TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE UNIONIST PARTY AND PAYMENT OF MEMBERS. THE consequences of the Osborne judgment multiply. The most important of the recent developments, so far as the immediate future of the Unionist Party is con- cerned, has been the sudden conversion of a section of the Unionist Press to the principle of payment of Members of the House of Commons. Whether the attitude of mind which has decided upon so fundamental a change is the outcome of changed opinion in the party itself we need not for the moment inquire ; but in any case, the argu- ments by .which the policy of payment of Members is advocated are, in our opinion, wholly inconclusive and unconvincing. The argument appears to run as follows. The Osborne decision, affirmed by the House of Lords on December 21st of last year, made it illegal for a Trade- Union to impose a levy on its members for the payment of Parliamentary representatives. Consequently the Labour Party, which has hitherto equipped Members of Parliament out of funds supplied by Trade-Unions, is short of money, and, being short of money, will be unable to afford the number of representatives in the House of Commons which otherwise it might be able to maintain. The leaders of the Labour Party, therefore, demand that the Osborne decision shall be reversed. The Unionist Party cannot regard this demand as admissible. But, argue the Morning Pool and other Unionist journals, it will never do simply to refuse to reverse the Osborne decision. That will not satisfy Labour. That will bring about a cleavage of classes. The demands of the workers for direct representation must be satisfied somehow. If we refuse to satisfy them in one way, we must satisfy them in another. Let us, then, make it part of the Unionist policy to see that the demand is met, and let us, as the safest way of meeting it, affirm at once the principle that all Members of Parliament should be paid out of State funds. By so doing we shall remove any feeling of grievance which Labour may entertain against the Unionist Party, as refusing due representation to working men ; we may even hope to see Conservative working men in Parliament. Thus, we are assured, shall the Unionist Party find salvation.
We need not stop long to inquire how far these new Unionist doctrines are in accordance with the opinions of Unionism expressed four years ago, when in March, 1906, the House of Commons carried a Resolution in favour of payment of Members by 348 votes to 110. If we remember rightly, the minority on that occasion consisted almost wholly of Unionists. And the arguments which were used in 1906 against the principle of payment of Members remain as cogent now as they were then. It may be convenient to repeat them, since they appear to have been forgotten, or, for whatever purpose, ignored. First, then, the payment of Members of Parliament would involve the expenditure of a very large sum of money. The salary allotted to a Member could scarcely be less than £300 a year, which would entail an annual charge of £200,000, equivalent to a capital expenditure of seven millions sterling. Nor is there any reason to suppose that salaries would remain as low as £300. In the United States Senators and Members of the House of Repre- sentatives are paid at the rate of £1,000 a year ; why should we pay less, it will be asked, in England. ? Again, the payment of Members of Parliament involves, logically, the payment of members of County Councils, Town Councils, and, other elective bodies ; why not extend the principle ? All this would involve an expenditure of a sum nearer £2,000,000 than £200,000 a year ; and even so, we should not have reached the end. For if you pay a Member's salary you must also pay his election expenses, and the expenses of a General Election would become simply prodigious. Instead of having two candidates, or possibly three, for the honour of representing a con- stituency and receiving £300 a year in cash, we should have six, or even a dozen, candidates for each post,— for post rather than position it would become. It is not the British way to let salaries of £300 a year go a-begging. But this would mean not only that the expenses of an election, entailing expenses of registra- tion, the fees of returning officers, and the sums spent by the candidates, would amount to an enormous sum in each constituency, but also that at the end of it all the elected. candidate might only represent the views of a minority of the constituency. Suppose, for example, that six candidates fought a constituency with an electorate of. 12,000, and that the poll resulted. in a " close thing," A obtaining 2,000 votes, and B, C, D, and the others 1,900, 1,800, 1,700, and so on. Quite con- ceivably A in these circumstances would misrepresent the constituency. There might be 2,000 voters, for instance, who had voted for him because he said the earth was flat ; whereas the other 10,000 might believe it to be round. But, in order to prevent a constituency from being mis- represented in this way, it would be necessary to have recourse to a second ballot, with all its attendant trouble and expense,—unless, of course, the machinery of election had been previously changed to admit Of the transfer of votes from one candidate to another. Even so, with a multiplicity of candidates the expenses of each election must be immeasurably larger than they are at present. If we put the average cost of each contested - election at only £2,000—it would probably be far more—and if we suppose only 600 elections contested, that would be another bill of £1,200,000 to be met out of public funds. As matters are now, a General Election involves a great deal of loss to trade; would a General Election be the more welcome, or the House of Commons more popular or better respected, if when a Ministry resigned office the country had to pay a milllion or two millions extra in taxes ?
All this prodigious expenditure, under a system of payment of Members, would be incurred at a time when we are already looking in every direction for means to meet the colossal bills piled up year after year by the Liberal Government. But apart altogether from questions of national expenditure, we hold that the payment of Members would lower the position of Parliament. The House of Commons at present is the paymaster of the servants of the State, and it cannot add to the dignity of the House that it should become the paymaster of its own Members. A man who has voted himself a salary of £300, or £500, or £1,000 a year is not as independent or as free from suspicion of personal motives as a man whose office is to pay, not to be paid. We do not suggest, of course, that it is anything but honourable to receive a salary from the State ; merely that it may involve a loss of dignity for a man to vote such a salary for himself. The dignity of the House of Commons would be lowered too, we believe, in other ways. We should get a great influx of the professional politician • men would try to enter Parlia- ment so as to gain a Member's income, or to obtain an advertisement which would cost nothing, and the con- sciences of such men would have a corresponding tendency to become elastic. There would be other dangers. There would be a possibility, we will not say of wilfully corrupt practices, but of waste and misuse of public funds. A rich candidate might contrive to let it be known that his salary of £300 would not be used to settle his club bills, but would somehow find its-way back into the constituency, or be devoted to objects of which important voters approved. That would certainly not make matters easier for poorer candidates.
We may ask, in conclusion, in what light the ordinary level-headed British working man is likely to regard this sudden conversion of Unionist politicians to the principle of payment of Members,—a principle hitherto denounced as involving grave dangers to the State. We may call it a bid for popular favour. He will probably use the word " bribe.' And he will not be deceived into supposing that it will lead to the better repre- sentation of his own interests in Parliament. He will be much more likely to take the view that his own chosen candidates will stand a lessened chance of election when there are half-a-dozen clever young barristers or solicitors also in the field, some of them .professional politicians who make it their business to paint political futures as brightly as possible. Even for this reason alone, that the result of adopting the policy of payment of Members will not be what the Unionists who advocate it believe, we should oppose the proposal. The better representation of British working men in Parliament will not be conferred on them from without, it will be gained by them from within. If they desire to be represented by Members of their own class, whether their politics be Liberal or Conservative, they will eventually be so represented, for they have the matter in their own hands. If they think it worth while to pay the salaries of such Members, they will elect the men and pay them the money. They will think none the better of any political party for proposing measures to-day which it condemned yesterday, and those members of the party who make such proposals, dismayed possibly at having to face working-class constituencies election after election with nothing more promising than the blessings of Protection, will find out their mistake. They are taking pills to prevent thunderstorms. They do not like the medicine they prescribe, and it certainly will not have the effect which they prophesy.
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