I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read a, Second time."

In presenting this Bill to the House, may I claim that indulgence which I know it is always ready to extend to anyone who, as I do, addresses it for the first time? The Bill is brought forward for the purpose of preventing anomalies in local representation, and for promoting efficiency and economy in the work of municipal authorities. Much work has been put recently upon local authorities, and there are a large number of committees and sub-committees which local authorities form for the purpose of housing, water, the lighting of streets and so forth, and it is desirable that the best men in the locality should be got to serve. There have been anomalies and difficulties in the past. May I call attention to one or two of those anomalies? In London and in the counties the elections are triennial, but in the other boroughs they take place annually, because of the provision of the Municipal Corporations Act that a third of the representatives should retire each year. The Bill is permissive, and it gives an opportunity for the boroughs to adopt triennial elections. I think it is desirable as far as continuity is concerned, and it is desirable in the interests of saving expense, that elections for the future should be triennial, but if any borough desire to keep the elections still annual, they would be at liberty to do so. The recent elections in London point with considerable force the difficulties and anomalies which have arisen because of what is known as the block system. I should like to give one or two instances.

The first thing is that you get under the block system minorities totally excluded. In the London elections last year seven boroughs—Chelsea, Fulham, Lewisham, Holborn, Paddington, Wandsworth and Westminster—the minority was totally excluded from representation, and in two other cases—Hackney and Southwark—where there was a compromise between two of the parties, Municipal Reformers and Progressives, although the Labour party holds 30 per cent. of the votes, with 60 seats, they obtained no representation whatsoever. Those are flagrant instances of where minorities have been denied representation in the government of the local area in which they reside, and in which no doubt they take very considerable interest. Again, one may take three other boroughs in London—Lewisham, Hammersmith and Wandsworth, where in 1906, 1909, 1912 and 1922 the minority had had no representation at all in the administration of local affairs. Again, you get an anomaly of this kind where the minority party get the majority of the seats. In Battersea, in 1892, the Municipal Reformers polled 81,000 votes and the Labour party 73,000. The Municipal Reformers obtained only 21 seats, whereas the Labour party obtained 33 seats. Again, you get the minority of votes obtaining the majority of seats where you have three parties voting. At Hackney, in 1919, the Labour party polled some 50,000 votes, the Progressives 49,000 and the Municipal Reformers 49,000. In the result the Labour party got 32 seats, the Progressives 13 and the Municipal Reformers 15—the majority of the seats given to the minority of voters. More flagrant still, in Islington, in 1922, the Municipal Reformers polled 131,000 and Labour 90,000. That works out roughly at this proportion: Municipal Reformers three-fifths and the Labour party two-fifths, but in seats the Municipal Reformers got 49 and the Labour party only 5. Again, under the block system of voting, where you get one party voting solidly, you get this kind of result which is well pointed in the results in a ward in Battersea in 1922. The Municipal Reformers had 8,600 votes yet although the Labour vote is 8,200—but 400 short—the minority were excluded from any representation at all, though they were anxious to be represented, and would be able to do good work. When you take into consideration the kind of work municipal authorities have to do, the committees upon which their members have to serve, and the multifarious things with which they deal, it is necessary to have the experience of all sorts and conditions of people.

We have these anomalies staring us in the face, and are bound to appreciate the fact that more and more in our local affairs are we being confronted with political controversy. We find that, with the swing of the pendulum in general politics, there is the same swing of the pendulum in local affairs, and very often we find that a small swing will entirely alter the complexion and the face of the administration in a local authority. The result is that an entirely new body of men come in to carry on the affairs of the local authority, and they are bound to rely upon the information which they get from the permanent and paid officials, and are largely in the hands of these officials. If the provisions of this Bill were adopted, and we had proportional representation of the people in the borough or the county, there would be far greater continuity of administration. In addition to that, local people who, at the present time, do not desire to stand, partly because of the expense, and partly because they cannot help feeling that defeat must certainly stare them in the face, will come forward knowing that even if their opinions be the opinions of a minority, they stand a chance of getting in to represent their own views and the views of a section of the people in that particular borough or county, and to protect the interests of that section, in the parliament of the local authority.

To remedy the anomalies which I have pointed out, this Bill is brought forward. I may mention that it is a permissive Bill. No local authority need adopt it unless it desire to do so, and is backed and urged by a large bulk of opinion. The London County Council itself has passed a resolution in favour of proportional representation in municipal boroughs. Some seven metropolitan boroughs are in favour of the provisions of the Bill, and I might go further and say that they would desire to adopt these provisions if the Bill were passed. Some eighty municipal councils have passed resolutions in its favour, and they number such large and important centres—to give the House a few instances—as the following: Bradford, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, Chester, Huddersfield, Leeds, Newport, Oldham, Stafford, Stoke-on-Trent, Wolverhampton and York. I have taken these out of the list, and the House will understand that it is not possible for me to read through the entire list of the eighty councils who have passed resolutions in favour of these provisions, but I have the complete list here. As far as the county councils are concerned, some twenty-six have given their approval to the provisions of the Bill.

The question naturally and at once arises: How does this Bill propose to deal with these anomalies, and by what machinery it is proposed to carry out its provisions? The quota of votes is the first thing with which one has to deal in this connection. If hon. Members turn to Clause 5 of the Bill, they will there find a definition of the quota. To give a paraphrase of that definition, in the ordinary contest for a single seat, the quota is half the number of valid votes plus one. Under proportional representation the quota is the number of valid votes divided by the number of the seats plus one, and one is then added to the result. On the assumption that we are voting for three seats, and that the number of valid votes is 600, we divide the 600 by four, getting the result of 150 and adding one vote to that we have 151 which is the quota. I think it is clear to anybody that if three candidates poll 151 votes each, or a total of 453, those three candidates must then be elected, because nobody else could obtain as many as 151 votes. Having once ascertained the quota, it is not difficult to see what one has to do with the vote. The vote itself is to be a transferable vote. It is suggested that voters might have difficulty in using the transferable vote; that they might have difficulty in putting down their first, second and third choices. When one comes to consider what Has happened more than once in local elections, and what happened, I believe, in Chelsea at the last election—when voters were confronted with as many as twenty-seven names, and had to take nine names out of the twenty-seven—I do not think it can be said to be more difficult for the voter with half a dozen, seven, or eight names before him, to pick out three of them, and say in what order he desires to place them—first, second and third.

Having dealt with the question of the quota, and of what the voter has to do with his transferable vote, the next question is that of the returning officer. Under proportional representation, there must be more than one count by the returning officer. It is said that will take time. I admit it will, but it is as well it should take time, if the result is going to be the sweeping away of the anomalies to which I have referred. We will assume that the returning officer has six candidates, and three seats. He goes through the votes when they are put into the respective files, and finds which of the candidates has received a number of votes above the quota. If any candidate exceed the quota, those votes that are in excess of the quota go to the votors' second choice. In the case of those candidates who are below the quota, and who finally have to be eliminated, those votes are taken away, and go to the second choice of the voter. So that you have a system working from the top downwards, to lift up some candidates and working from-the bottom upwards to lift up others; and it works out in such a way that the minority secures a representation equal to the number of votes which they have polled. In fact, they get representation, whereas under the present system you find instances of the kind I have given to the House, in which even considerable minorities have no representation at all.

I urge that in municipal affairs it is of vital importance that those people who, by their education, their association with boroughs and county councils, by family ties or, above all, by personal residence, take an interest in the affairs of the place where they live, should have the opportunity of being represented on the councils, and the opportunity should be one which would enable them to contest a seat, knowing that, though their views are the views of the, minority, they have just as much chance of being elected as others, so that they can put their views before the Council, and that it will not be merely one set of views that will be represented. The first clause of the Bill deals with the adoption of its provisions. Again I emphasise the fact that the Bill is optional. No borough council or county council need adopt its provisions unless they desire to do so, and the House will see by Sub-section (1) that it is necessary to have three-fifths of the Members present voting for it before the provisions of the Bill can be adopted. [HON. MEMBERS: "A majority."] A majority vote, but three-fifths of the Members must give a vote.

It does not mean that three-fifths of the Members must vote for it, but that three-fifths of those who are present must do so.

I am obliged for the correction. I am afraid that I have not looked at it closely, but I adopt what the right hon. Gentleman says. The next Sub-section to which I would call attention is Sub-section (3), which provides for notice of a month at least being given to the Council, so that all Members will have full warning before these provisions are adopted. Sub-section (5) gives the Council the opportunity of altering its method of election from annual to triennial if they desire to do so. I trust that by the majority of councils the method of election will be altered from annual to triennial. Clause 2 deals with the effect of the adoption. Paragraph ( a ) of Sub-section (1) points out the form of the alternative vote, and paragraph ( b ) makes provision for the filling of casual vacancies. Clause 3 provides for regulations to be made by the Secretary of State; Clause 4 gives the Secretary of State power to hold local inquiry if he deem it necessary; Clause 5 is a definition clause, and Clause 6 deals with application.

It is urged against the provisions of this Bill, I understand, that you want to get a majority for a Government in the House of Commons. But that is not really a very desirable thing, nor is it a necessary thing in local administration; and you do not need a majority in local administration, nor a big majority, because the main part of the work that is done on county councils and borough councils in the work of Committees. And you do not get, as you do in this House, an Executive carrying on the whole of the work, but you split it up into a large number of Committees. It would be sufficient, and in my submission it would be advisable and important, that you should get every point of view represented. It is not a good thing in local administration to have so vast a majority that they will always carry everything through from the point of view of one party, and one party only.

The next objection that is taken is the difficulty of casual vacancies. Casual vacancies have to be dealt with, and would be dealt with if the provisions of this Bill were adopted in the same way as that in which they are dealt with now. There is no way of getting over the difficulty unless you desire, when there is a casual vacancy, to allow the members of the council to co-opt on to the council somebody to represent the person who has ceased to be a member, whose views are the same as those of the deceased person or the person who has retired. I think that the other objection taken to the provisions of the Bill is upon the ground of expense. That is not a very strong ground, because the whole idea of the Bill is that elections should become triennial, and not remain annual; and it is desired that the borough councils in adopting its provisions should make the elections triennial. If they do, a very great saving in expense will take place.

The size of the electoral area has sometimes been put forward as an objection, but though that objection might be strongly urged if this were a Bill applying to Parliamentary representation, in the case of municipal elections, where the areas are not so wide, the representatives are local, and are naturally known. There is no objection which can really stand in face of the immense advantage that would result if these proposals were adopted, and proportional representation were given to those desiring to register their votes at local elections. I have dealt already with the difficulty of voting. In these days of education, I submit that it would not be difficult for any voter to register his choice in the order 1, 2, 3 when he is filling up his voting paper. For these reasons, I submit that this Bill is one which can be adopted safely. It is a permissive Bill; it is not sought to thrust this system upon any local authorities who are not in favour of it, but that those who are in favour of it can adopt its provisions, and, if they wish, I submit that they should have an opportunity of doing so.

I beg to second the Motion.

The Bill has been submitted to the House by my hon. and learned Friend in a speech which everybody will admit was delightful in its effectiveness and very lucid. It was a speech which made us all hope that he will frequently favour the House with the expression of his views. I hope very much that on this occasion the House will give a Second Reading to the Bill. It is a Bill purely for local purposes, and it is en- tirely permissive. Any local authority can adopt it, but no local authority need adopt it if not in favour of it. It is a Bill which has been passed on three separate occasions by the House of Lords, which ought to satisfy many of my hon. Friends who are not quite certain whether they intend to oppose it or not, and it is a Bill which has been asked for by no fewer than 80 local authorities, including the London County Council and the municipal councils of very large towns. I had intended to strike out a new line in the Debates on proportional representation by saying something about proportional representation itself. I think that would have been almost a record in our Debates, had it not already been done by the hon. and learned Member who moved the Second Reading of the Bill. One of the striking things about Debates in this House on proportional representation is that the subject, as a rule, is hardly touched at all. My hon. and learned Friend has explained in a very lucid way what proportional representation is and what it will do. I intend very shortly to supplement a few of his arguments.

