one man; but at last the legal gentleman in question, presumably under some definite arrangement agreeable to himself, tabled an amendment to the effect that this secrecy was particularly bad in the case of the Tariff Reform League. This, of course, successfully put a stop to the discussion. The Unionists moved a similar amendment referring to the Free Trade Union; and the division, instead of being upon the secrecy of the Party Funds, was an ordinary party division between Liberals and Tories.
It is satisfactory to know that the reprisal threatened by one strong Radical among the many who desired the original discussion, to wit, going down to Cambridge and fighting Mr Buckmaster at the next election, was unnecessary. Mr Buckmaster lost his seat, and the two Front Benches were no doubt relieved to discover that they had thus escaped from their bargain.
Another expedient for preventing the raising of inconvenient questions by men acting in the interests of their constituents is the “blocking motion.”
There is an absurd rule by which, if a member {70} has given notice of a motion dealing with a certain question, no other member can discuss that question till the first member’s motion is disposed of. As there is no obligation on the first member to move his motion, the Government finds it easy to burke discussion whenever it has a mind to do so. It has only to induce some obedient supporter to give notice of a motion that he has not the faintest intention of moving, and by keeping that motion indefinitely on the notice paper it can successfully prevent any other member from raising the question it desires to evade. In this way Mr Rees, now a knight or baronet in some order or other, distinguished himself during the Parliament of 1906. The most conspicuous example of an order proceeding from the two Front Benches to prevent discussion, by means of this fraudulent artifice in the hands of a subservient placeman, was the blocking of discussion on India, a matter of the most active and grave concern to everyone in these islands.
The method of raising questions by a motion for the adjournment of the House is hedged round with restrictions. It can only be done in the case of “a matter of urgent public importance,” and the Speaker is the sole judge of what constitutes such a matter. The position and reputation of the Chair depend in this matter, perhaps more than in any other, upon a technical impartiality, and it should be recognised that in no matter is this impartiality more really or constantly exercised. {71} The adjournment of the House is a grave matter interfering with the convenience and desires of many; it is exceedingly important to prevent its being frivolously moved. It may justly be said that if the matter really is of urgent public importance, the Chair still allows it to be an excuse for moving the adjournment. But—and this is essential—the mover must find forty members to support him, and if the Front Benches are united in desiring to prevent discussion, this is generally very difficult; for outside the Irish party, which will probably have no concern in the matter, it is not easy to find forty members present in the House at one time (the House of Commons is usually attended by a dozen or twenty members at the most) who can afford to sacrifice the advantages in honour and money which the two Front Benches have to offer.
The general truth, then, is that the time of the House has passed absolutely into the hands of the little group that governs. The House cannot discuss what questions it pleases, or pass what laws it pleases. It can only wait obediently for the questions raised by the Government, and vote blindly for the laws which the Government chooses to introduce.
The vital importance of this phrase, “the time of the House,” may escape the general reader. It lies in the fact that the Government (or, as our ancestors would have called it, “the Crown”) can not only automatically fix how the time of the {72} House shall be used, but can also decide how much time there shall be. That is the vital point. It is as though at a company meeting the directors had the power not only of saying what might be and what might not be raised by shareholders, not only the power of apportioning the time in which discussion should take place on each point, but also the power of saying whether such and such a question or all questions should be debated in meetings of so many hours’ duration, and of fixing the number of meetings. Thus foreign affairs are not discussed at all in the English Parliament; a few hours a year are perfunctorily allotted to them; and the same is true of all those departments in which it is desired to avoid discussion. If the process continues we shall have in a few years no matter of vital and real interest open to discussion at a sufficient length for public opinion to be expressed, or for criticism to be allowed any weight.
