THE NEW REFORM BILL.
WE sincerely hope that the new Reform Bill, when it comes to be considered in detail by the House of Commons. will be discussed, and dealt with generally, in the spirit of statesmanship and moderation in which Mr. Long introduced it. He made two things quite clear. The first was that the present moment was not only opportune for introducing Parliamentary reform, but that it was imperative that we should seize it. If we did not, we should not begin the epoch after the war by tackling, as we ought to do, the problems of reconstruction with fresh and vigorous minds, but should be forced to dissipate our political virtue in debating matters of Constitutional machinery. Mr. Long's next point was that we must take the proposals adopted at the Speaker's Conference as a whole, and not merely as the groundwork of debate. This, however, does not refer imperatively to two very important portions of the measure—Female Suffrage and Proportional Representation. The Government have decided to leave to the House the ultimate decision as to whether these proposals shall or shall not be accepted. All they say is that if the House accepts them in principle, they must te carried out in the particular way recommended by the Speaker's Conference and in no other way. The House of Commons, that is, can reject Female Suffrage, but, in the event of acceptance, must accept it subject to the compromise agreed on at the Speaker's Conference—i.e., that the age at which women are to receive the vote shall be thirty. In the same way,• if it chooses to adopt the principle of Proportional Reprsentation, it must apply it as agreed upon at the Con- ference. It must be confined, to begin with, to urban areas, and even this limited application must be on the agreed lines.
It would be easy to make telling speeches, not merely against the Speaker's scheme being introduced at the fag-end of an exhausted Parliament and so on, but still more against the degradation of Parliament involved in declaring that the bulk of the measure must be swallowed whole or not at all, and that even in the two cases where an option is allowed there must be no tinkering with the details. In reality, however, the arbitrariness of the proposal is not nearly so great as it seems. We must remember, in the first place, that the two subjects of " One man one vote " and One vote one value," which are the essentials of the first portion of the Electoral Reform Bill, have been discussed in the minutest detail for the last thirty years. No doubt there are plenty of people in the country who never paid the slightest attention to those discussions, but still these schemes have been on the horizon of practical politics ever since 1885. Out of these discussions two conclusions have always emeiged. One is that in fairness you cannot have universal suffrage and " One man one vote without " One vote one value "—i.e., without the drastic and democratic Redistri- bution scheme which would do away with the present electoral anomalies. The difficulty has always been to secure a working agreement between the two parties which would embody both these much-needed democratic measures. Now the Speaker's Conference, which was representative of both points of view, did arrive at a reasonable working compromise. It gives us what we ought all to be devoutly thankful for, and what the Spectator has again and again asked for— namely, universal suffrage. It also gives us " One man one vote," though with a certain drawback which cannot be said to be unreasonable or conceived in the interests of either party. It is theoretically an anomaly, but it presents no electoral scandal. At the same time, there are also certain derogations from the purity of the principle of " One vote one value " which will counterbalance the concession of the gift of two votes to men who bond fide occupy business premises in a town and have their homes in the country. Again, note that the Speaker's Conference was no outside body, but a body composed entirely of Members of Parliament, chosen on non-party grounds. It was in effect a microcosm of Parliament. Therefore to talk of the impertinence of insisting that the recommendations of such a body should be thrust down the throat of the House of Commons is mere rhetoric. The Speaker's Conference was a kind of Grand Committee.
In all the circumstances, then, and though there are plenty of things which we personally eslike in the recommendations, we hold that it was most reasonable that the House should be told that it must take them as a whole and as a balanced compromise, and not pick them to pieces and remake them. To do that would be to destroy the essential part of the work done by the Speaker's Conference. As has always happened in our Parliamentary system, if you get an agreement between the two parties for a particular measure, that measure when -it comes to the House of Commons must be swallowed whole—must be treated as something on which the ordinary debating work of Parliament has already been accomplished. It is a pie to be eaten, not to be resolved into its elements of pastry and meat and then recooked in a new dish and with new trimmings. When we come to the two questions which are left open to the House of Commons, Female Suffrage and Proportional Representation, we cannot help regretting that they were so left open, because it seems to us that all the arguments are in favour of attaching them to the scheme and making them part of it. The supreme object, as we have said, is to clear the ground. But the ground certainly will not be cleared if we have Female Suffrage still hanging over us. Again, the electoral agitation is certain not to cease unless Proportional Representation is given a fair trial. Personally, we are exceedingly sorry that the Speaker's Conference could only reach agreement as to Female Suffrage by means of an age-limit. Though, as our readers know, we used to be opposed to the suffrage for women, and have only accepted it in view of the great upheaval of the war, we feel most strongly that it had better be " a clean cut " and a generous cut. Just as we opposed it on the ground, not of the incompetency of women, but because we held that the suffrage had better be confined to one sex, so, now that this view has become untenable, we hold that it is very much better that women should be put upon an entire electoral equality with men. The women who will be excluded from making their electoral desires effective at the poll will probably be the women who will need the franchise most—the unmarried women who are earning their own livelihood. There are a great number of women, often the best educated, who do not marry till they arc over thirty. But it is just this class- i.e., persons who are self-supporting for the first nine or ten years of their adult life—who should have the vote. But though we feel this so strongly, we hold that it is not a sufficient ground for opposing the scheme, or for being angry with the Government for saying that if the subject is to be got out of the way, it must be got out of the way on the lines of the Speaker's Conference proposals and no other. Similarly, we would say to the supporters, and also the opponents, of Proportional Repre- sentation that, though they may be eager to make amend- ments in the Proportional Representation proposals, and though their desire for such amendments may be founded on reason, they had better accept the Conference compromise.
Once more, it is only through such acceptance that they will be able to clear the ground for reconstruction. In other words, we hold that the Female Suffrage and the Proportional Representation proposals are really parts of the Speaker's scheme, and that if they are not accepted as such and passed in the form in which they are presented, we shall suffer from the dangers of half-measures. If we fail to seize the oppor- tunity of.putting the House of Commons in a position to deal adequately with the problems of reconstruction, we shall have committed a grievous blunder for which we may have to pay very dearly. For ourselves, we regard it as a great disaster that the Referendum—i.e., the placing of the veto power over legislation in the hands of the people themselves (a measure which automatically solves the Second Chamber problem)—was not included in the proposals at the Speaker's Conference. However, it is no good crying over spilt milk, and we are not going to say a word that might wreck those proposals. We would rather that Constitutional reform should be lopsided, and that Parliament should fail to put what we consider to be the coping-stone on a true and democratic system, than leave the Constitution open to the very great dangers to which it will be exposed if the whole of the proposals of the Speaker's Conference are not carried out.
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