Proportional representation is meant to give both to majorities and minorities the weight and strength of elected Members in proportion to the numbers of votes cast. It deals fairly with both majorities and minorities. It is carried through by the method of a single transferable vote. Every elector has one vote. That sometimes is not very clearly understood. I have heard hon. Members say that the system would give voters seven or eight votes. That is not the case. It is a single transferable vote, giving one elector one vote only, but he has seven or eight chances or more that his vote will not be wasted. He can transfer it from No. 1, his first choice, by stating his preference on the voting paper, which would show whom he would like to vote for, provided that No. 1 does not require his vote or is eliminated. Supposing some very outstanding and popular candidate met with so much support that he collected for himself not merely one quota but perhaps three or four quotas. You can easily imagine that happening if some very outstanding and popular Cabinet Minister, say, put up for a constituency. He might attract so many quotas that other candidates of the same party would be severely prejudiced and would get very few votes. The popular candidate might get two or three quotas which would not be wanted, for he requires only one to secure election. With the votes transferable fairness would be assured for the other candidate standing. The votes when not required by the very important and popular candidate would go to the next choice. It means simply that all the votes would be used instead of being wasted.

Another case might occur where a candidate gets so few votes that those votes will be lost. Let me put it in this way. Were I standing in a constituency with some of my hon. Friends as opposing candidates I would get few votes because they would get so many. My votes would not be required and I should be eliminated, but unless the votes were made transferable they would all be lost. Another point relating to the quota has been very fairly dealt with by my hon. and learned Friend. It means simply that if there are three Members to be elected the quota is one more than one-fourth; that if there are four Members the quota is one more than one-fifth; and that if there are five Members the quota is one more than one-sixth. If there are one vacancy and one hundred electors the man with fifty-one votes gets in and the man with forty-nine votes is eliminated. Another point of which a good deal has been made refers to the returning officer, but it is not necessary to deal with that here.

I notice that there is an Amendment on the Paper, and, as I shall not have an opportunity again of dealing with some of the objections to proportional representation, I would like, if I can, to anticipate some of the arguments which might be used against the Bill. One of the strangest arguments used in this House by a great many of my hon. Friends is that if you pass this Bill, which has nothing to do with Parliamentary representation but purely with local government, it will be the thin end of the wedge. Could any argument be stranger, when one considers that for the last four or five years hon. Members in this House have been sent here by proportional representation. Surely that is not the thin end of the wedge. Any little local government Bill cannot add to the thickness of the wedge. Another argu- ment to counter the thin end of the wedge surely is that this House has already passed a system of proportional representation for Ireland. What the House can pass for Ireland surely it is the thin end of the wedge already in Parliamentary elections. I do not think we need deal at any length with that point. Another argument has been that proportional representation is too complicated. It used to be said that electors would not be able to fill up their voting papers. Electors fill up the same kind of paper by hundreds of thousands every week. Football coupons, bullets, and all these other competitions are exactly the same thing. They are sufficient education for the electors.

But we are able to quote actual instances where there has been no difficulty whatever. I refer to the question of spoilt papers. We have statistics for other elections, and some of them are very remarkable. The first set of statistics refer to the election which took place in Malta, where the spoilt papers were under 1 per cent.—·7 of 1 per cent. The argument that the system is complicated I can answer from personal experience. When I went out to Malta on behalf of the Colonial Office three years ago to explain this system to the Maltese members I had to explain what has been called a complicated system in a language which I did not speak, and many of them did not understand English. I found it quite easy, without the use of a single figure, to explain the system to them, and the result was, as the succeeding election proved, that they understood it so well that the spoilt papers were under 1 per cent.

We have a very striking illustration of the smallness of spoilt papers in the election for the Northern Ireland Parliament in 1921. In that election the spoilt papers averaged 1 per cent. In the County of Antrim, where the total votes cast were 80,470, the spoilt papers were only 521, which worked out at an average of about six per thousand, or ·6 of 1 per cent. The argument that the system is complicated has to go by the board, as also the argument that proportional representation is a jig-saw puzzle. One hon. Member who was very prominent in the opposition to this Bill, the late Mr. Burdett-Coutts, who made most helpful speeches, used the argument that the system is a jig-saw puzzle as a very pro- minent part of his armoury. That kind of argument has been killed for ever, after the experience we have had of the system.

An argument in favour of proportional representation is that where it has been adopted it has not been repealed, except in the case of Ulster. [HON. MEMBERS: "Canada!"] No, they have not adopted it in Canada. They have turned it down, and quite rightly. I was in Canada last year and saw all the leading authorities on proportional representation there. They told me that though they were in favour of proportional representation they realised that the physical characteristics of Canada made it practically impossible to carry it out. There you would have constituencies of about the size of France and Germany put together, and grouped for three or four Members. It would be possible, and they thought of trying to introduce it, for constituencies closely grouped, like Toronto and other places, but as a general proposition it would be absolutely impossible, and we read in the "Times" newspaper a day or so ago that proportional representation is not likely to be adopted in Canada.

The only case I know of where proportional representation has been adopted, and then repealed, is Ulster. I will not go into the reasons why they repealed it; but we must regret that the Ulster Government thought fit to repeal the Statute. I have here an extract from a speech made by the Unionist Vice-Chairman of the Castlereagh Rural Council, in which he says:

Another argument has been used against the Bill, and I daresay it will be used to-day, and that is that it will make two systems for elections to local councils. I fail to see why if a certain council decides that it would like to elect its members by proportional representation that that should necessarily affect any other council. Torquay has passed a resolution in favour of proportional representation. Why should that affect, say, Dulwich? If Leeds has passed a resolution and wishes to have its members elected by proportional representation, what has that to do with Liverpool? Why should it affect Liverpool? Every local council is perfectly capable of managing its own affairs, and if 80 boroughs and counties have passed resolutions in favour of this system, I fail to see why other places should adopt an attitude of opposition.

One objection was raised while my hon. and learned Friend was speaking. It is said that this Bill must be passed by three-fifths of the Members being present and voting, and one hon. Member interpolated the remark that that might mean that the Council would be pledged to this Bill by merely a quorum and that very few Members might be present. If hon. Members will look at Clause 1 (3) of the Bill, they will see that one month at least before the meeting of the Council to vote on the scheme the intention and purport of the resolution must be sent by post to every member. If members of a Council have a month in which to think over whether they will adopt this scheme or not, and if they are so indifferent that they do not take the trouble to turn up at the meeting when they have had notice of it, it entirely rests with them, and shows that they cannot be very greatly opposed to the principle, even if they are not very favourable to it. Therefore, the provision for three-fifths being present and voting to carry the Bill is under the conditions very fair.

This Bill has been recommended by a Royal Commission which sat under the Presidency of Lord Richard Cavendish. That Commission in their report said that whatever objections they had at the time to proportional representation for Members of this House, those objections—and they said it 30 years ago—were not of any purpose in regard to local government. Of course, that was repeated by the Speaker's conference in 1918. As I have said, this Bill has been passed three times by the House of Lords, and some hon. Members might find a certain amount of comfort in seeing that the name of such a stalwart as the right hon. Baronet the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury) is on the back of the Bill, so that it cannot be so very dreadful, as he is known for opposing everything, but he has backed this Bill twice, and I think that ought to satisfy hon. Members who are afraid of it. Further, it is purely voluntary, it is desired by over 80 Councils, and therefore I hope the House will give this much wanted and very innocent little Bill a Second Reading.

I beg to move to leave out the word "now," and at the end of the Question to add the words "upon this day six months."

We have just emerged from an Election which is supposed to have vindicated the cause of safety and tranquillity and to have shown the desire of the people of England to be free from the instability which endangers the Constitutions of other free countries. It is rather amazing, therefore, to find hon. Members as constitutionally minded as my two hon. Friends who have moved and seconded the Motion for the Second Reading of this Bill, bringing forward a Measure which subverts one of the historic and traditional aspects of our constitutional system. It is no argument at all to find in the memorandum the statement that this proposal has been in operation in Ireland ever since 1920. It is much more important to remember that the system which my hon. Friends are seeking to subvert has been in existence in England ever since the reign of Edward I. The fact that a system has been adopted in Ireland and in other modern States is no argument, unless there is some other cogent subsidiary reason to adduce in support of that contention for disturbing what has worked uncommonly well, not only in Parliamentary but also in our local affairs, for many centuries. To me, it has been a wonderful thing, considering the strain on a man's time and purse and the lack of glory attaching to it, to find so many men of a good type who at the present time are willing to undertake local work, and unless my hon. Friends show that the system which they are supporting is likely to bring better men, men of greater judgment and higher intelligence, into local affairs, it seems to me that they are not discharging the burden which lies upon them. The case has been put with a clearness and a force which we expect from the Mover and Seconder of the Motion, but their arguments have been of a very theoretical and academic character, and the points which they have stated might be raised against the Bill are not really the greatest points which can be raised against it in this House.

12 N.

I should like to call attention to certain very grave objections to the scheme which is embodied in the Bill, and I hope that some of those hon. Members who are supporting the Bill will deal with these objections when they come to speak in its favour later on. The first objection to which I should like to draw attention is that this scheme substitutes far larger areas as the basis of representation than the areas which are in use now. It will be possible, under the scheme of the Bill, for a ward or a local area to have, not three members, as it has at the present time, but no fewer than 30 members, and I do urge the House to have regard to the difficulty of a member representing a large area of a county or of a city keeping in touch with ten times the number of electors that he has got to keep in touch with now. Hon. Members belonging to all parties must recognise that the need to keep in touch with their electors has become very much greater in recent years. With the spread of education, people take much more interest in parliamentary and local affairs, and at the same time there has been going on another influence which also intensifies the need for close touch between a member and his constituents, both in Parliamentary and in municipal affairs, and that is this. The agenda of the Legislature or of the local council have a far greater bearing upon the daily life of the people, and much more is discussed and decided in those bodies to-day than 20 years ago. The result is that, with the growth of education and the change in character of Parliamentary and municipal debates the necessity for keeping touch between a Member and his constituents has become greater and greater. The thing is undeniable, and I imagine that hon. Members with a longer experience of Parliament than I have will be even more familiar than I am with the increased burden of correspondence. No day passes but a Member of Parliament or a member of a city or local council has got to deal with numerous specific grievances and wishes of his constituents. That is a great burden, and it is a very necessary burden, because, if our representative institutions are going to work, there cannot be too close an intimacy between a Member and the district which returns him to represent it. If that be the case, it is very much more difficult for an ordinary man to keep this close touch with a very large area than with a relatively small area.

We are not dealing with Parliament in this Bill, it is true, but at the present time a member of a city council has, perhaps, to deal with an electorate of 10,000 or 15,000 voters, and if this Bill comes into operation, and if, to take the extreme case, which at the same time does fall within the orbit of the Bill, the constituency becomes one with 30 members instead of 3, it means that the number of voters whom a city councillor has got to represent may be increased from 10,000 or 15,000 to 100,000 or 150,000. I suggest that it is clear that the difficulty of keeping this close personal relationship would be very greatly increased. The burden of being a member would be greater than ever, and if at the present time it is hard to persuade many men and women to take part in local affairs, and come forward as candidates, it will become very much harder if the constituency is ten times as great and the difficulties and the strain on a member's time are so enormously increased. One of the pleasantest things in the life of a Member of Parliament or a city councillor is the faith that, rightly or wrongly, is reposed in him or her by the constituents, but that personal faith cannot remain unabated if the Member is unable to give the same amount of time and attention, which inevitably would be the case if constituencies were so very largely increased in size.

