THE PLAGUE OF QUESTIONS.
THERE are many ways of wasting time in the House of Commons, but all but one are imperfect in this or that particular. They require some degree of concert on the part of those who resort to them, and concert is troublesome to arrange, and apt to fall through when arranged. A man will not be at the trouble of employing them, except when some obvious party advantage is to be gained, and this is not a condition that can be satisfied every day. Or they con- flict with the New Rules of Procedure, and then a Member who has come down with the best intentions of hindering the despatch of business, may see his plans hopelessly upset by the intervention of the Speaker or the Chairman of Committees. The supereminent way we have in view has none of these faults. It is in the power of every single Member to ask a question, and before doing so he need take counsel 'with no one but himself. Then, a question makes so small a demand on the time or the energy, that the busiest or the most indolent man may put half a dozen in succession, without being either hurried or wearied. In this respect the New Rules have made no change whatever. The Closure may put an end to a debate, the power of moving adjournments may be used up ; but the sacred right of asking the noble
lord or the right honourable gentleman the question number so-and-so, " that stands in my name," still exists unchallenged. Besides this immunity from the defects which belong to other modes of wasting Parliamentary time, Questioning has two specific advantages of its own. One is, that it is peculiar to no party. When a Liberal Government is in power, Liberals feel as free to question it as Conservatives. When a Conservative Government is in power, Conservatives sin quite as much in this way as Liberals. The privilege is too precious to be waived, on any consideration. Private Members will give up their Tuesdays and Fridays, or even their still more precious Wednesdays :
but we doubt whether, if the fate of a Ministry depended on it, a single Member would be found to withdraw his
own special question from the Notice-paper. He would say, not always truly, that that one question need not take two minutes to answer. The other advantage is that it is the cheapest possible method of obtaining notoriety.
There are many Members who would be only mocked if they were told to bring in a Bill, or to draft a resolution, or even to make a speech. They have neither the ability nor the courage to take the advice, if it were given to them ; and if they had both, it would depend on a hundred chances whether the opportunity of displaying them would ever arrive. They must be lucky in the ballot. They must be men of importance, and get " a day " from the Prime Minister. They must have influence with the Whips, and so catch the Speaker's eye before- hand. But they can all ask a question, and they have nothing to do but to give notice in order to secure an indefeasible right to ask it. More than this, the reward is out of all pro- portion to the labour. Now that Reporting is rapidly becom- ing a lost art, and long speeches are ruthlessly cut down to an inch or two of type, a question may look as imposing the next morning as if to put it had taken half-an-hour. As regards a man's constituents, it may even be better than a speech, because a speech is necessarily compared with others in the same debate ; whereas the questioner has the field to himself, and the subject of a question may be full of local interest, while the subject of a debate may only concern the nation at large. Put all these things together, and the modera- tion of the House of Commons will be seen to be some- thing extraordinary. Why should Members be content with two hours in an evening, when they might take up four, or six ? Why should sixty or a hundred questions be asked, when five hundred would not be a question apiece ? It is no wonder that the practice grows ; the wonder is that it has not grown much faster.
Yet., though it is perfectly easy to explain how and why Questioning has come to take up more and more of the time of the House of Commons, it does not the less constitute a serious and mischievous abuse. The House of Commons, as we have repeatedly been told, has in practice a limited number of days in which to get through the work of the Session. For one reason or another, a day is constantly subtracted from this series. Sometimes the House is counted out. Sometimes a question of little or no public in- terest receives an amount of attention altogether out of proportion to its real importance. Sometimes an open effort is made to prevent business from being done. But what, after all, is the loss of a Parliamentary day, which at most yields from eight to ten hours, compared with the steady loss of from one to three hours every day that the House sits ? Something like an eighth of the time of the House of Com- mons—one whole Session in every eight—is, under the present system, almost wholly wasted. There are exceptions, of course, to the rule,—questions that relate to subjects of genuine moment, or that draw from a Minister information of real value. But as regards the majority of the questions, no human being is the better for their being answered, or would be the worse if they had never been asked. They minister to nothing in the world but individual vanity. They have their beginning and their end, their first origin and their final cause, in the self-esteem of the men who ask them.
This being so, it becomes a very urgent matter how some order can be introduced into this chaos. That Questioning cannot be abolished will be admitted by the most ardent re- formers of Procedure. It sometimes supplies a very valuable means of bringing a Government to book, or of gaining official information. The thing to be aimed at, then, is not .suppression, but regulation ; not to prevent Members from asking questions that deserve the asking, but to ensure that as few as possible that do not deserve it shall take up time which might so easily be turned to better account. One way of doing this would be to limit the right of question in the case of ordinary Members to Tuesdays and Fridays. This would have two good results. Though questioning would still encroach on the time of the House of Commons, it would encroach on the less valuable part of it ; and so far as need- less questioning is part of a system of designed obstruction, it would make it almost useless. Hours might be lost on these two nights, but they would not be deducted from the aggregate de- voted to those Government measures which more and more con- stitute the serious business of the Legislature. Any loss that the public might suffer from the prohibition of questions on Mon-- days and Thursdays would be entirely prevented, if the right of putting questions were retained in its integrity for all Members who are Privy Councillors. Thus the Front Opposi- tion Bench would-be wholly unaffected by the restriction, and this would enable a sufficient number of independent Members to ensure that a question which ought, in the public interest, to be put on a Monday, shall not be kept back for twenty-four hours. With this exception, however, it would be possible to go a good deal further in the way of restriction. Why should not notice of questions be privately given to the Minister to whom they are addressed, and then the answers be printed in the votes, with the questions ? The information would thus be obtained every day,just as it is now; but it would be obtained with no sacrifice of Parliamentary time. If the answer were really unsatisfactory, the questioner would have no difficulty in getting some Privy Councillor belonging to his party to repeat the question in the House. But ordinarily, every purpose would be answered by an inspection of the notice-paper. Nobody would be the worse for the change, except the men who see in asking questions the one means by which they can hope to become famous.
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