There remains only a third method besides motions and bills, and that is the direct asking of a “question” in “question time.” No speech is permitted, of course, on such an occasion, nor any characterisation of Ministerial action (though the Minister may make a speech in reply, and say what he likes about the questioner): nothing but a bare answer can be expected, and even that may be refused. But, such as it is, this method of keeping a subject alive by questions is the only—though paltry—procedure left to a member of the {73} House of Commons who desires to act in that assembly in any representative character. [Note 73.1]
With its efficiency and action we will deal in the next section.
That feature which the general public has least acquaintance with in political life is also the feature with which it should most concern itself: the machinery whereby representative action is nullified.
But, first of all, it is important to point out that this machinery is not a cause of the decline of Parliament; it is only a limiting condition of that decline. In other words, the machinery whereby all representative action of consequence is repressed is not a machinery continually applied nor acting regularly upon an organised body of resistance. Indeed, it would be better if this were so, for then its daily practice, the friction arising from it, and the public discussion which would necessarily follow, might weaken this particular section of the pathological conditions we are examining. This province of the disease might stand some chance of remedy.
The machinery which is here described is therefore most infrequent in its action, and not of a sort which can catch the public eye either by its {74} outstanding character or by the frequency of its action. It applies only to rare and exceptional revolts against resistance.
In order to explain how this machinery applies, let us imagine some strong popular demand corresponding to the overwhelming popular demand for the immediate abolition of Chinese labour in the South African mines.
In the case of that popular demand we all know what happened. The country not only by an overwhelming majority, but with an overwhelming intensity, gave the mandate that the Chinese should go, and that they should go at once. It was a mandate based upon a mixture of popular emotions, not the least of which was the desire to chastise those South African Jews who had compelled our politicians as their servants to exploit for financial ends the popular enthusiasm in the matter of the South African war. It was, again, a demand for the signal punishment of the first attempt made since modern industrialism began, to move labour in large batches from place to place upon a scheme arranged by capital for the interests of capital alone. Popular instinct seized at once upon the enormous danger of that initial experiment, and perceived with sound sense that if it were not made an example of, and if the South African Jews were not taught a sharp lesson, the whole outlook and theory upon which this vile experiment had been based would become the permanent theory and outlook of international capitalism.
{75} There were other features in the demand, some ignorant and some unwise, but the demand and the mandate were undeniably there.
The politicians, when the Parliament of 1906 had met, paid no attention whatsoever to the mandate. The leaders of the two Front Benches consulted with the South African Jews as to what would best suit their convenience. The South African Jews decided that they would be poorer men unless the Chinese were left to work out their contract, and especially insisted that the fresh batches of Chinese whom they had already ordered through the agency of the last Government should be supplied to them. They were indifferent to what should happen after the contracts slowly expired, for by that time local labour would be plentiful again, and cheap,—at the end of the full four years probably cheaper than the continuation of the employment of the Chinese.
Such were the orders of these gentlemen, and the politicians had nothing to do but to obey. But how was it that, with the House of Commons crammed with men who had received a definite mandate from the electors to do the exact opposite to this, nothing was done to satisfy that mandate?
Some millions of the electors must have been asking themselves that question in their bewilderment at the action of Parliament immediately after the election; and of those millions a few hundreds at the most can have known how the thing was worked, so secret and so cunning are {76} the workings by which the senile and fraudulent system proceeds.
Let us suppose a few years hence (for the populace are just now too weary of the politicians to initiate any democratic movement) a similar definite mandate upon some one subject.
For instance, let us suppose that the Duke of Battersea, a money dealer of sorts, born Heaven knows where, starts in the future some big development scheme involving the control over many thousands of labourers, the compulsory purchase of much land, and in general so large a public action as makes him need for its achievement the right to make by-laws and to enforce them under penalty, the right to segregate and to punish labourers, and the right to maintain a special police.
The hypothesis is not extravagant when you consider the pace at which industrialism is developing in this country, and the way in which the House of Commons has become the mere servant of the wealthy.