This is not merely a question of personal relationship. There is the question of expense. If a constituency becomes ten times, or, if you like, five times, the size of the constituency at the present time, the expense will increase. There is no provision in this Bill for keeping the expenses which a candidate for municipal election can legally incur down to the present amount. As a matter of fact, a provision of that sort would be a very difficult one to carry through, because there is only just enough allowed at the present time. It would be very difficult indeed, unless the expense of fighting a constituency rose correspondingly with the number of electors, for a candidate to make himself known to a new area containing 100,000 electors. The increased expense would be a great burden on candidates, and, again, I say it is hard at the present time to get people who cannot afford the money to come forward. That difficulty would be greater if the expense were increased. Moreover, the expense which a man must necessarily incur when he is the representative of a very large area on a city council, must be very much greater than in the case of a city councillor who represents a smaller area. Surely it should be our desire to reduce, not only the personal burden, but also the financial burden, upon representatives of industrial populations on city councils.

Another point is this. If you have a large area, it will be more difficult for a man to be personally known through the length and breadth of that area. He has to rely very much more upon general reputation than upon personal acquaintance, and if that be the case, the man with plenty of money to spend will be a much more attractive and popular candidate than a man with very little money to spend, because if the electors do not know him personally, they can come within reach of his purse. That seems a very strong objection to the Bill, if we desire to have the best men on our representative bodies regardless of their means. Further, it invites a very odious form of competition among members representing the same party upon a council. If an area is represented by ten men of the same party, and there must be preference given by the voters, I think the man with an enormous purse will enjoy the greatest popularity, and that gives him an advantage which does not attach so much to the rich man in a small area.

Let me turn to the third objection, which, I think, can be very fairly raised against this Measure. We want to keep alive, and make as vigorous as possible, local interest in politics, and I think in local affairs, as in Parliamentary affairs, one of the great things that keep public interest alive is the fact that that public interest lies in a local channel. Ward A will vote for so and so, because he has lived in that ward and is known to that ward, and people will be keen on those interests and on those aspects of politics which affect a particular locality. The bigger the locality, the more the local interest dwindles. If you want to keep local interests alive, you do not want a small area submerged in a large area where local interests are lost.

I turn to the fourth, and what I regard as the biggest danger of all. Curiously enough, the Mover and Seconder of the Second Reading, in anticipating objections that might be raised to this Bill, did not refer to this objection at all. This objection is the inevitability of compacts between parties, of log-rolling, wire-pulling and manipulation. The thing is absolutely inevitable. We have it to some extent, of course, at the present time, but it is not a thing you wish to encourage. In this I am not speaking as a Conservative. I should like to read to hon. Gentlemen opposite what the Leader of the Opposition himself has said about it in his book on the Socialist movement. On page 153, talking about proportional representation, he says: to somebody else. It would be all machine-made, and people would not vote according to their own wish or choice, but according to party dictates. That is not a healthy thing. It is because I believe this Bill, although it may be small, nevertheless in its intent and inevitable results, deals a blow against purity in politics and efficiency in Government, that I beg to move its rejection.

I beg to second the Amendment.

This is not the first occasion upon which we have debated proportional representation. I have been present at several Debates on the subject, not only in the last Parliament, but in the previous Parliament, particularly when the Representation of the People Bill was going through, and when the champions of proportional representation tried to get it attached to that Bill. They tried, in a similar way as they are trying to-day, to get proportional representation attached to certain constituencies, and old Members will remember that a Committee was set up to inquire into those constituencies where proportional representation should be allowed to act. The result of that inquiry was that no constituency in the country at that time wonted proportional representation in Parliamentary elections. My objection to this Bill is its permissive character. If proportional representation be right, I think you ought to adopt it for all elections, local as well as Parliamentary. But my strong objection to this Bill is that it is going to allow a council, by a meeting of three-fifths of that council present and voting, according to Clause 1 as I read it, to adopt the Act. That means that if you have a local authority consisting of sixty members, thirty-six members of that body can meet, and by a majority of one out of the thirty-six, can apply this system of proportional representation to their particular area. I think that is a wrong principle altogether. Personally I am not in favour at all of proportional representation. Those of us who have been connected with elections for a good many years have always been in favour of trying to get elections as simple as you possibly can. Those of us who have had any dealings with organisations—and my special knowledge is in connection with London—know that the object of the organisations—no matter what party the organisations belong to—has been to get the election so simply arranged that the elector can understand, go to the poll and record his vote for either party or candidate he may wish to do.

We have at the present time, both for local government elections and Parliamentary elections exactly the same system of voting, that is by placing an "X" against the name of the particular candidate or candidates. I respectfully suggest to the House that by this Bill to allow another system of election to be brought into electoral areas, so that you can have proportional representation for one local government area, while you are still carrying on under the old system for another local government area, and for Parliamentary elections, is utterly wrong from the point of view of the interests of the elector himself.

One would have thought that both the Mover and Seconder of the Bill would have given the House some record of how proportional representation has worked in Britain up to the present. The hon. and gallant Member for the Honiton division (Major Morrison-Bell) referred to one instance—and I believe later in this debate one of my hon. Friends will explain how it has worked out in that particular district. But we have had proportional representation in Great Britain applied to the school board election in Glasgow, and to other places in Scotland. I have taken the trouble to get some of the facts as to how it has worked out in Glasgow. I respectfully say to some of my hon. Friends who believe in proportional representation that I do not believe they know how it works out in practice. May I give the House a few figures as to how the matter has worked out in practice in Glasgow. In the school board election of 1919 there were 7 divisions worked by the proportional representation system. In three out of those seven divisions after the final count the same candidates were elected as were elected on the first count, while in the other four divisions the first count was varied by substituting one member. Putting it another way, out of a total of 48 members elected to the school board in Glasgow in 1919 44 members were elected on the first poll, and all that followed from the subse- quent counts—after 75—was the election of four different members to that which took place on the first count. If that is the case, where is the great advantage to minorities? The main object it seems to me of the people who advocate proportional representation is to get minority representation. That is what they are anxious for. If after an election such as I have just described you only vary four candidates, I put it to the House, where is the great representation of minorities that the proportional representaion advocates put forward as one of its strong points?

There was, again, the school board election of Glasgow in 1922. There were 89 candidates. In two divisions the candidates at the final count were exactly the same as in the first count, and in the other divisions they varied, one in each case, after a great number of counts. To summarise it, out of 45 candidates who were elected for the school board, 40 of them were the same as were elected on the first count—and there were 69 counts altogether—while five of the results were varied by the final count. That is proportional representation in practice. The same thing applies to Dundee. For Aberdeen I have not been able to get the exact figures. My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Honiton, who seconded this Bill, explained to the House how you are going to transfer the votes. I should like to invite the hon. and gallant Gentleman to come down and address a meeting in my constituency and explain to my constituents how he proposes to transfer their votes. I do know that he will not be able to make them understand.

I shall be very glad to come down to my hon. Friend's constituency and do what he wishes.

We will wait and see the result of this Bill. If it goes through, I think the hon. and gallant Member for Honiton and other proportional representation champions will have to do a good deal of explanation in the districts where they are going to try to get proportional representation carried out by the local councils. Let me give the House an example of what the count means. I find in the "Glasgow Herald" for 27th March, 1922, the following comment about the school board election count and recount in Glasgow:

The hon. Member who moved the Bill devoted a good deal of his speech to London. May I respectfully say that I do not think the hon. Member knows very much about London local elections, because if he did he would not have made the statement which he made in his opening speech? He spoke to the House as if in the London local elections—and he quoted several districts in London —as if the people who represented the particular district were more or less strangers. May I say to the hon. Member for Bristol East (Mr. Morris) that if he will inquire into London elections he will, I think, find that practically—in the bulk of the wards of London, no matter what party is represented—the great majority of the representatives are local residents who reside in those wards, or at any rate reside in the boroughs themselves? One of the things which every party in this House who is interested in local elections has had to face, is the fact that you have great difficulty to get local people who reside in the wards to represent that particular ward upon any particular local authority. This matter particularly applies to London. I do not suppose there is any part of the country where we have so many local authorities as we have in London. If you are going to allow this permissive system of voting, it means you are going to allow one local governing body in a particular area to pass this resolution by a majority of one in a small council, and that is going to cut across the old system and divide it up. I have worked and organised for a great many years in London.

In the administrative county of London itself we have 58 local elective bodies. There is the London County Council, the Corporation of the City of London, 28 Metropolitan borough councils, and 28 boards of guardians, and three of those have triennial elections. The City Corporation has an annual election, but if you go beyond the borders to the extra Metropolitan area, taking the administrative County of London as the police area, then you have a further 157 locally elected bodies. There are urban district councils, rural district councils, parish councils and boards of guardians. In round figures the total of the bodies for Greater London is 215. I think it would be a calamity if by this Bill 5, 10, 20 or 50 of these particular bodies are to be allowed to pick one system of election and cut across all other elections in the same area and the Parliamentary elections which are held under the old system.

The Bill itself proposes that the Home Secretary shall have large powers as regards amalgamating wards. As I understand proportional representation, you can only get it properly to work in large electoral areas, or even Parliamentary areas with a great number of members, and you want an odd number in order that minorities may get some form of representation. In London itself —I have not been able to obtain the figures for outside London—we have 62 wards, and they return one member to these local authorities. We have 122 wards which return two members, and 200 wards which return three. I suppose under proportional representation those wards would come in. There are 35 wards which return four members, and ten which return five. We have 119 wards returning six members, two which return seven, and one that returns eight. There are 32 which return nine members, and one of them returns 11.

In London we have tried to get equal election districts for all kinds of elections, and under the last Redistribution Bill we were able to get that. Previous to that time the guardians had a different area to the borough councils, and the borough councils had a different area to the county council, but now they are all the same. If this Bill is passed what may happen with your boards of guardians will be that for a particular area they could choose proportional representation elections for a particular district; then your borough council might choose proportional representation or your county council might choose it, but it does not apply to Parliamentary elections, and so in one particular district you could have two forms of elections. That is bad from the electoral point of view, and also from every other point of view. The hon. Member who moved the rejection of this Bill referred to the difficulty of obtaining candidates. I speak with some knowledge of local election and I do not think the members of any party in this House will differ from what I say so far as London is concerned that, whether it be the Labour party, my party, or the Conservative party, we have all experienced difficulties owing to the great increase of electors, and the great increase in the cost of running local elections in London, and since the passing of the Redistribution Bill we have all had a difficulty in finding candidates.

To-day each candidate in a ward starts at the scratch, but under the system of this Bill if you are going to run nine candidates for a ward which returns nine members they are not going to start equally because one of them must be number 1, somebody else number 2, and so on, and I suggest that it is going to increase the difficulty of getting candidates for any ward for any of these elections if you are going to have the election based on that system. I am quite certain that if you adopt proportional representation and you amalgamate the wards as suggested and make them much larger and you get 9, 11 or 13 candidates for a ward, you will make it almost impossible, first of all, to get suitable candidates; and, secondly, you will add enormously to the cost of running local elections. The expense of local elections has increased enormously since the passing of the last Redistribution Bill. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that in the ordinary ward elections for borough councils or boards of guardians, where there is a contest between two opposing parties, to-day you have to spend quite three times as much as the amount you had to spend before the Redistribution Bill was passed in 1918. Those are my objections from a London point of view. I think the system is wrong, and it is going to upset all your systems of organisation of elections in London if you are going to allow one or more local boards to pick out a separate system of election from that adopted by surrounding local boards. For these reasons I hope the House in this new Session of Parliament will do exactly the same as was done in the last Parliament, and in the previous Parliament which passed the Redistribution Bill and reject the Bill which is now before the House. If proportional representation be right, I suggest to my hon. Friends who are supporting this Measure that they ought to bring in a Bill, and make it apply to all elections. With regard to the question of amalgamating these wards, I suppose if the Home Secretary has the power under this Bill, it will mean a local inquiry and a good deal of expenditure before he can make any amalgamation of wards. As the Bill is now printed, I want to know whether that charge will fall upon the local authorities, or whether it will be paid out of Imperial funds. I hope I have made my points perfectly clear. I thank the House for listening to me so patiently, and I do hope that the House will reject this Bill.

