T HE spectacle presented to the country by the preparations for
the coming General Election is not encouraging to believers in democracy. On the one hand we have the Government Whips in the Central Office in London sending down the names of candidates with an implied order to the constituency that the persons named are to be elected ; on the other hand the constituencies are apparently unable to take any measures to select candidates who would at the same time be locally welcome and nationally satisfactory. Yet, if we look at the problem broadly, it is difficult to see how matters could be otherwise. There are now some twenty million electors or thereabouts in the United Kingdom. Most of them in normal times pay very little attention to national problems. They are absorbed with their own private interests, of which the essential work of earning daily bread is generally the most important, or with their own private amusements, such as visiting cinemas, attending whippet races, er betting on horseraces which they never see. A few also take a keen interest in trade problems immediately affecting themselves, such as aisputes with their employers and quarrels between different Trade Unions. When, however, national affairs assume the dramatic and tragic importance that a world war involves, every person in the kin om becomes, temporarily at any rate, deeply interested in em. Apart from a small minority of Pacificists, and apart from a somewhat larger minority of Socialists whose internationalist ambitions run counter to normal national patriotism, the vast body of the electorate are intensely patriotic, and eager that their country, having won the war, should establish beyond question its power to prevent further aggression on the part of the enemy.
This patriotic eagerness, however, gives little help in the practical work of choosing candidates to represent any par- ticular constituency in Parliament for in practice the vast majority of the electorate do not know the names of more than half-a-dozen men of national importance. The matter goes further than this, for even when a nationally prominent man has long represented the same constituency it may quite easily happen that a large number of people in that constituency do not even know his name. When Lord Morley had repre- sented Newcastle for several years, on the occasion of one election his canvassers, so it is said, came and reported to him that nearly half the people whose votes they solicited had never even heard of the name of John Morley. Similarly, it may be mentioned that on the occasion of an election not many years ago a canvasser reported to his chief that one of the electors had replied to his solicitations by saying : " No; I mean to vote for Z."—a former representative of the con- stituency who had been dead more than ten years. It is useless to shut our eyes to such facts as these. They are the materials out of which democracy is made, and if democracy is to be any kind of success the nature of these materials must be taken into account. Briefly, there is little hop! of obtaining any real representation of the people's will by a system of election which presupposes that twenty million electors scattered over a largish kingdom are capable of wisely choosing national representatives. In fact _they do not choose. They accept the dictation of some well-organized Caucus. This has long been the practice in the United States : it was the practice in our own country before the war, and everything points to the fact that it is likely to continue to he the practice here as elsewhere in the future. That means, in effect, that the country will be governed by the most successful manipulators of the Party machine. The manipu- lation must necessarily involve various forms of corruption, for money is indispensable to work the machine, and the Parties will obtain money either by the sale of honours or by other concessions from the power of the State to the profit of the individual. In the United States and in Canada tariff favours to a large extent take the place of the sale of honours. We may expect a similar kind of peculiar pecuniary interchange in our own country if the State control of industries is per- mitted to develop or even to continue.
The purpose, however, of this article is not merely to make a gloomy forecast. Its real purpose is to urge that, taking account of the materials which we must employ, we should con- sider whether better use cannot be made of them. The most hopeful outlook lies in the direction of the further development of local self-government. This is a totally different thing frbm what is called Federalism. So far as the United Kingdom is concerned, Federalism is merely a polite word intended to camouflage Irish Home Rule. Very few want Federalism. It does not even begin to satisfy, the Irish Nationalist demand for Ireland a Nation ; and where it is put forward in Wales and Scotland it is only an expression of a similar feeling of separate nationalism. As a practical proposition it is seen to be absurd the moment we realize that of the total figure of forty-six millions forming the population of the United Kingdom, no fewer than thirty-four millions live in England, and that England also provides an even greater proportion of industrial development of the whole kingdom. To imagine that the pressure on a Parliament at Westminster would be relieved by knocking off a few of the minor problems affecting Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but leaving the problems of the whole of the thirty-four millions of England to be settled in one Parliament, is a palpable absurdity. Federalism is no substitute whatever for decentralization. To secure any real relief for the Parliament that sits at Westminster there must be a wholesale transference to locally elected bodies of functions now discharged by a nationally elected Parliament. That can be done without setting up any new electoral machinery, and if done it would give to the democracy in each local area a real opportunity of expressing its own will, for it would bring within the power of the masses of the electorate the settlement of problems of which they were more or less personally cognizant because of the important fact of proximity.
The obstacles in the way of decentralization are twofold— first, the private interests of Members of Parliament and of the central bureaucracy at -Westminster, who play into one another's hands ; and secondly, the defects in our present system of local taxation. On the former point little need be said. What it means is this, that the bureaucrat in this country, in France, everywhere, wishes to keep power in his own hands. He is aided iri that wish by Members of Parlia- ment because it adds to their importance and their chance of corrupting their constituents to be able to bring pressure to bear on a Central Office which will give favours to local constituencies, and perhaps provide jobs for individual voters. But this personal obstacle to decentralization could be swept away with comparative ease if only we had in existence a system of local taxation which was obviously fair and not industrially oppressive. At present all our local revenues are raised-by rates upon visible property. That involves an excessive burden upon one kind of property which is not the only, nor necessarily the best, measure of capacity to pay. Secondly,•there is a steady resistance by the local ratepayer to the increase of his burdens, and a constant claim for sub- sidies from the Central Government. The moment these subsidies are granted, central control is introduced to take the place of local initiative. There is further operative the common fallacy _that what the nation pays, nobody pays. That is difficult to get out of the human mind, but the mere fact that such a fallacy exists and is so widespread is itself a strong argument for substituting local financial responsi- bility for the National Eichequer. Otherwise we are threat- ened with the grave danger that the demands on the National Exchequer will go on increasing to such an extent that they will finally destroy the sources of national'prosperity. Meanwhile, comparing national with local expenditure, we have the absurdity that great towns like London, Liverpool. and Birmingham are constantly clamouring for , national grants in relief of local rates, whereas those same great towns themselves provide out of their own resources the national funds from which these national grants are made. What we have to devise is some system by which the present method of local rating can be supplemented by other sources of local revenue—possibly a local Income Tax, possibly local taxes upon various forms of popular expenditure. When this has been done real decentralization will become possible. London then, itself a kingdom of roughly seven million people, would be able to provide for its own system of education, and have its own system of expenditure out of revenue raised entirely from its own local resources, controlled and administered by its own locally elected Council or Councils. The same consider- ation applies to the other great Municipalities of the kingdom. As regards counties the problem is a little more difficult, because some agricultural counties are so poor relatively to the rest of the kingdom that they could not out of their own resources afford to maintain such a standard of local services as the general standard of the kingdom requires. In such cases there is no objection in principle to a definite subsidy from the wealthy portions of the kingdom to these necessitous areas. Apart from this consideration, the ideal to aim at is the transference either to existing local bodies, or to com- binations of those bodies, of all those functions at present exercised by the National Government which are not essen- tially national in character. When this had been done, and our local bodies had thus acquired increased importance because of their increased powers, then it would be worth while considering whether we could not secure a better National Parliament by some system of secondary election. The Municipalities and County Councils of the kingdom would under the decentralized system of government here advocated be far more competent to choose a representative National Parliament than twenty million individual electors herded into groups by rival Caucuses. "
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