Political Commentary
Wikiritits of Parliament are excusably sensitive about the re- &wing of the boundaries of their constituencies. They do not 4,V e to share the remarkable ill luck of Mr. Ralph Assheton, is now threatened with losing his seat for the second time, before ruffling their feathers and protesting about the dis- tOemberment of natural communities. (It must be said in Passing that if this ill luck had to fall on anyone it is only air that it should be on a •politician whose singular persist- ence ensures that the House of Commons will not be deprived it: his counsels for long. One can be fairly confident about Mr. Assheton will be back.) But the two-day debate on the reports and proposals of the Boundary Commissions should ;lot be seen only in the light of party and individual advantages Lcst and gained. Enticing though it may be to linger on the fjcsPect of Mrs. Barbara Castle, from Blackburn West, and e,,r. Edith Summerskill, from Fulham West, struggling with 1,`,„`ch other to get adopted for a safe seat somewhere in the o'„Idlands, that is not the whole of the question. The principles isconstituency boundaries are drawn and re-drawn are is 1Portantnedas the principles on which the extent of the suffrage meterni * ofburing the debate in the House of Commons the grounds Cr, complaint against the work of the , hard-driven Boundary Bpftrnissioners were apt to become confuscd. Some Labour ins.akors were never very far from Mr. Herbert Morrison's latll,uating remark of Mori arch—what a master of the calcu- ititju insinuation Mr. ison is—when he complained t.hat, bupogh he did not wish to make any imputation against any- "Y. in a considerable number of proposals somehow or other Labour seems to be getting the worst of it.' This charge of political bias, so nicely worded, was not repeated. But when Labour speakers one by one charged the Boundary Commissioners with interpreting the provisions of the 1949 Act too rigidly or too pedantically, there was the same attempt to shift on to the Commissioners, who merely did what they were asked to do, the blame which should rightly attach to those responsible for the Act itself, namely the Labour Party, and, of its numbers, none more surely than Mr. Herbert Morrison. The political double-talk which enables a party to pass an Act and then complain because its provisions are carried out deserves an even more contemptuous reception than was given it, by the Government spokesmen. At the time of the passing of the Act the Labour Party brushed aside all warnings of the harm it was proposing to inflict on the body politic. Now that those warnings have been proved right it should face the fact that what is at fault is its basic political principle in this matter.
That principle is a mathematical one. It,rests on the assump- tion that the first object of a representative system must be to give every vote as nearly as possible the same weight. Hence, the abolition of the university seats. Hence, too, the instruc- tion to the Boundary Commissioners to try to fit every constituency into an electOral quota. The result has been the proposed substantial re-drawing of the boundaries of some 200 constituencies., Mr. Isaac Foot's protest that ' The surgeon's knife is to cut through the veins, arteries and tissues ° of Ply- mouth regardless of the history of a thousand years ' could be echoed in most parts of the country, and was echoed during the debate. Natural and historic communities have been pro- posed to be dismembered—the City of Westminster, for example —and members and electors have been arbitrarily separated from each other. The trust and familiarity which should exist between members and electors can have no chance of developing if every three, five or seven years they are going to be compul- sorily divorced. The 1949 Act is almost certain to be amended. But it is not enough, as Sir Winston Churchill sugiested, merely to make the general reviews less frequent. They must be" used only for ad hoc purposes, as in the past, only when some drastic change in the distribution of population demands them. Abstract principles are in this not only-irrelevant but danger- ous, for it is impossible to tamper with the living cells of the body politic without destroying its balance.
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Some politicians have queried my suggestion that Sir Winston Churchill will be able to lead the Conservative Party at the next general election. They have argued, first, that he will be too old to undertake the many calls of an election campaign on a man's strength; and, secondly, that he will be open to the Opposition charge that, great man though he may be, he is really too old to be Prime Minister. These ,arguments seem to me to overlook, as most political commentators have done, the fact that Sir Winston Churchill has made his first personal appearance on television. Agreed, the occasion (the night of his birthday) was a favourable one. But the fact remains that the cameras did not show him to be anywhere approaching senility. In some ways they helped, because much of the effect of Sir Winston Churchill's speaking is in the small gestures of his hands and movements of his face, which they caught so well.- Assuming that he does not have a recurrence of his illness, television could make it quite unnecessary for him to go on a nation-wide tour. Moreover, Labour accusa- tions of approaching senility could not be sustained if his • television appearances belied them, if he came before the cameras in one of his most vigorous, most genial moods. Sir Winston is known to dislike the idea of television, but one can be quite sure that if it provided the only way of ensuring that the country should not be deprived of his services, he would make a great unselfish effort of will and overcome his objection. Sir Winston, at eighty, is quite young enough to master a new' medium. TRIMMER
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