At the outset I wish to make it clear this afternoon that this is a question upon which my colleagues on this side of the House are much divided. Some of them are enthusiastic supporters of proportional representation, and others are very determined opponents. Therefore I am not going to express more than a personal view on this occasion. Some of the opponents of proportional representation have concentrated very largely on the argument of regarding areas, and it is to that part of the case that I invite the attention of hon. Members. Taking a small country like our own the electoral areas are bound to be limited at the best. I am quite aware that when critics consider countries like Canada and the United States there is a distinct tendency to make far too much of this argument. In a very large number of cases in this country the area is limited in character, and it is not difficult for the average industrious representative to get into touch with the whole or the greater part of his area.

There is another argument which is of very great importance at the present day. Hon. Members who are familiar with recent investigations in education, public health, and other problems have been greatly impressed by the amount of evidence which has been given, particularly on the last point, in favour of a larger area. There is not the slightest doubt that many of our areas for administrative purposes of the present day are too small and in the interests of public economy should be enlarged. If the areas are enlarged and we arrive at something like the ideal district, the next question which faces us is the problem of getting proper representation within that area for every point of view which it contains. The hon. and learned Member, who argued with great force against the Bill, spoke as if in the wider area which the Bill contemplates there will be only one representative of the people. The actual position is that there will be a number, and in some cases a considerable number, of representatives of the people; and, while it is perfectly true that the member elected represents that larger area, he has the co-operation and support of other representatives, all the stronger if they happen to be, as they must be in many cases, of his particular persuasion. That goes a long way to meet the argument that you are throwing upon the individual a far greater responsibility and difficulty in representation than he has at the present day.

Surely the opponents of the Bill, on this question of area, have omitted to notice that part of the Bill which provides for a reasonable sub-division. The hon. Member for Central Southwark (Mr. Gilbert) altogether exaggerated the difficulty on that point. In some of the larger areas which have been introduced in Scotland, where we have this system in operation for educational purposes, there has been a division into two, three, or more parts, which, while very much larger than the original area, are at all events quite small enough to be covered by a representative anxious to do his duty. In any case, we must not attach too much importance to a mere local or ward election, because what is really at stake is the representation of principles or sets of principles in the body which is finally set up. That leads me to remind the House that, after all, the authority which is elected is going to act for the district as a whole, and, if we are able to say of that authority when elected that it does not contain an adequate representation of the views of substantial minorities within the community, then undoubtedly it loses much of its representative character.

That brings us quite naturally to the second part, and a very important part, of the proposal which we are now discussing. It is, I think, an accepted principle in political science that minorities should be adequately represented. Many Members who favour proportional representation would not be nearly so enthusiastic in their support if it could be said of the existing system of election that it provided in any case for representation of minorities in the bodies elected. The very reverse in a large part of our experience is true. Year after year quite considerable minorities of all points of view, and of every persuasion in different communities in this country, have been struggling to obtain representation on the local authorities, but many of them have never persuaded the particular area, largely sub-divided, to return a representative. There is no doubt that taking the community as a whole, which after all is the district for which that authority exists, they could get a representative returned on the basis of proportional representation, and for the first time in our experience there would then be expressed in that authority a point of view which hitherto, because of the system, has not found expression.

It is very important in the public interest that we should institute some electoral machinery or system which will contribute to that end. I have very little knowledge of the law, but I think it is true to say that there have been important legal decisions in this country which have emphasised the contention of a minority both as regards the distribution of material property and as regards the establishment of a principle in the State, and that should apply to the election of a local authority. It is in the public interest, especially in these difficult times through which we are passing, that a point of view which may be extreme or revolutionary on the one side or thoroughly reactionary on the other, should be exposed to the test of contact with other points of view through representation on the elected body, because it is there, first of all, that it can be brought into contact with something which will establish it or disprove it in the community. The position of minorities has never been fully safeguarded in this matter, and this is a method in local elections at all events of doing something on their behalf.

The only other point with which I will trouble the House this afternoon is a point which weighs, I am bound to mention, very considerably with many of my colleagues on this side of the House, and I do not in any way underrate the force of their argument. They say that the growing support of proportional representation at the present time in quarters which are regarded as hostile to our cause is due to the fact that we are making progress in the country, and that this is possibly a device introduced to make it a little more difficult for us to obtain a working majority either in the State as a whole or in the local authorities in particular. There is one very sound argument which meets that case. First of all, I daresay that all who take that view would agree that we are not entitled to a majority in the country, on a basis of strict representation, until we represent the majority of the people in the country, and when we represent a majority of people in the country there can be no doubt about the electoral result. But there are many districts in Great Britain in which under the existing system we have succeeded in returning only one or two representatives, or in many cases none at all. If we can get a little larger area on the basis of proportional representation, then undoubtedly for the first time in many areas we can secure the election of a representative to the local authority. We have not so far been able to achieve that result.

A good deal of criticism has been directed against local proportional representation on the ground that it has failed to provide for minorities. That is simply due either to the fact that so small a percentage of the total electorate has voted in the first place or that so small a proportion of the people representing that particular point of view has voted in the second. In that way the minority has not been represented on that local body. That is no attack on proportional representation. It is a criticism, and a very proper criticism, of the apathy and indifference of the electors. So far from opposing the Bill on the ground that it is likely to stay our progress, there is the strong argument that we should support it as leading to the expression of our views, probably for the first time, in much of the administrative machinery of this country.

There is only one other point I desire to put. The most ardent supporters of proportional representation have never disputed that very often we get a House of Commons or a local authority elected on a basis of distribution which is not in any way in keeping with the distribution of votes in the country as a whole. There is no doubt if we had had proportional representation at the last General Election the party to which I have the honour to belong would have been even larger in numbers than it is at the present time. I do not stress that unduly. Many of our eminent political thinkers of other times have emphasised the thought that the House of Commons should be the mirror and an accurate reflection of the views of the people of the country as a whole. Any attempt at proportional representation having regard to the number who record their votes no doubt sounds like an ideal difficult of attainment by reason of difficulties in the sphere of electoral machinery. But this is a small country, and the areas, everything considered, cannot be so large that under this and under existing measures they are incapable of reasonable sub-division. If that is true a large part of the difficulty regarding machinery disappears, and it remains for us to try to obtain national and local representative institutions which in the highest and best sense of the term will be in numbers and outlook truly representative.

I represent one of the constituencies in this House which is worked by proportional representation, and hon. Members will no doubt be curious to know how one elected by proportional representation feels on this subject. I can answer that best by saying I am going to vote for the rejection of this Bill. I do so from personal experience. Five years ago I read literature on proportional representation. I had not seen it working, and I did not know what was the case for the other side, but I signed my name to some documents in favour of it. Five years later I must confess myself a pervert or a convert, but at any rate a person who has come to his senses. First, I think all forms of pro- portional representation sin against the cardinal theory that should be the basis of all representation, whether it be parliamentary, municipal or local. That basis should be that the local man should be returned by people who know his goings out and comings in and are acquainted with him. Therefore the smaller the constituency, provided it has the minimum number of votes necessary to justify its existence, the better. The more constituencies are grouped together the more will it be the case that external candidates are put forward by each side, who will be unknown in the ward or the borough or the county division. A man may be the most popular person in the world at Banbury. He may be its king, so to speak, but at Henley very little will be known about him. Similarly a popular person at Henley will be only a name at Banbury. But when unknown candidates stand for large areas, then the working of the system falls into the hands of a machine, or of the party jobbers, whatever the party is, whether it is Labour, Liberal or Conservative. They will settle who is to be number one, two or three in the area group and the point will not be settled by the inhabitants of the ward or of the division. It will be settled very often by self-chosen or intriguing persons who know nothing of the local feeling of a ward. I am in favour of representation by local men, and I am against all grouping either in municipal or in Parliamentary divisions. We know that contiguous divisions are not always in touch with each other, but are divided by some river or railway system or range of hills. I want to have local representation by local men and therefore I am against all grouping.

Secondly, the way in which proportional representation works at present in the constituencies is, owing to the egregious drafting of the Bill, perfectly preposterous. Hon. Members will know what I mean when I allude to two-member constituencies. In the case of two-member constituencies, the result of the present Act is that, if one-third plus 1 of the voters in a constituency vote for one candidate, and two-thirds minus 1 vote for the other two, the one who represents the one-third plus 1 will get one of the two seats, whereas those who represent the two-thirds will only get the other seat. Perhaps I may exemplify it by supposing a case such as that of a two-member constituency like Brighton or Oxford University. Suppose, for instance, that in Brighton 40,000 people voted one way and 20,001 voted the other way, the 20,001 would secure one of the seats, because they would have one-third plus 1 of the total voters, while the 40,000, who were opposed to the 20,000 plus 1, would only get the other seat. The result of that would be that for the whole of the next Parliament the vote in political affairs of a large and important constituency would count for nothing, because its two members would pair off against each other for every possible Division. It seems to me that a Bill which leads to this should not be called a Bill for proportional representation, but a Bill for the over-representation of minorities, because that is what it is. Can it be wondered at that those of us who sit for the majority, in two-member constituencies, should regard the Act as preposterous, iniquitous and one that had better be got rid of, and that we should also regard this Bill, which will place other constituencies in a similar position, as one not to be encouraged? The whole "quota" system of the minimum number plus 1 becomes, in extreme cases, absurd and inequitable, and only means over-representation of minorities.

The exact representation of all fractions of the population in any body, whether it be local, municipal or Parliamentary, is not an end in itself, though it may be a very good thing to secure when possible. The end in itself of all institutions is the right governance of the people by their representatives. Supposing that you introduce a system by which every small minority has its representative, and in which, by the way in which the machine works, it is very likely that small minorities may have the decisive power between the greater parties, you have a most dangerous condition of affairs, a condition in which it may be practically impossible to secure any majority that can work the machine. The Duke of Wellington once, in one of his lucid moments of common sense, observed: "His Majesty's Government must be carried on somehow," and it seems to me that by the introduction of complete and absolute proportional representation you run the danger that occasions may occur when His Majesty's Government cannot be carried on anyhow.