It is quite conceivable that the working classes would have brains and courage enough to revolt; there might be some such movement as there was over Chinese labour: a true popular initiative and mandate. It is quite certain that if any such symptoms of freedom showed themselves the Government Bench and the “Official Opposition” would combine, as they did over Chinese Labour, to repel the popular demand.
{77} It is equally certain that they would succeed. The electorate feel that in their bones now, and that is what makes them indifferent to the whole dirty business.
But how, precisely, would the bosses succeed? What is the machinery which works the trick? It cannot be too often repeated that the prime cause of the whole matter is the profound corruption of the Parliamentary system. Batches of lawyers expecting money rewards from the two Front Benches, not one of whom would dream of acting as a representative: batches of elderly wealthy men waiting for honours from the two Front Benches, not one of whom would be such a fool as to lose the honour by representative action: groups of wealthy men who by the aid they afford to others, by the fear their economic power inspires, by their control over the Press by advertisements or direct ownership, are more powerful over their Parliamentary dependants than the officers of an army over their commands, and who know that representative action would lose them their Government contracts and their lucrative opportunities in the un-free dependencies of the Crown: some fifty or sixty or more, each of whom regards himself as a candidate for the reception of public money in the form of a salary, and that salary only to be obtained by abstaining from any representative action and obeying the two Front Benches: the Secretaries of Ministers and of ex-Ministers; the thirty or forty occupants of the {78} Front Benches themselves—all these between them make up (when we have excepted the Irish Party, which is happily independent of such intrigue) the great bulk of Parliament.
But among those hundreds some few would probably be found—perhaps as many as half a dozen—who by temperament or even by self-interest and calculation would be moved to express the demand of the many millions who had constituted the new Parliament. Some one or two, in other words, will attempt to act in a representative fashion. It is then that the machinery would begin to work, and that machinery we will now proceed to explain.
The new Parliament has met; the first few days, in which the memory of the election is still strong upon members, are not yet expired. The earliest opportunity for action occurs in the debate on the Address. After the Speech from the Throne has been delivered, the House of Commons debates for a few days upon the reply to that Address. And any dissatisfaction at the action or inaction of the Government, as expressed in the King’s Speech, must take the form of an amendment regretting that such and such a policy has not been mentioned in that Speech, or has been mentioned in it.
Mr Brown and Mr Jenks note the absence in the King’s Speech of any mention of the Government’s intention to cancel the policy of the last Government with regard to the great Land Development {79} Company formed by the Duke of Battersea, with its proposed obnoxious by-laws, special police, and other features odious to the populace. On this point the elections turned, and, like Chinese labour, the elections turned on it by a spontaneous effort of the populace, in spite of the vigorous, not to say frenzied, efforts of the bosses; among whom must be included of course not only the leaders of the two Front Benches, but the whole vast machine which, by secret funds, innumerable paid agents, local and central, etc., “runs” a General Election.
Well, Mr Brown and Mr Jenks put down an amendment on the paper, humbly regretting that His Gracious Majesty (who is by a Constitutional fiction the author of his own speech) has not promised to cancel the Duke of Battersea’s little job.
Nothing can prevent these gentlemen putting down the said amendment. So wide are our liberties that unless the phrases chosen contain expressions which the officials of the House (who are part of the machine) consider offensive or intemperate or frivolous, nothing could prevent Mr Brown and Mr Jenks from putting that amendment down.
Now, the curious reader will note that nothing prevents anyone of the remaining six hundred men from putting down amendments, or, to speak more accurately, nothing prevents the so-called “Opposition” half from doing so; for it is part of {80} the game that an “Opposition” man putting down an amendment to a Government policy will not spoil his future chance of a salary, contract, baronetcy or what not, on condition that he puts nothing down which has not been allowed by secret understanding between the two Front Benches. When, therefore, it is heard that Mr Brown and Mr Jenks, manfully sacrificing all hope of baronetcies, contracts, or salaries, have put down their highly representative amendment, a dozen or twenty amendments will appear on the paper dealing with as many different subjects, many of which probably were not and could not be in the mind of any of the electorate at the time of the election. Any subject will do so long as it serves to swell the list.
