BOOKS
In Defence of Ordinariness
By HENRY F.AIRLIE
EVERY reviewer should declare his interest; and I frankly confess that I sleep more soundly in my bed at night if I know that Par- liament is sitting. It is becoming fashionable again to decry Parliament and its members. I wish, therefore, to use this occasion, not only to celebrate the ,second edition of one of the great constitutional textbooks of this century, but to celebrate also Parliament itself and its honour- able members. It is one thing to criticise the ac- tivities of individual members of Parliament; it is quite another to criticise the activity of being a member, of Parliament. It is one thing to look at Parliament with a cool, cynical and compre- hending eye; it is quite another to belittle Par- liament. At the risk of sounding like a nineteenth- century Liberal, I must assert that Parliament seems to me to be one of the glorious achieve- ments of the human race. It is still, today, one of the surest bulwarks of freedom, continuing, as for centuries past, to teach the world by its example.
I opened this new,edition of Sir Ivor Jennings's masterpiece* as a duty, in order laboriously to discover where and how he had revised it. Before I had reached the end of his familiar opening paragraph (unchanged) I was reading with wide-eyed pleasure. There is lucidity, of course, but that conveys nothing of the graceful- ness of the structure of the book and of the writing, a gracefulness which is the property of the best of Cambridge scholarship; there is learning, but that gives no more than a hint of the unerring precision with which he illustrates his points; there is keen observation, but that gives only the smallest idea of his penetrating comprehension of what Parliament is about; above all, the whole is informed by his belief in the institution of Parliament, but that is a bald way to describe the disciplined passion which lifts the works so far above the level of most textbooks.
Sir Ivor Jennings has worked hard in revising his book, which was first published in 1939. Some sections have been largely rewritten; there is a new chapter on the nationalised industries; of the 526 pages of the first edition, only 138 needed no alteration. But the overriding impression, which is no slight on the extensive revision car- ried out by Sir Ivor Jennings, is of how little the changes matter. Since 1939 there has been a war, during which the Prime Minister enjoyed almost dictatorial powers; the first Labour Government to enjoy power has carried out a crowded and far-reaching programme of eco- nomic and social legislation; the changes in British society have made the problems of re- cruitment to the House of Commons (and the House of Lords) more difficult than ever before.
.Yet the differences between the Parliament of 1939 and the Parliament of 1957 are only slight. I defy any of those who nibble and niggle at Parliament to deny that this capacity for survival is of incalculable value in a shifting world. Par- liament still unites freedom and order in a way which is the envy of the world, and probably its hope. Apart from Redlich's great work on Par- liamentary procedure, there is no book I would rather see presented to the members of every new-born legislative assembly than this second edition of Parliament, accompanied by a cross- indexed copy of the first.
There is, for example, one instructive example of the way in which conventions grow and are accepted in the British constitution. In his first edition, Sir Ivor Jennings wrote of the choice of Labour Prime Ministers :
It was made clear when Mr. Lansbury was elected [Leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party] in 1931 and still more clear whgn Mr. Attlee was elected in 1935, that the Parliamentary Labour Party reserved' its full liberty of action to elect whom it pleased if the party secured a majority, and thus to indicate to the King who was desired as Prime Minister.
In his second edition, Sir Ivor is able to point out that, in spite of this, George VI automatically sent for Mr. Attlee in 1945, and that 'when Mr. Gaitskell was elected chairman and leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party at the end' of 1955 it seems to have been assumed that he would be the next Labour Prime Minister.' For close students there is much of this kind to be found. There is also much else. What a wealth of social history is summarised in the changed hours dur- ing which the House sits on each day, not least in the fact that in 1939 the House could not be counted out between 8.15 and 9.15 in the evening, whereas it cannot now be counted out between 7.30 and 8.30.
There is also much to intrigue the close student of Sir Ivor Jennings. He still cannot resist the opportunity to needle the Conservative Party when the opportunity offers. But it is fascinating to notice that he has dropped alto- gether his protestation : 'We are not, as Sir William Harcourt insisted, all Socialists; but the vast majority of us are Liberals.' Why?
In his first edition, Sir Ivor Jennings only once let his passion off the leash. In his closing sen- tence, he returned to his persistent theme that the whole meaning of Parliament lies in the existence of an official Opposition. 'The leaders of other Oppositions,' he added in 1939, 'are rotting in concentration camps or have joined the noble army of political martyrs—and the peoples are slaves.' Why he should omit this sen- tence in the year after the Hungarian revolution it is difficult to understand. But the last chapter still remains a brilliant brief defence of Parlia-
tion of the real function of the House of Com- mons as being to 'express the mind of the people,' to 'teach the nation what it does not know,' and to make us 'hear what otherwise we should not.' He argues that it does it 'by defending and criticising the Government,' and his book is an elaborate examination of how this process of give-and-take works.
It works because, as he says, the members of Parliament are 'ordinary people with a fair slice of ambition. . . . What the democratic system does is to harness a man's ambition. . . .' Sir Ivor Jennings says that this is the worst that can be said about the members. It is also the best. The enduring virtue of the House of Commons, through centuries, is that it has been composed largely of ordinary people : drab, honest, foolish, bumptious, confused, worried, happy, unhappy, ordinary people. That they are ordinary people, that they will react, by and large, as ordinary people, especially at moments of crisis, which is what ultimately matters, is their virtue, their value and their glory. Take away their ordinari- ness and they will no longer be our defence against the extraordinary people who are always wanting to do extraordinary things to us. The man who will comment on politics must first acknowledge the virtue of ordinariness. This acknowledgment Sir Ivor Jennings makes in every judgment. Others, please copy.
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