1.0 P.M.

Ingenious people have worked out what would have been the results of the last Election had proportional representation prevailed. I will not vouch for all their calculations, for I did not follow them all, but I did follow the greater part of them. There is no doubt that there would not quite have been a Conservative majority. The Conservatives would have numbered something like 298. They would have had no majority, and no other party, of course, would have had a majority, and His Majesty's Government could not have been carried on. I do not care whether it is a Conservative or a Liberal or a Labour Government that is in power; we want a Government that can govern. It seems to me that proportional representation is one of the ways of securing for us that, on a very much larger number of occasions than is the case already, we shall not have a Government that can govern. It will result in leagues of minorities, which can when combined vote down the largest homogeneous party. Leagues of minorities or leagues of a majority with one of several minorities are, I think, in themselves not to be desired. England, as has been very truly said, dislikes coalitions, and for this reason, that coalitions, whether they be coalitions of the majority with one of the minorities, or coalitions of all minorities against the majority, are bound in every case to sacrifice some of their creed, their personal views of right and wrong. We do not want to be compelled, as part of a bargain, to vote for views that we believe to be erroneous, perhaps morally wrong, perhaps only economically wrong. We all dislike a coalition, and I dislike it still more when it is worked by means of proportional representation, which would result, much more frequently than was possible in the past, in there being no homogeneous majority in the House of Commons, and possibly in small fractional minorities, either local or representing some sectional propaganda, having the power of settling the fate of Cabinets. Therefore, with regard to proportional representation, of which five years ago I rather approved, I must now employ the words of Shakespeare:

The hon. Gentleman who has just resumed his seat has told us that the end we have to seek is the government of the country by its representatives. It is because I believe that to be a right object that I intend to support this Bill. The Bill, of course, has its history, and the House may allow me to remind it that, as far back as 1910, a similar Motion was brought before this House. On the 30th March, 1910, this House decided:

It ought to be emphasised that this Bill is entirely optional, which, I think, is a great advantage. I do not follow at all the hon. Member for Central South- wark (Mr. Gilbert), who said that it would be a disadvantage if some boroughs in London adopted this Bill and others did not. I think there ought to be variety. I hope that local government in this country will not have all the trim precision of a Dutch garden. Experiments ought to be made in one direction and the other, and if this Bill is adopted in, say, a dozen boroughs throughout the country, we shall have the advantage of what I think will be useful and fruitful experience. It is not to be forced upon any one local authority, and I would ask, why cannot this House trust the local authorities? It is a very great mistake to assume that all the wisdom of the country is gathered at Westminster. We have certainly not a monopoly of wisdom in these matters, and I would just as soon trust in the wisdom of a borough council to decide upon their own interests as I would in the decision of this House.

The hon. Gentleman who has just sat down said the Bill was iniquitous and pernicious. If the scheme is full of pitfalls and dangers, how can he better prove his case than by giving local authorities an opportunity of trying it? If in the course of the next four or five years in big local authorities like Leeds and Bradford, who have asked for this power, these disappointments and pitfalls are made manifest, what stronger case could the opponents of proportional representation have when the scheme comes to be applied to the country generally? My submission is that every voter should be able to cast his vote with a reasonable assurance that it will count and that he will get his vote's worth. Hon. Members who have experience of local government know that very often there is a ward in which one party is in permanent minority and they have made one attempt after another, and although they may be able to secure a third of the electorate, they are excluded from power until at last they give up hope, and the party committee, or the organisation of the ratepayers' party which has sought to secure representation loses heart, the organisation falls to pieces, the ward becomes un-contested, and there is political stagnation. You get apathy in local affairs, and it is that which often lead to incompetence and even corruption.

Or if I may take the other experience of what happens at a council election. I belong to a council where there are 80 members, consisting of 60 councillors and 20 aldermen. After an election has taken place in November, we meet together and form our committees on a basis of proportional representation. When we elect our aldermen, as we do every six years, we do it on the basis of proportional representation. At a certain time there are so many Conservatives on the council, so many Labour men and so many Liberals, and we constitute our committees accordingly. It is open to a casual majority—it may be a majority of one—to say "We are going to take all the aldermen," but if that course is taken it is an arrogant action on the part of the majority for the time being. That is a disaster in local affairs and if it is right that we should carry on the work of the council upon the lines of proportional representation and form our committees upon that basis, it is surely right that the council itself should be constituted upon the same lines. I should like the House to consider what is the precarious position very often of a public servant who may have held high office in the town and who has served it for very many years. He comes up for election in a particular ward at a time when some local matter creates a temporary excitement, and, it may be by courageous action on his part, he has aroused against himself a certain resentment, and those whom he has offended throw their weight into the scale and he is turned out of the local council. He is dependent simply upon a chance majority at one particular time in one ward when he himself has been serving not one particular ward but the whole town. I believe the passing of the Bill would mean that a man who has for long years rendered faithful service to his own town will be practically sure of re-election. A local council, I think, should in its. component parts be representative of the component parts of the community. I would remind the House of words used many years ago in relation to this House, and I think they apply as truly to a local council: essence or a borough council consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the whole local community.

Taking the town to which I made reference just now, we had an election last November, and I should like to give the House the result. There were 16 contested wards. The Conservative secured just over 20,000 votes and obtained 13 seats. The Labour party secured 11,401 votes and only secured one seat. On a proportional basis the Conservative should have had eight seats and the Labour party five. As it happened the Conservatives had 13 seats and the Labour party only one. I have had put before me figures relating to Bradford. They are stranger still. In 1920 the Labour party actually secured a majority of the votes and secured no representation. The votes were 32,810 for the Labour party with no seat, the Liberal party secured 30,700 and had 11 seats, and the Conservative party had 29,570 and had 12 seats. So that the smaller the vote got the bigger was the representation. I ask the hon. Gentleman who has just sat down who suggested that we had to look for the government of the people by their representatives, how he can defend a system which secures, in Bradford, at any rate, that the people are actually governed by those who are not their representatives. That is a case within comparatively recent times of a big progressive city. Is there any system that is more likely to bring local government into contempt? Will the House consider what elaborate preparations we make? We have had Franchise Bills passed, we keep up the lists, printed from time to time at enormous cost to the country, all sorts of laws have been passed to secure safeguards against bribery and personation and after all these preparations nothing is done to secure that a vote shall have its adequate result.

One reason why this reform which has been pressed so long has not succeeded is because it has such an unfortunate name. We have a distrust of these long words. I think the system of proportional representation can best be described as being a system of fair play to all parties. A very distinguished Member of the House many years ago spoke of this as being the greatest reform still to be made in the art of politics. That was the opinion of John Stuart Mill, and one reason why I am particularly interested in this reform is because I come from a part of the country which was associated for many years with one who played a great part in the House and was a great champion of this reform. I refer to Mr. Leonard Courtney, as he then was. I am a humble successor in representing the same constitutency that he represented for so many years. Mr. Courtney spoke, almost from this place, as far back as 1886, when the Local Government Bill was before the country, urging upon the House the adoption of the reform at that time. It was some years before that, just after the death of Mr. Fawcett, that in this House Mr. Leonard Courtney said: and municipal life these richer elements may be brought that I hope this Bill, which promises so much for the country, will be passed, and that after experience of some years in our local councils we shall be wise enough to apply the principle to the larger affairs of the nation.

I have listened with interest to the speech of the hon. Member who has just spoken, which indicates great enthusiasm for this cause; but while I listened with interest I also listened with some surprise. He indicated that one of the effects of this Bill might be in certain cases that a candidate who had done something to offend his constituents, although in his idea he had done something that was entirely right, and in regard to which his constituents were wrong, would be able to hold his seat; that proportional representation would heal the breach, and enable him to represent a constituency which, for a time at all events, was unwilling to have him as its representative.

What I intended to say, if I did not say it, was that at one particular time when an election takes place there might be a passing emotion, or some indignation aroused, and a small body who were offended would throw all their weight into the scale against the man, regardless of all the service he had rendered in previous years.

The hon. Member now says "A small body." If they were a small body, how could they have power to throw out the candidate? If they were a large body, then why should they not have the power to throw him out? I followed with some surprise the case which the hon. Member gave of a certain local election where, possessing a majority of the votes, the Labour party were left in the position of having none of the seats. That surely indicates some lack of organising dexterity somewhere if, having a majority, they were unable to get any of the seats. In that I fail to follow the hon. Member. I listened with special interest to the hon. Member for Central Edinburgh (Mr. W. Graham). I wanted to learn from him, and the explanation surprised me, why there is such support for this Bill amongst the Labour party. It is a curious thing that my right hon. Friend the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury) supports the Bill because he thinks it would be a safeguard against an excessive Labour party. On the other hand, the Labour party think that it is the best means of raising them to a prominent position. My own opinion is that both of these views are profoundly mistaken. I do not think that my right hon. Friend will find that if there was a great wave of revolution he would be saved because some small raft of Conservative representation might float above the flood. In regard to the Labour party, I am convinced that they will not advance their cause so much by a pedantic scheme of this sort as they will by beginning gradually and going on day by day persuading the great bulk of the people that it is to their interests to give them a majority of votes. They will secure that far better than by pressing it in a hole and corner way. They would' achieve their object far better by allowing support to flow from the great stream of political opinion in this country. Great political parties have never been built up by artificial means and by dexterous manipulation. They have been built up by persuading the mass of the people of this country that they were ready to carry out the will of the mass of the people.

One thing that surprises me when I look at this Bill is its enormous and its audacious scope. Whatever we think about local government, we must realise that local government is an essential part of the government of this country, as much a part of the Constitution as the central Government. Surely, if it is such a fundamental part of the Constitution we should not put it into the melting pot and leave it to the optional exercise of choice on the part of local bodies to alter the date of election from annual to triennial or vice versa, to alter the scope and range of the electoral division, and to alter fundamentally the system on which the election takes place. All these things are to be left to the chance vote of three-fifths of the members of a Council. Surely hon. Members will see that it will be a very strange position in this country if our local government is to be divided into a sort of kaleidoscopic variety over every part of the country. How can there be satisfactory relations between the local government and the central Government if the locality is left to choose at its own option the methods of election, the scope of the electoral division, and the time when the elections are to take place? There would be no homogeneity in the country at all. That is what the Bill proposes to take out of the hands of Parliament, out of the hands of this central inquest of the nation, and to hand it over to the chance vote of a small minority in each locality.

The hon. Member for Central Edinburgh said that this scheme had been approved by many eminent political thinkers. I have my doubts and my suspicions about eminent political thinkers. I have not always found that they were the most eminent practical politicians. Look back to the Debates on this subject, and I am certain that it will be found that the great weight of statesmanlike opinion was opposed to this scheme. We admit that John Stuart Mill was a great philosophical thinker, although even in that regard he is perhaps a little out of date, and we admire Mr. Leonard Courtney as a man of singular independence of character, but neither of them was distinguished for a very practical grasp of politics.

I have had, even more than my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford University (Sir C. Oman), personal experience of proportional representation. I had once the honour of representing a single-member constituency. When it was proposed that the constituency which I alone represented should be abolished, and become a triple constituency, the matter was proposed by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Spen Valley (Sir J. Simon) and he assumed that I would oppose it. I told him that I was not prepared to oppose it; because although I did not favour the system, yet it would have been a very delicate matter for me to oppose in my own constituency that which would give a greater freedom of choice to University constituencies. Of course, we admitted that under proportional representation the minority must have one Member. When the first election took place, my colleague and I, as representing that constituency for some time, told the Committees that we should stand as two Conservatives, but not with a third. Our Committees agreed, and that was publicly announced, so that all knew that if the Liberal organisations chose any one candidate they could return him without a contest. Unfortunately, they were unable to choose a candidate. Each little group put forward its own and each hoped that its own representative would be elected. Accordingly, my colleague and I were forced to undergo the considerable expense and trouble of an election, not because there was any doubt that we should get in, which was a foregone conclusion, but in order to decide who should be our colleague.

I will take hon. Members into my confidence when I tell them after experience that it is an eminently satisfactory thing that a man should be wedded to one constituency and that constituency to him. The bond is a more sacred one, a more satisfactory one in every way, just as in the conjugal relationship. There is one constituency and one only, and if hon. Members will take my advice, let them keep to their one constituency. I have got a constituency which, though it is now enlarged, I would not change for any other, but I still look with some regret to the constituency which was mine for 16 years, and was mine only, instead of the constituency which I share with others. I am certain of this, that we may try these artificial methods without making things better. Is it the great advantage which the promoters of this Bill say it is for a constituency to have every type of elector represented? I do not see that it is. Why should every crank, every strange opinion, necessarily be represented within this House or on the local bodies? It is the business of those small sections of the community to try to make themselves of importance, to try to persuade their fellow citizens that they really have a good work to do, and a good reason for their existence, until they get a fair proportion of votes and come in not as representing a mere small section of the community but as representing a large, formidable, substantial portion of the community.