Therefore, even if discussion were not limited, and if the rules of the House allowed discussion to be free, Mr Brown and Mr Jenks’ amendment might come very late in the list, and some other hare might have been started to entertain the public, so that their action should fall flat.
But these “even ifs” do not apply.
In the first place there is your “Official Opposition Amendment.” You may protest that the Constitution and the very theory of self-government can know nothing of an “Official Opposition”; that the phrase in connection with self-government or representation is ridiculous; but it is the chief reality of the machine and the most notable wheel in the empty grinding of Parliament. {81} The Official Opposition Amendment must be taken first. It is, of course, upon some subject agreed upon between the bosses, and not within a hundred miles of the popular mandate which Mr Brown and Mr Jenks have attempted to express.
What of the other amendments? Are they taken by lot or in the order of time in which they were set down? By no means. They are taken in the order in which the Chair decides, and the Chair is of course one with the two Front Benches in such matters. I mean where the matter is of real and sufficient gravity. For here, as elsewhere throughout this book, it must be protested that among the wheels of the machine that which is least open to criticism, and among the decayed functions of Parliament that which preserves the old and free conditions most, is the Chair. Subject to the rules and traditions which so greatly favour the bosses and their nominees, the action of the Chair is singularly impartial; but when something really grave—like Chinese Labour, for instance—which the two Front Benches had determined to settle in a manner of their own is on the carpet, the Chair cannot be impartial, for to be impartial would be to take the side of the people against the politicians, and it is no part of Mr Speaker’s duty to consider the people. He is there to give, subject to the rules and customs of Parliament, a fair and equal chance to every member, and no more, to preserve the courtesies of debate, to keep speakers to the point, and so {82} forth. If he were to give Mr Brown and Mr Jenks priority over, say, Mr Isaacs’ amendment about the Seychelles Islands, he would be giving preference to two men as against forty or fifty who have assured him that Mr Isaacs’ amendment is what they really care about. It is quite certain, therefore, that Mr Brown and Mr Jenks will come very far down the list, perhaps at the end of it.
Even so, by patiently waiting, their turn will come; and if the electorate is not by that time sick and tired of the whole wretched humbug, they could, by moving that amendment, put the bosses into a very pretty hole: for those who vote against the amendment would be flying in face of their election promises so very soon after the election, and while opinion was still so hot, that they might jeopardise their seats, and with their seats the prospective baronetcies, salaries, and contracts aforesaid.
But wait a moment. The turn of Mr Brown and Mr Jenks will never come. The bosses have not only the power of raising sham discussion, they have not only the power of extending to any number those sham discussions, they have also the power over Time; it is the leaders of the two Front Benches who decide in consultation among themselves, and after discovering from their local agents and central agents whether the popular temper is getting dangerous upon the subject, how long the debate on the Address will last. They certainly will not let it last long enough for Mr Brown and Mr Jenks to enjoy their little show. These valiant {83} men have sacrificed the “prizes”of the game and all their chance of boodle for nothing at all.
What further action can they take?
As we have seen in the former section, by the theory and practice of Parliament three opportunities, and three alone, are open to these worthy men in their quixotic desire to represent their constituents:—
(a) Any member of Parliament may bring in a Bill; he may do so under what is called the Ten Minutes Rule, or he may do so in a more thorough manner if he happens to have the luck of the ballot.
Members ballot for the right to bring in so many Bills; and each individual member’s chance may be ascertained by dividing the number 670 by the number of days which the party bosses allow for this amiable and harmless entertainment. Sometimes they will allow as much as, say, twenty-five days; then Jenks and Brown may count on having about one chance in twelve between them; but if they only allow a dozen days, then Jenks and Brown only have one chance in twenty-four.
