XXXIXTHE EXTINCTION OF PARTY GOVERNMENT
31.5.24
The politicians of Great Britain, under the pressure of various accidental and some fundamental necessities, are being forced towards an honest democracy and efficient government. But they resist with great activity and ingenuity.
A Bill for what is called Proportional Representation, but which is really sane voting, has recently been rejected by the House of Commons by a majority of 238 to 144. It had the official support of the Liberal Party. Previously the Liberal hacks were all against it, but they have been chastened by the last two elections. The Bill went very far towards honest representative government, but in one respect it went no distance at all towards a great revolution in political method. When the time comes for its re-introduction it will be necessary to extend it or supplement it by another reducing the numbers of the representative assembly.
The urgencies of the British situation have put Great Britain far in advance of the United States in this matter. There is a very respectable movement for Proportional Representation in the United States of America, but it has still to be realised as practicalpolitics and a serious need by the American public. In America every citizen is born either a little Republican or else a little Democrat; it does not matter what the Republican or Democratic platform is or what sort of man is put up for him in his division, he has to vote for his party. Or else go through a crisis almost like disowning his father and mother and vote for the other party. There is nothing else in the world for him to do in politics, just as there was nothing else but being “either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative” in the great days of Gilbert and Sullivan in London. The United States is young, prosperous, and at a great advantage to the rest of the world; it may be able to afford its present travesty of democracy for a long time yet. Britain cannot. The party system has always been more rigidly organised in America than in England. In Britain on the Left side, counting Liberal, Labour, and Communist together, there are eight or ten distinct schools of political thought and intention; on the Right side there are five or six. The British voter grows more and more erratic and uncertain under the present idiotic system, and the results of General Elections more and more silly and incalculable.
The idea of Proportional Representation is now nearly a century old. It is due to a clear-headed man named Hare. He proposed that a number of candidates should stand for the whole country as one constituency. The voter would vote for theman he liked and trusted best. If that man were so widely liked and trusted that he got more votes than were needed to return him, he would take as large a fraction of every vote as he needed, and if the voter had indicated a second choice on his paper, the rest of his vote would go to the candidate next on his list.Whatever happened, some or all of the voter’s support would go to the man he had chosen.That man would be his man par excellence. There could be no more direct relationship between voter and representative. But if that man were a very great and desirable man, the voter could also congratulate himself on the partial possession of a second or even a third, more personal representative. There are people who profess to find great difficulty in understanding Proportional Representation; mostly this is a purely wilful and subjective befuddlement. The filling up of the voting papers is perfectly simple and the counting and fractionation of the votes offers no difficulty to any properly instructed educated person.
For trivial reasons Hare’s voting method, which would give us an almost pure representative democracy, has been modified in all the practical proposals made by the division of the country into large constituencies instead of leaving it one whole, and the assignation of a limited but still large number of members to each. But its virtue of comparative veracity in representation still to a large extent remains.Mr.Rendall’s recent Bill proposed constituenciesreturning not less than three and not more than seven members. This is much too small for a real representation of British opinion, but it was as much as the party wire-pullers would allow. When the question is reopened this maximum should be increased.
Of course the systems called Proportional Representation in use in France and Italy are scoundrelly caricatures of the idea. Under them the voters vote not for men but for party gangs, and the whole object of Proportional Representation is to release men from servitude to party manipulation.
The objections to the measure made in the debate upon the rejected Bill were mostly very trivial or based on positive misconceptions. The question was indeed not discussed. Most of the opponents from the Labour side contented themselves with twitting the Liberal politicians with change of heart upon the question. They behaved just as the Liberal Party hacks did in 1918 because they are exactly the same sort of men. The mentality of the party hack, Liberal, Labour, or Conservative, is very much on a level in this matter. Most of the big men in all parties are for Proportional Representation, because they know they are outstanding enough to survive its establishment. The party hack knows he lives through and by his party: the voter does not choose him but suffers him, and at the first clear opportunity the voter will push him out of the way and choose a more interesting non-party man. Aboutseventy Labour men who have at one time or another professed approval of Proportional Representation did not vote.
The struggle against Proportional Representation is really the life struggle of the professional party politician. Under Proportional Representation the legislative assembly, instead of being elected by a small majority, or even a minority of the voters in the country, will be representative of nearly the whole country. In a constituency electing ten members, for instance, there will probably be less than a tenth of that constituency not actually represented by members returned. This wipes out every hope of a bilateral political system, because it will fill the assembly with free members, responsible only to the voters who have returned them, and practically independent of organised party support. They will necessarily be very various in their opinions.
It is not yet sufficiently realised, even by the supporters of Proportional Representation, that a country which returns men because they are distinctive and significant to its Legislature—and that is what the adoption of Proportional Representation means—will need an assembly of a different size and type from the present clumsy crowd of notables and nobodies at Westminster. There are too many members of Parliament at Westminster for efficiency, just as there are too many Congressmen at Washington. They loaf about. They do mischief in obscurity.They make trouble in order to realise their own existence. They are to public affairs what excessive fat is to the body of a man. These big legislative bodies date from a time when group psychology was not thought of. It is even possible that a big legislative body elected by Proportional Representation would be a worse evil even than the party house. Released from the party ties that control them, bunched into fluctuating groups, the scores and hundreds of unnecessary members would obstruct and confuse every legislative proposal. Proportional Representation must mean not only the suppression of the hack politician, but also the suppression of the commonplace member. For efficient government we want a Legislature no larger than is fairly representative of the broad varieties of public opinion. At the largest we need only from two hundred to three hundred members, a grand committee of the nation, appointing Ministers severally, assigning tasks to sub-committees, and expressing the general ideas of the country. We shall certainly be able to dispense with the rotation of the “ins and outs” and possibly with the organised Cabinet in such a Legislature. The adoption of Proportional Representation will be a much profounder and more revolutionary change than a mere change in voting procedure. It will necessitate an entirely new type of representative government. In that lies its importance in the world’s affairs and its fascination and desirability for most intelligent people.