It is no advantage in the Debates of this House of Commons or even in the proceedings of a local council that each man who represents a very small section should be able to inflict upon his fellow Members a long statement as to his peculiar views. I do not think that Members of such independence as the Member for Motherwell (Mr. Newbold) are of any great advantage to the business of this House, and perhaps those who think with him would do better if they tried to persuade a large number and then came forward not as representing merely the opinions of a small minority clique, but as members representing a large proportion of the constituencies. The only method by which we have advanced in our Constitution hitherto is the method upon which all great statesmen have proceeded, and I am not prepared to support an artificial method, such as is proposed by this Bill, which would throw the whole of our local government into the melting pot.

I am not going to deal with this Bill from a university point of view. I have now had 40 years of practical experience of elections in industrial constituencies, and I would suggest to Members who have just addressed us that their arguments, which may hold as regards university representation, are altogether out of court when you come to deal with the real constituencies in ordinary life. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for the Scottish Universities (Sir H. Craik) was good enough to admit that men like John Stuart Mill and Mr. Courtney, advocates of proportional representation, had intellectual eminence, but he said that they lacked, in his judgment, practical knowledge of life. So far as my observation of the speeches of himself and the hon. Member for Oxford University (Sir C. Oman) go, I do not seek to deny them intellectual capacity at any rate to place them by the side of two such eminent men, but neither do I think their practical knowledge of life any greater than that of these men. We are told that the object of the Labour party ought to be to build up on constitutional lines this party under the existing system of election and not to rely upon artificial arrangements.

I fail to understand that the present proposals are any more or any less artificial than the proposals which we seek to displace. They are both proposals to set up and maintain machinery to accomplish a certain result. That result, I am sure even a representative of the Universities will admit, is to get a fair representation on public bodies of the ideas which more or less are represented in a constituency. I am amazed to hear what seems to be the implication that any crank could, under proportional representation, expect to get some form of representation by election on public bodies. On that supposition arguments were advanced against the adoption of these proposals. I suggest that the arguments represent a little loose thinking. A man may be a crank, but under proportional representation that certainly will not get him anywhere. Before he can arrive at the point of being elected to any public body under proportional representation he will have to secure such proportion of the electors behind him as other members get. If he is able to secure that, despite his crankiness, he is entitled to stand upon the floor of any such assembly and to represent the views of the people who sent him to it.

I have been waiting to hear from these practical gentleman some practical objection to proportional representation. The only one I have been able to find so far, and that only by implication, is that they are in favour of disproportional representation. That I have always known that I have had to suffer from; that I and some of my colleagues to-day are probably able to take advantage of; and, strange though it may appear to the last speaker, there are some of us who though we have suffered from that theory, are not prepared to take advantage of it to-day merely because that has now turned to some extent to our advantage. We still believe in the justice of the proposals for which the principle of this Bill stands. I have been living for over 30 years in one town, and during all that time I have been taking part in electoral propositions. It would seem from the argument of the last speaker that in his mind we are not to get any representation at all until we have won a majority of the electors of that town to our side. I suggest to him that that is not even the system which he upholds. The system which he upholds is one which would give progressive election to such a body according to the strength and the numbers that you have in your town.

What I meant was that you get your representation by spreading your views and getting them accepted by a certain proportion of the population, so that in some place or other you will find that you have a majority.

I was about to show the right hon. Gentleman that his con- tentions are up in the air and are not true. Thirty years ago, in the town that I represent, our opinions as Socialists were accepted by at least one-third of the electors of the town. On the basis of averages it might be assumed that we were paying one-third of the rates of the town. Therefore in all decency we ought to have had such electoral machinery as would have given us at least one-third of the representation on the body that governed the town. For very many years we held that position and never had a single representative upon the public body, because of the splitting up of the town into wards, and because the progressive section who call themselves Liberals were afraid, in many cases, to split their votes between a Liberal and a Socialist for fear that the Conservative would get in. I can remember a municipal election taking place in that town some 20 years ago. There were 12 seats to be contested. It was, of course, in the days when the electorate was very much smaller than it is to-day I recollect that upon the party vote we were the second of the three parties in number. But the results of the existing machinery was that our Liberal and Conservative opponents took the whole of the 12 seats between them.

We are asked to go on carefully and quietly building things up. The case I have quoted relates to 20 years ago. In November of last year the same machinery was in force, but with different conditions. Had the three-cornered arrangement gone on, although we should still have been a minority, we should to-day be in control of the council governing the town. But our friends, who believe so strongly that each party ought to stand on its own bottom, do not seem to understand the facts of life. Our Liberal and Conservative opponents, after slanging each other for 20 years in a fashion that I am never prepared to imitate, and after assuring the electors on either side that the other was the enemy, that there were vital differences of principle between Liberals and Tories which could never be bridged, have for the last two or three years found a method of bridging those differences by never mentioning any principle and by never advocating any idea except one, and that was, "Combine, for God's sake, to keep the Socialists out." What was the result, after 20 years of constitutional agitation under the existing obsolete forms of electoral machinery? There were 10 seats to be contested. The Labour and Socialist party polled over 10,000 votes. The two other parties combined, Liberal voting for Tory and Tory for Liberal, secured over 13,000 votes. With the 13,000 votes they took nine seats out of ten, and we with 10,000 votes secured only one seat.

To-day of the three parties we are the dominant party, and after well contested elections and thorough tests our opponents have failed to upset that conclusion, as my presence here shows. Nevertheless the fact remains that in a council of forty-eight members there are only five representatives of the predominant political party in the town and we have not one single representative on the aldermanic bench. That arises out of the obsolete and indeed infamous election methods which have been applied up to the present and which have played first into the hands of the Liberals and then into the hands of the Conservatives, but have always operated against Socialism and Labour. I am glad to say that pressure of circumstances is turning many men on both sides to a fairer consideration of this matter. Although I am one of those who have benefited by the present method, I am not going to do other than vote for the principle I have supported during the whole of my political life, even though that vote should lose me my own personal position as a representative of the people. An ex-Prime Minister of this country, speaking only a few days ago, referred to one matter of very grave significance in connection with the working of this very ill-advised political machinery. It may mean—it certainly will mean—a grave danger to this country. It may yet precipitate it into another violent war in which the lives of many citizens will be lost and many millions of hard earned money will go towards the upkeep of military, naval and air arrangements and will be taken away from the carrying out of the social reforms which are so badly needed. I am referring to the effect of our present electoral system upon the consideration of such questions as, for example, the question of the Ruhr and whether we ought to refer disputes like it to arbitration, and also the question of Mesopotamia and whether we should withdraw our forces from that country. I am not going to enter into these matters in detail.

Hear, hear!

Surely I have not transgressed the ordinary usages of Debate, and if hon. Members will mete out to me the same courtesy which they mete out to speakers on their own side of the House, we shall get on much better. No man can accuse me of unfair interruption or unfair implication. Extreme though I may be, that is one charge which no man who knows me has even been able to bring against me and very few would care to try bringing such a charge against me.

On a point of Order. May I explain to the hon. Member through you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, that in saying "Hear, hear," I was seeking to support his opinion and not, as he alleges, to interrupt it?

I apologise if I have made a mistake, but the accent seemed so ironical that I could not help taking notice of it. Without going into these questions which I have indicated, I only wish to say that the ex-Prime Minister, referring to votes in the Lobby of this House on those questions, pointed out that the Government had had a majority in each case of something like 100. He went on to say, and it is likely he is accurate, that the minority in the Lobby represented perhaps 10,000,000 voters as against 6,000,000 voters represented by the majority in the Lobby. That is a very grave consideration. It should compel the House of Commons to decree a thorough examination of electoral methods, and we should seek to revise them either upon the lines now proposed or some other lines. It should no longer be possible in the life of the nation, that by the vote of a minority of the electorate this country could be precipitated into war, merely because the electoral machinery prevents the proper expression of the will of the people. For some years past I have taken part in Parliamentary elections where exactly the same points have arisen. In the last election in my constituency I polled 17,000 and my Conservative opponent 14,000, while the Liberal candidate received 12,000 votes. After the election I found the Conservative papers very irate with your humble servant for daring to represent a con- stituency in which, as they put it, 26,000 votes had been cast against me, while I only secured 17,000. To some extent I agree with that view. I am not claiming to go on any longer taking advantage of such an antiquated and ridiculous method, but I suggest that there would be much more truth in that view, than merely a little modicum, if those who express it would also recognise that at least 29,000 votes of men and women were cast against the Government, whereas only 14,000 votes were polled for the Government. The anxiety and irritation of mind shown in this instance certainly did not arise from a just method of thinking. I have always felt that the electoral methods of this country need to be brought up to modern requirements. Many of them are obsolete, though some of them might be retained and improved. I think University representation is one of the most obsolete of all the features of the present system.

I think the hon. Member is going a little beyond the scope of the Question before the House.

We have had the question of elections discussed from the University point of view by two hon. Members who based the whole of their arguments upon what occurred in connection with the Universities.

No, no!

I was simply endeavouring to show that which I should have thought any fair-minded man would realise—

"New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth."

On the electoral question, it behoves this House to agree to the setting up of some form of machinery for the overhaul of the whole electoral system, in order to secure that when the will of the people is declared at the poll, either in municipalities and local bodies or in the national sense, it should receive due and dominant expression in all our assemblies.

When the hon. and learned Member for East Bristol (Mr. Morris) was successful in winning the first place in the Ballot, and selected this hoary and antiquated topic of proportional representation, I am bound to say I felt inclined to shed a silent tear. Here was an hon. Member who had won the glittering prize that every private Member wants to win, and which so very few do win—the first place in the Ballot—and who chose proportional representation, which has been discussed in this House ad nauseam, and in regard to which opinions have been expressed here, and will be expressed again in the Division Lobby this afternoon, of an absolutely hostile nature, it made me think of that story of our childhood days about the three wishes. A good fairy promised an old man and woman any three things they might wish. The old man wished for a plum pudding; the old woman was so angry with him for wishing it, that she wished the plum pudding was on the end of his nose; and then he wished the plum pudding would fall off, and that was the end of their three wishes. The hon. and learned Member wins first place in the Ballot, and sacrifices this magnificent prize on the cold altar of proportional representation.

Is there anything in this Bill that we have not had before? Yes, there are two new points, and they are that it refers only to municipal elections, and not Parliamentary elections, and that for the first time we are not told about Tasmania and Finland and the other places abroad where proportional representation is said to have been such a gigantic success. I notice that this desire to bring forward some new nostrum is usually supported by examples from abroad, but when I found it necessary to discuss with my constituents quite recently the important question of a capital levy, that still small voice, which is just as insistent in politics as in morals, continually said, "What about Czechoslovakia?" I always replied, "Yes, what about it?" I am not sure that my hon. Friends who bring forward this Bill are not making a great mistake in giving up the experience of other countries. Is there no lesson to be learned from Lithuania? Might we not be told how they elect their borough councillors in Jugo-Slavia and aldermen in Lapland? I think it might be very desirable for us to know, but we are only told what happens in Glasgow. I do not want to labour that Scottish education election, but anyone who studies the figures will see that the whole effect of the election was that one candidate who had 387 votes at the beginning came out as the winner over a man who had 1,300 odd votes in the first count. That was the conspicuous success achieved by this marvellous system of proportional representation in the Glasgow education election.