Let not the reader imagine that bringing in a Bill is the simple thing that laymen would take it to be. The Bill may be out of order; it may be supposed to cover the ground of what the Government have already decided to do, or it may contravene any one of those obscure and almost innumerable rules which not half a dozen experts have mastered in the last thirty years. A Bill brought in under the Ten Minutes Rule is of course {84} an absurdity from the point of view of getting anything done. Bills are thus brought in only to give public notice of the grievance they are to remedy, or the right it is hoped to confer. But a Bill brought in through the luck of the ballot has the advantage of a whole afternoon’s debate.
What then?
Well, after that there is nothing, unless the two Front Benches agree to allow further stages; the bringing in of a Bill simply means an afternoon wasted in academic debate. A Bill becomes an Act of Parliament only after it has been read a first time, read a second time, debated in its general principles, then sat upon by a Committee, special or general; then in its amended stage read a third time, then passed by the House of Lords and assented to by the Crown. The two Front Benches, having control of the time of the House of Commons, always see to it that no Bill which does not suit their convenience shall proceed beyond the first formal stage. And none ever does. When you read in your paper of how the Hon. Charles Lake cleverly piloted the Washerwomen’s Bill through Committee, and after years of struggle made it law, “though it was but a private member’s Bill,” you are reading one of those conventional falsehoods which are used to deceive the public. There is no such thing as piloting a Bill. What you do, if you have a private Bill to which the bosses cannot object (as we may conceive the Hon. Charles Lake’s Bill to have been), {85} is to put pressure by means of lady friends or your newspaper, or in some other way, upon the bosses, so that when they can allow time in a slack moment the whole of the stages shall be gone through. The Bills that pass in this way have never any real significance.
We need hardly say that Jenks and Brown’s Bill to prevent the Government backing up the Duke of Battersea’s concession, even if they had the luck of the ballot, would never go to Committee.
But would it be divided upon?
It might or might not be divided upon, according as the two Front Benches chose. It might be decided that the matter was of such importance that a bare afternoon’s discussion was not enough for a division to be allowed upon it. Or again, an amendment might be accepted and debated in its place; at any rate the poor off-chance of bringing in a Bill is useless.
(b) A member with a similar luck in the ballot may use his day to bring in a motion.
A motion, of course, is of no legal effect whatsoever. It is mere hot air. It has the one advantage of provoking a division, but here again that division will or will not take place, precisely as the Front Benches may decide. [Note 85.1]
{86} Upon Brown and Jenks’ motion, if they have the luck of the ballot (say one in twelve or one in twenty or one in thirty), and bring it in, no division will be taken: the Front Benches will see to that.
Of course, it need hardly be pointed out that Brown and Jenks bringing in a motion or a Bill to this effect could only be done if it were done with the utmost secrecy. If the two Front Benches got wind of it, nay, if any but a few of their hundreds of supporters got wind of it, the bosses would arrange with some hack who was waiting for a salary or a title to put down a fictitious motion upon the paper. Once a man has a motion down, no similar motion can be debated; but, by a rule invented for the purpose of carrying on the machine, a motion may be kept on the paper, although the mover refuses to have it debated. The hack, therefore, will put down a motion, covering the point which Brown and Jenks are going to raise, leave it indefinitely on the paper, refuse to have it debated, and so prevent its arising in the House at all. Thus a Liberal manufacturer may solemnly put down a motion to discuss the sale of peerages; a Jew may put down a motion to discuss the abuse of money-lending; a High Churchman a motion to discuss the practices of the High Church; a Catholic a motion to provide for the inspection of convents, and so forth. The action is, by the custom of Parliament, taken in the Pickwickian sense.
(c) Brown and Jenks may ask questions.
{87} Such a point has the degradation of Parliament reached that this shred of the old representative power is truly, literally, and without exaggeration, the only active part of that power now remaining. Small and inept as it would seem among a democratic people and in a free assembly, it is to-day, in comparison with the rest that goes on in Parliament, of capital importance.
