A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
SOME House of Commons arrangements and practices concern the House of Commons alone, some concern the electors who send members to the House. Among the latter is the consistent refusal of the average M.P. to go near the House on Fridays. Friday is, of course, a Private Members' day, when Bills on a diversity of subjects— none of them admittedly of first-class importance ; other- wise they would be Government measures—are intro- duced. With a House in which the Government majority is so great that divisions are a mere formality the few remaining rights of Private Members ought to be most jealously guarded. Yet week after week Private Mem- bers' Bills are talked out, though there is a majority of members present in favour of them, because the necessary hundred members to carry a closure resolution is not forthcoming. Last Friday Miss Horsbrugh's Bill on the drinking of Methylated Spirits fell through because the closure was only carried by 48 to 28 ; a fortnight earlier Mr. D. M. Mason's Sunday Trading (Scotland) Bill lapsed because the closure figures were only 61 to 42 ; and so on. Members of Parliament are elected—and paid—to attend the House in normal cases five days a week (or rather, tour and a half, for they rise at four on Fridays), not four.
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