2.0 P.M.

In some speeches which we have had in support of the Bill this afternoon, we have had the tacit assumption that the Bill will protect minorities and give them representation, but I submit that the Bill does nothing of the kind. It does not secure representation to minorities, but it gives an entirely undue importance to the second preference votes of those who have voted for the candidate at the bottom of the poll, and I am going to argue that that is illogical and undemocratic. The hon. and gallant Member for Honiton (Major Morrison-Bell) laid great stress on the fact that the House of Lords has three times passed this Bill. I yield to no man in my admiration for the House of Lords and its important position in the English Constitution, but I am rather inclined to agree with an hon. Member opposite who said, when he heard about those three occasions on which the Lords had passed this Bill, "That settles it." I will tell the House why I say that. While I yield to none in my admiration for the Second Chamber and its importance in its own sphere of action, I do not care a row of pins for its opinion on the best methods of democratic election. It has no experience of it. We have heard a great deal about John Stuart Mill, and Lord Courtney, and Lord Avebury, and the rest of them, but what is said about them all applies to the House of Lords, and they have no experience of the methods of democratic election.

We have had a method of proportional representation forced upon us by another place, for I would ask hon. Members to remember that in 1867, against the wishes of Disraeli, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer and in charge of the Reform Bill, we had to accept the three-member constituency. It endured from 1867 to 1885, and it was an utter humbug and a disastrous failure, because everywhere that parties were divided with a considerable minority, two seats went to the party which had the majority of the electors, and the other seat went to the other, the result being that predicted by Disraeli, and Gladstone, and Bright in this House, namely, that you had stagnation. The party which secured the two seats said: "Why should we bother about politics? We have got two seats." The party which secured one seat said: "Why should we bother about politics? No matter how hard we work we shall not win a second seat." Therefore, you had stagnation, as was predicted by Disraeli, and Gladstone, and John Bright, the practical politician who knew how the thing would work out, and it worked out exactly as they said it would, but the doctrinaire politicians of the John Stuart Mill and Courtney and Lubbock kind saw nothing less than a magnificent scheme for securing the representation of minorities, and minorities were not represented. All that happened was that in the three-seat constituency, as at Liverpool, you had two of one sort and one of the other, and political stagnation, and if you had four seats you would have had two one way and two the other, and the constituency disfranchised.

We have had a good deal of talk about these larger areas, and I think, in spite of what has been so well said by the hon. Member for Central Edinburgh (Mr. W. Graham), who always makes an exceedingly reasonable exposition of his views, that in these large constituencies you do away with the personal touch between a Member and his constituents which you have had ever since 1885, and that is a retrograde movement. A further remark by the hon. Member for Central Edinburgh was that we should be providing for minorities, but I hope to show the House, by a simple illustration, that that is not the case, and I am going slightly to alter the figures in Lord Eversley's celebrated brochure about proportional representation. I am going to imagine a municipal election in a London borough, and assume that for the particular election area, we will say a large ward of five seats, there are nine candidates. I am going to assume that taking the parties of to-day, the Conservatives and Labour are very evenly divided; but there is a strong minority for each of the Liberal parties, and wild horses will not drag from me an opinion as to which is the real Liberal party. I will call it Liberal party A and Liberal party B, and I am going to imagine that, after the distribution of the surplus votes given to the two first candidates of the Conservative and Labour parties, four seats out of the five have been filled up. In the case such as I imagine, it is only the fifth seat that has any importance at all. Two seats will go to Conservatives and two to Labour. Who will get the fifth seat? After the four candidates who have got their quota come Liberal party A with 10,000 votes and Liberal party B with 9,500 votes. A third Conservative has 8,000 votes, and a third Labour candidate has 7,000 votes. But there is another candidate, and he is a gentleman who believes that the earth is flat, that that is the only thing that matters, and that everything in municipal life ought to be subordinated to that great proposition. He gets 600 votes, and is at the bottom of the poll. I agree that that candidate would never in this world get returned, but mark this. The 600 people who have seen fit to vote for him on the ground of personal popularity, if you like, have got second preferences, and they combine to give them to Liberal party B. What happens? Their 600 votes put Liberal party B above Liberal party A, and that is the man who gets the fifth seat.

I put it to any advocate of proportional representation. The crank candidate's voters have the great privilege of deciding the election, because the fifth seat is the only one that matters. It was certain beforehand that two Conservatives and two Labour candidates would get the four places, and the only thing that mattered in the election was who should get the fifth seat. Who have decided that question? The people who voted for the crank candidate. Instead of deciding elections these people should be put under mild restraint. We have heard about the universities. After all, Oxford University has a reputation even to-day for intelligence, but how many spoilt voting papers were there in the election at Oxford University? In spite of the superior education of Oxford, the number of spoilt voting papers at the recent Election was something unparalleled, because even the highest education does not enable people to understand proportional representation.

This is a Bill which has no popular demand behind it. It asks for a very great change in our electoral system. Its advocates say that 80 municipal bodies have passed resolutions in favour of it. Yes, but what about the other two thousand? We know that the Proportional Representation Society has bom- barded municipalities on this question for years. They are doing it to-day, and the result is that 80 out of over 2,000 have passed resolutions. The hon. Member for the Bodmin Division of Cornwall (Mr. Foot) rather liked the idea of a check-board system introduced into our municipal affairs so as to allow every municipality to do what it pleases, so that one borough in London may adopt proportional representation in one form for large areas, another next door may choose smaller areas, and a third not adopt it at all. How does he defend that? "Oh," he says, "variety is charming. Variety is desirable," and he sneers at the trim garden you have at present, and prefers the promiscuous horticulture of the wilderness. You will have every constituency a law unto itself. You will have absolute chaos. In adjoining constituencies you will have entirely different methods of election. I venture to think that that is not desirable.

Finally, I protest against this Bill, not only on the ground that it has no popular demand behind it, but because it is unnecessary, because it upsets a very good, old sound British principle which you have got on the turf and in many other things in life—"the first past the post the winner" Do not introduce elaborate artificial schemes and devices such as taking away the number you first thought of, arriving at a quota, and so on. You have a sensible system at present. For Heaven's sake stick to it, and do not resort to these doctrinaire schemes, which never did any good in this world yet, and will certainly be of no value in our electoral system.

I want to oppose this Bill. We have to make a claim to-day that each one of us speaks for himself, and I think a Debate of this kind is all the more interesting because of that. I want to speak for myself, and I am opposed to the Bill. I listened to the Mover and the Seconder of the Bill, and also to the Mover and Seconder of the Amendment, and I venture to think that any open-minded person will agree that the Mover and Seconder of the rejection has the best of it. The best speech, to my mind, in favour of this Bill was that of the hon. Member for the Bodmin Division, and the point he made was that this Bill is bad, but give it a trial to prove it. That is not saying very much for the Bill, after all. I dare say the hon. Member who introduced the Bill has studied one of those model elections that are sometimes sent out. If, after studying that, this is the best thing he can do, then I look upon it as a hopeless problem. He reminded me of a woman who appeared in the Shoreditch Court, and was told by the magistrate that her husband was the biggest liar in the district. She replied, "It was the best I could make of him out of the raw material I had to work upon." I think the hon. Member who introduced this Bill was in the same position in having such poor material to work upon. It has been said by some hon. Members opposite that this would be a good thing for the Labour party. I am very suspicious when I hear that argument put forward, and I have heard it more than once this morning. I rather think the right hon. Baronet the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury) was right when he said he looked upon this Bill as a bulwark against Labour aggression. I am rather more in agreement with the right hon. Gentleman upon that point of view rather than any other.

This is a very accommodating Bill. It is a permissive Bill. More than that, at the end of six years, if you do not like it you can get rid of it. In the last Parliament we have known the Government get rid within six months of legislation that had been enacted, so that six years is a very reasonable time. To adopt this principle, which is a new one, and has never been tried, so far as I know in this country, would be a mistake. It has been adopted in Ireland; but there is not much in Ireland up to now that can claim our admiration, and that would count much with some of us, I must confess. There must be many modifications before this system can be introduced, even into local elections. The areas have to be altered, and made bigger, so that a larger number of Members shall be brought in. You may adopt the triennial system, which is entirely new, and up till now has been opposed by many local authorities in the country. So that even before this system can be adopted there will have to be some great changes, and I do not think that these changes will be brought about. It is a complicated thing, although hon. Members tell us that it is a very simple thing and that anybody can understand it. We consider our present method as the simplest of possible methods, and yet how many spoiled votes have we in every Election held. There was one Election in the last General Election in Derbyshire not yet I think decided. They had eight or nine counts and recounts at the time of the Election, and there was, I think, an hon. Member sitting here a few minutes ago who was returned by five votes and that Election is being contested. It has been before the Judge in chambers and up till now, so far as I know, he has not given a decision.

If, therefore, it takes four months under our present simple system of election to settle some of these matters, how long is it likely to take under proportional representation? You will have to extend Parliament from five to ten years so that we may know for a certainty who are to be the Members. The hon. Member who seconded the rejection of the Bill gave some figures concerning Glasgow. I do not know what my Glasgow Friends here will have to say about them, and whether or not they will agree with them, but they were very startling figures. The hon. Member mentioned that in one recount there were no less than four hundred persons engaged, and they started counting on Saturday at nine in the morning and did not finish until an hour after midnight. Four hundred people engaged! The expense must be enormous. If there is not always satisfaction in the recounts under our simple system to-day, what satisfaction will there be in a complicated counting and recounting such as is suggested under proportional representation? I look upon the system as practically hopeless, and for this reason I am against it. It is too complicated to be understood. I feel myself that there ought to be a second ballot. There are many Members here on both sides of the House who were returned by minorities, which I do not think is right. I think there ought to be a way found out of that, but I do not think this is the way, and for that reason I oppose the Bill.

Everybody realises that proportional representation, as a method of voting, is open to criticisms which have to be satisfied. How far those criticisms go, whether they really go to the root of the matter, may very legitimately be a subject of differing opinion. That a man should mark a ballot paper with the figures 1 and 2 without much greater mental strain than marking a cross, as on the present papers, would appear to be a statement not easy of contradiction. In regard to the counting afterwards, we now have in practice in various parts of the world the system that we know of, and whatever the contention by some in the House as to its working in practice, we have never had a shred of evidence that it ends in mental confusion or alteration of temperament. I rise, however, for the purpose of saying one or two things about the matter from a different point of view. This is a permissive Measure. It is a Measure strictly limited to local government, and one which comes here under the rather remarkable circumstance that it has been three times passed in another place. It is just possible that there may be differences of opinion in this House—there were in the last Parliament, I believe—as to the exact amount of authority which attaches to the decision of the other place, but I think there are many other Members besides myself who agree that a Measure which has three times passed in another place—it is not a question of any Government, or, as a matter of fact, the opposition of any Government—I think many will agree that such a Measure comes here with a great weight behind it, because it has been thrashed out by Members who have had great experience, particularly in local government and local administration. Therefore it commends itself to me on that ground, amongst others, and I take that ground in commending it to this House on this occasion.

In the next place it is dealing with local government and local administration. I think that the arguments we have heard to-day from some hon. and right hon. Members have been arguments far more relevant to the question of proportional representation in elections to this House than they are to matters of local government. The hon. Member for Oxford University (Sir C. Oman) and the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the Scottish University (Sir H. Craik) both gave us some learned dissertations, but I trust that I shall not be considered irreverent when I say they rather reminded me of those words in Keats, that they were No hon. Members of this House, I know, are deeper versed in antiquity than these two hon. Gentleman, but I do not know whether my right hon. Friend the Member for the Scottish Universities (Sir H. Craik) will think me impertinent when I say that I doubt very much whether the position he takes up in regard to local Government in connection with this Measure can really be maintained. He takes the view that you ought not to allow local authorities to modify their methods of election, because, as I understood him, it was infringing on the sphere of Parliament and gave them too much freedom.