The Chair rules that no Minister is bound to answer a question. How old this ruling may be is not to the point; it would in theory seem to limit the value of questioning so strictly as almost to destroy it. As a matter of fact, however, some sort of answer is usually attempted. Nineteen-twentieths of the questions asked concern administrative points on which the answer is not a Minister’s, but that of a permanent official for whom the Minister speaks in the House. [Note 87.1]
There is little doubt that this valuable, or comparatively valuable, privilege of questioning the Ministers will be curtailed in the near future, for it has already on several occasions given anxiety to the two Front Benches. But for the moment it is fairly free. Three whole quarters of an hour a day are allotted to questions, and a supplementary question may be asked, arising out of the original one.
{88} True, Ministerial answers on a point as important as the Duke of Battersea’s concession would be valueless; they would be ambiguous, general, humorous, or quite off the point. But questions habitually asked by Brown and Jenks would at least suffice to keep the matter alive, and possibly some particularly nasty side of the scandal, which could not otherwise be ventilated, might be made public in this fashion. [Note 88.1]
But though questions are thus valuable as advertisement, they are quite useless as a means of action. The Ayrshire Foundry scandal, for instance, to which allusion has just been made in a note, was exposed by means of questions to the House of Commons, but it was kept from the public, who are still in the main ignorant of it, and no action whatever followed upon the exposure. No one was punished, and the same thing might happen again to-morrow, without any consequences of unpleasantness to the culprits.
With these three methods—bills, motions, and questions—the power of Brown and Jenks is exhausted. We have seen that as methods of action all three are useless. In other words, no representative action on the chief matter of a general election, if that matter has proceeded from the electors and does not suit the private interests of the professional politicians, can take place; and, so far as the representative power of {89} members is concerned, the House of Commons is dead.
There can be all the sham fight you will upon the sham issues which the bosses have arranged between themselves before an election takes place, but there can be no initiative on the part of the electorate which shall have any chance of acting upon the assembly at Westminster.
In order to give the reader a clear idea of this monstrosity (for it is no less), let him consider the following case: Public circumstances have rendered it acutely necessary to pay certain sums of public money to a large class of individuals upon a certain date, if wide-spread misery is to be avoided.
There is a conflict upon the area of distress which this vote of public money is to cover. Some say that the famine or what not is only acute in Lancashire south of the Ribble; but those who know most about the local circumstances are confident that the West Riding, though less hard hit than South Lancashire, is still in acute necessity of relief.
A Bill is drafted and introduced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the first clause of which it is provided that on a certain date he shall be authorised to pay such and such sums to authorities or individuals appearing later in the Bill. The exact words run:
{90} “On or not later than the first of August 1910, every person hereinafter named, and the authorities hereinafter named, shall be entitled to receive …”
and after that follow the amounts proposed.
Several clauses are necessary, twenty perhaps, to make the Bill workable in view of the various circumstances, previous laws, and local arrangements affected by it. Let us suppose that the fifteenth clause is that which, in effect, confines the action of the Bill to South Lancashire.
Here we are dealing with an exceptionally favourable case, for we suppose no opposition from those relatives and friends of Ministers who happen to sit on the other Front Bench; such a Bill would be “non-controversial.”
But a number of amendments are suggested, for though the principle of the Bill is accepted by nearly everybody, yet many changes in its provisions would make it more acceptable to this or that interest in the House. The amendments are put down; advantage is, of course, taken of the position by those few who oppose the Bill altogether. The first amendment in order is one thus framed:
“Distress Relief Bill: Clause I., Line 6.—Leave out from the word ‘every’ to the word ‘receive,’ and substitute the words ‘to every person hereinafter named there shall be paid’ for the words so deleted.”
{91} Many other amendments are on the paper, but this is the first of them, because it applies to the earliest words in the Bill that can be amended at all. [Note 91.1] On Clause XV., however, the really vital amendment affecting some millions of human beings, of immense importance in the eyes of many members of the House, set down by them in several forms, and of no less effect than to include the whole of the West Riding in the measure, is to be debated. It is known that the Treasury, from motives of economy, desires to limit—as indeed its Bill sets forth—the relief to South Lancashire alone.
Now, then. This is what we will suppose to happen in Committee.
The amendment suggesting that “to every person shall be paid,” instead of “every person shall be entitled to receive,” comes on first.
The Chairman of Committees is in the Chair. He calls upon the mover of the amendment, or selects one name out of several if the amendment has been put down by several people. The mover rises and makes a speech, of not quite a page of Hansard [Note 91.2] in length; at the end of that speech the amend-{92}ment is proposed to the House. The Chancellor of the Exchequer makes a short speech in reply, saying that he does not see that the amendment is of much value; the mover gets up and answers this short speech in another short speech, apologising for his amendment, and showing why he put it down. The Chancellor of the Exchequer gets up again, and makes a rather longer speech, reasserting his opinion that the amendment is of no great value. After the Chancellor another Front Bench man gets up and makes a speech in which he says that the “Official Opposition” will not support the amendment (sighs of relief on the part of those who would have had to vote for the tomfoolery if the Official Opposition had supported it). When the Front Bench man has sat down, another gentleman gets up and makes a rather longer speech in support of the amendment; he is followed by a fifth speaker, who makes the longest speech of all. Altogether, four pages of Hansard are taken up on this absolutely futile point, there is a division, and the absurd amendment is of course lost.
Two more amendments, affecting the words immediately following in the Bill, are duly debated, and each duly withdrawn without division. A fourth amendment (coming within two lines of the first in this lengthy Bill) is to the effect that the law shall be law “until Parliament otherwise determines”—in other words, the law shall be law until Parliament chooses to repeal it. Considering {93} that Parliament has the right to make and repeal laws at pleasure, the plain man would imagine such an amendment to be out of order. Nothing of the kind. It is made the starting-point of a perfectly enormous debate! The mover speaks for more than a page of Hansard; the Chancellor of the Exchequer replies in another page; a member of the so-called “Opposition” Front Bench talks half a page; three private members then consume a page and a half. Another member of the so-called “Opposition” Bench talks another page; yet another page is occupied by half a dozen private members who take up a great deal of the time of the House, but who are somewhat condensed in the official report. Then up gets the “leader” of the “Opposition,” and talks for a mortal page and a half on this absurdity; he is followed by the Prime Minister for half a page; two more “Opposition” Front Bench men and two private members account for another page. And this ridiculous palaver is not concluded until nearly nine pages of Hansard’s Reports are exhausted! There is a division, and (of course) the meaningless amendment is lost.
Immediately after, in the very next line, it is proposed to leave out the words “under this Act.” In other words, it is proposed to make a verbal alteration which negatives the Bill. That also is in order! It is duly debated, and then—great heavens!—withdrawn! In the same line {94} yet another amendment proposes that the law shall only work so long as its conditions are fulfilled; that is, that the law shall only be operative so long as it can legally be operative … And that is in order! And that is duly debated! And that in its turn, to the bewilderment of some unsophisticated member of the public watching from the gallery, is withdrawn!
In the very next line (and the Bill has perhaps 150 lines) … But we will not detain the reader further. Let it suffice to say that when the whole day has been exhausted, Parliament has advanced in this sort of debate through exactly seven lines of the Bill, and in that advance has changed absolutely nothing!
Day follows day; amendments of this sort pour in one on top of the other, and at last, when perhaps a tithe in mere space of the Bill has been thus “debated,” and long before the vital amendment on Clause XV. has been reached, the two Front Benches decide that the House must now turn to other business, the rest of the Bill is closured, and there is an end of it. The people of the West Riding are left without relief, and, so far as they are concerned, they need not have been at the pains of sending their members to Westminster at all; their views and necessities have not been so much as expressed.
The reader will be inclined to say that such inanity, however far the degradation of Parliament may have fallen, is impossible; that the {95} picture here drawn is a caricature, and can make no pretence to be a true picture.
Well, for “South Lancashire” substitute destitute people of over seventy years of age; substitute for the “Distress Relief Bill” the Old Age Pensions Bill, and for “The West Riding” substitute “destitute old people between sixty-five and seventy,” and you have an exact and literal account of what took place in the opening of the proceedings in Committee in the summer of 1908, when the Old Age Pensions Bill was being “piloted through the House”—to use the professional phrase consecrated to that futile performance. The supreme question, the one thing that most mattered to the destitute, was dealt with precisely as a despotic monarchy would deal with it, but without the moral right and position which lies behind a despotic monarchy; the procedure of the House had been used simply to cheat the people, and very effectively was that bit of cheating done.
There pervades the House of Commons a certain moral atmosphere conventionally called “the Tone of the House.”
All corporate bodies, a school, a regiment, a household, present this phenomenon, and the House of Commons is no exception to the rule.
“The Tone of the House” would of course be somewhat modified by a renewal of its personnel; {96} it would be greatly modified by even a slight modification of its rules; it would not be the same were a different type of man chosen for its officers.
In the absence of any of these changes it continues, changing only slightly as men change, and the times.
It is the subject of deserved and widespread ridicule; men entering politics are warned by their experienced friends against suffering its influence. It is not a good moral atmosphere; it is a stupid and rather a degraded one, much lower than that of the House of Lords, for instance, and not to be compared with that of a good college or a good regiment. But for the purposes of this book our only concern is to ask how far it may be responsible for that disease whose last phase and disastrous effect we are here studying. How far is the Party System, with its two sham sets of opponents, its huge salaries and the rest, dependent upon “the Tone of the House”?
The answer of one who has had some years’ experience of that atmosphere can only be that it is a far smaller factor in the Party System than those of the public who are palled by “the Tone of the House” when they come across it during their presence at occasional debates might imagine. “The Tone of the House” makes impossible any stimulus applied from within: and that is true, let it be remembered, of every traditional and corporate body. Such stimuli are, from the point of view of a corporate body’s traditions, mere disorder, {97} and are resented as such. But it does not render impossible decisive action; what renders that impossible, or rather very difficult, is the code of rules under which the House now debates; it is only very occasionally that some subject of definite national import can be brought up in the House of Commons, and a man must be either very lucky in the ballot or have some exceptional opportunity to compel the House of Commons to consider anything which the double machine does not want considered. But it is not “the Tone of the House” that prevents decisive action of this sort; these hundreds of men confined hour after hour in a dreary building, the physical air of which is unwholesome and domestic decoration appalling, are glad enough of any breeze, moral or material. It may verily be said that an anarchist attempt to blow the place up would, if the explosion were sufficiently distant, be welcomed as a break in the crass futility and monotony of the dull and wholly empty round. There is indeed only one way in which “the Tone of the House” prevents action, and therefore supports the hypocritical nonsense of the professionals, and that is, that it tends to capture any man whose motive is not wholeheartedly a motive of achievement. It is certainly an atmosphere in which it is much easier not to bother, and a man who partly wants reform, but partly also good fellowship, and a sense of ease in his surroundings, will find after a very few months that the proportion of his desire for reform to his {98} other desires has sunk to zero. But “the Tone of the House” is purely negative, even here, and quite a few men sufficiently determined to destroy the Front Bench arrangements from within could do so; a dozen would be amply sufficient. [Note 98.1]
No, “the Tone of the House” has never proved sufficiently strong to prevent, on the rare occasions when such a thing was possible, a damaging attack upon the machine; that is prevented in a manner much more direct, namely, by the grip, through secret Party Funds, the control of elections, and the choice of candidates in the constituencies, held upon Parliament by the machine. To these practical points the reader must pay a particular attention. They are the most important of all the concrete objects which reformers have before them to attack. With their method of corruption we will now deal.