Both in the Local Government Act of 1888 and the Local Government Act of 1894, it was definitely contemplated and laid down that local authorities should have very considerable liberty not only in the methods of election but in the—I was going to say—construction of other local authorities. It rests to-day with the county councils of this country to say whether a rural parish shall or shall not become an urban district. Under the Act of 1894 it was provided that the members of a rural council should retire once in three years or one-third each year, and that was a matter to be settled by the local authorities. Those of us who read the famous speech of Mr. Ritchie in introducing the Local Government Bill of 1888, will remember that all through that speech ran the argument that county councils and county borough councils might very well have transferred to them some of the powers and responsibilities which to-day remain in the hands of the Minister of Health. Therefore, this House has given countenance to the principle that local authorities may well have considerable power in arranging the methods of their own work. All that is asked for under this Bill is not that this House shall force upon any locality what it does not want; all this Bill says is that in the case of localities where it is definitely desired to try an alternative method of election they shall be permitted to do so. Is not that a wise principle?

Is it not desirable that experiments in electoral methods of a limited scope and applied only to authorities with limited powers should be encouraged by this House? We are always being told how overworked we are in this House. As time goes on the different subjects that have to come forward here increase in number. Is it not therefore a good thing that there should be some devolution of authority and experiment as to allow local authorities of their own accord and at their own wish to try a method of this kind. I do not wish to shrink from anything concerning the merits of this question, but the very nature of local authorities and the work they have to do makes it more desirable that if they wish to have it and to elect themselves by this method I think they should have a chance of doing so.

Matters of acute contention arise less in local government than in Imperial Government. Many of our duties here are concerned with the passing of laws or the prevention of the passing of laws, and with the supporting of a Government or opposition to it on matters of high policy which raise far-reaching questions of political principle. Therefore there must be constant difference of opinion and constant clash of controversy. In the case of a local authority you are neither making laws nor promulgating high policies, but you are simply administering laws and carrying out laws that are made. I have never yet met anybody who liked all the laws, or who at any rate did not dislike some of them. Surely there is less excuse for that method of election which fosters contention and controversy and organises men on the sharpest of issues. In administrative bodies when once they are chosen party feeling at once ends. We all know in this House that on local bodies, when once they are elected, they are much more concerned in carrying out their business than in organising on party lines. The country could not go on unless that were the general habit. There is no party which can claim any monopoly of the absence of party temper. I have seen the most careful attention given to problems of administration by men and women of every kind of public opinion, and is it not in the public interest that we should try and foster that less acute form of controversy by allowing those places who seek to have this method of voting to be allowed to have it.

I am in favour of facilitating only where it is desired. This method of election which tends, so far as it affects the issue at all, against controversy and in favour of the co-operation of the greatest variety of people with the greatest variety of experience. It is for that reason that I shall vote for the Second Reading of this Bill. It is not claimed that there is any verbal inspiration about this Measure, and all sorts of modifications may be made in Committee if necessary. Sometimes I have the honour of speaking on behalf of the county councils of England and Wales, but I wish to say that this Measure has not been officially before that association, but I shall support it there, as I do here, because it is optional, and only to be exercised by those who desire it.

The essential demand for this Bill comes from a number of great towns, and is it not best that we should allow great cities like those who have asked for this method that we should allow them to practice it. Let them try the experiment if they desire to do so, because by so doing we are encouraging interest, enterprise, freshness of thought, and experiment in great local bodies. We are not committing ourselves to any universal change either with respect to this House or to local authorities themselves. Surely it is wise, in contrast with highly contentious methods of other systems, to allow a new thing to be tried by experiment by people who desire to try it with the knowledge that this House can alter it, if it seems to us or to the people who wish to try it that it requires some alteration. It has always been the custom of our country to go step by step, slowly and carefully, in any direction for which there is a real demand. The honest difference of opinion which there is in this country upon this subject is one which will end ultimately, no doubt, in some strong preponderance of public opinion, and is not that end best approached by allowing experiments to be tried than by refusing them.

This is a matter which has nothing partisan about it. On the one hand you have the deliberate and repeated requests for it by many most important public authorities in the country; and on the other hand you have the passing three times of this system in another place by persons whose predispositions are certainly not towards revolution or wanton change. When you have support and a request from bodies such as the Second Chamber and the great municipalities of this country, when you have illustration after illustration given where groups of people and parties declare that they have not had a fair chance under present circumstances, is it not fair and wise and safe to allow this limited experiment, to read this Bill a second time, and give an opportunity in Committee of applying that detailed knowledge of local government which is possessed by so many hon. Members of this House.

It has been complained, as I gather from my hon. and learned Friend who has just sat down (Sir R. Adkins), that there has been some singing of "antique songs" in the course of this Debate. It is true that we have had the old arguments, and to a large extent the old advocates; but, if there have been husky voices singing antique songs and harsh melodies, I think he will not object, since he himself has criticised so frankly, if I say that the antiquity has not been all on one side. I have been present at three Debates on this question in this House, and I have been somewhat startled that one who has for so long a time occupied such a distinguished position in this House should take up the attitude that the judgment of another place, which the party to which he belongs has constantly condemned, should be preferred to the judgment of this House of which he himself is a Member.

I did not say that the opinion of another place was to be preferred to the opinion of this House. The opinion of this House has never been taken on this Bill.

My hon. and learned Friend and I are very old friends, and he knows that I have no desire to ruffle his susceptibilities. We are met in an atmosphere of such calm and tranquillity that I am loath to introduce any discordant note. But he argued that this House ought not lightly to reject the judgment of a body far removed from the angry passions which convulse us, and which is infinitely better informed on the local question with which this Bill deals. If that is not preferring the judgment of another place, I do not know what it is. He is quite wrong when he says that this House has passed no judgment on this question of proportional representation. It has rejected the proposal no fewer than three times, and on each occasion with an increasing majority. My hon. and learned Friend has slipped in this matter, and I shall suggest in a moment that he has slipped elsewhere. Rarely has the Proportional Representation Society shown better judgment than in the choice of the hon. Member who submitted this Bill. I have heard many speeches on the subject in this House and elsewhere, and am bound to say that the calm, the moderation, and the restraint with which he did so nearly led me at one time to suspect that he honestly believed in the case which he was making. He laid down three points. First, that proportional representation prevents anomalies; secondly, that it promotes efficiency; and, lastly, and most important of all, it makes for economy. I challenge all three propositions, and I will ask the attention of the House to a few facts which will completely dispose of all three contentions.

My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Honiton (Major Morrison-Bell), who has been so long and so distinguished an advocate of this hopeless cause, wished to reassure the House that he had no ulterior motive. The last thing that he would dream of doing would be to use this Bill as the thin end of the wedge. I have heard that said before. When the Local Government (Ireland) Act was introduced, in defiance of public opinion, and without a word of support from any individual or any Irish Member in this House, and when it was forced under duress upon Ireland, he told us the same thing. What happened? The very next year the thin end of the wedge was driven right home, and there was forced upon us in defiance of Irish opinion, and without the support of any Irish votes, Proportional Representation. I would ask hon. Members therefore to discount that point of view, and to have regard to whether or not their good nature is not going to be imposed upon in the same way.

My hon. and gallant Friend behind me (Major Morrison-Bell) has been searching most carefully into the records upon this question in the North of Ireland, and in the whole of the speeches in the Debates and in the newspaper articles he has succeeded in discovering one misguided gentleman who still believes in proportional representation. He is the one swallow that makes the summer. I noticed that he did not read any of the speeches made at the same gathering by other gentlemen. I noticed he entirely disregarded this fact that there were 55 public bodies in the North of Ireland who protested vehemently against proportional representation, and called upon the Government to do away with it at once. What was any Government to do in face of an overwhelming tide of public opinion like that? There was not a single public body, or public or private man, who insisted upon the retention of proportional representation, and there was not one word of protest uttered against its withdrawal by the Government until the paid propaganda got to work three months afterwards, and then we heard this feeble protest which my hon. and gallant Friend has raised. That is the history of it.

I protest against calling proportional representation a system of election. It is not anything of the sort. It is an infatuation. It is what many politicians are in the habit of doing, calling the worst things by the best names. "Proportional representation" is a specious phrase. People at once think that it means representation of minorities in proportion to their strength, and say, "What can be fairer?" Nine people out of ten swallow it as though it were true. I am going to show what actually does take place, and I will show that no definition of "proportional representation" could be more at variance with the fact than that it does give representation in proportion to minority strength.

I see sitting on the benches some who were in the House when we fought proportional representation, first, in relation to local government, and, secondly, in relation to Parliamentary elections. They will remember how vehemently some of us protested against it, and how, knowing our country so thoroughly, we showed them what would happen. I would remind them of it, and ask them whether every single prediction that we made has not been fulfilled to the letter. They sought, when they were thrusting this Bill upon us, to present the case that the General Election for a Parliament in Northern and a Parliament in Southern Ireland would be one of the greatest triumphs for democracy which the world has ever seen. It has been one of the worst disaster which Southern Irish democracy has ever suffered. They made precisely the same claim in respect of local government. In both instances the claim was entirely unfounded. We were told that unless the elections were conducted under proportional representation, the Unionist minority in the South and West of Ireland would not get adequate representation, and that under proportional representation it would. What is the position? The great Presbyterian Church the other day made public protest—and, again, I noticed that my hon. and gallant Friend did not quote these things—that while they had proportional representation both for local government and Parliamentary purposes, they were voiceless and voteless, in both respects, and they had no representation whatever. The sister Church, the Episcopal Church of Ireland, has no representative in the entire South and West of Ireland, and its sole voice and vote comes from Trinity College. These are concrete cases, they are acid tests of the fact that the forcing of proportional representation on Ireland broke down, as it would break down if you put it to the same test in this country.

I am not very greatly concerned with idealistic systems based on wholly un-idealistic set of facts. They simply achieve nothing. What does concern me rather is whether the electoral system operates to secure for public bodies the right type of man or not. I will take the point that good administration is the ideal thing, and that whatever falls short of that, whatever your electoral system may be, stands condemned by facts. No one will quarrel with that statement. If inefficiency, gross mismanagement, and scandals in public bodies devolve from a particular electoral system as an inevitable consequence of that system, it can make no appeal to intelligent men. There is not a single public body in Ireland—not one—that is not to-day infinitely worse in personnel, in efficiency, and in good administration than at any period I can remember in the history of the country. We know that county councils over and over again have had to be dissolved, and that the banks have refused to go on advancing money because of the fact that the men who were controlling those public bodies had proved hopelessly inefficient. They had gone in for wild cat schemes, constructed in the hope of purchasing temporary popular support to carry them over another election. But they have utterly ruined bodies which they controlled. The system affords a clear pathway for groups of faddists and cranks, who have no stake in the community, but seek to purchase a fleeting popularity by squandering public money in the way that I have suggested.

Let me give one or two illustrations. I will take a constituency which was contested on three occasions by one man. On the first occasion, under proportional representation, he was returned at the top of the poll, but a few months earlier at a Parliamentary election, on the straight issue system, he was beaten by 8,000 votes. He made an appeal a few days ago to precisely the same constituency again for local government purposes, and was last on the poll. What is to be thought of a system when a straight clear-cut issue is put to the electors involving a judgment by precisely the same body of electors which carries with it a condemnation in the form of a defeat by 8,000 votes, in the case of a gentleman who knowing how to manipulate the system, had come out at the top of the poll only a few weeks later? Let me take another case. It refers to one of the most traditional seats in Belfast, which was contested by a gentleman who, upon a straight issue, would have had about as much chance as the proverbial snowball. He came in, however, at the head of the poll. When later, a fight came on a straight issue, he knew he could not command 1,000 votes, and he did not put himself forward. I put it to the sense of fairness and justice of hon. Members. [An HON. MEMBER: "What was the constituency?"] I do not think that the hon. Member would know it. It was the Victoria constituency of Belfast. Here, however, is a case again where, under proportional representation, a man secures election although, when the election takes place on the straight issue system, he knows he cannot command 1,000 votes.

I will take another case. It is the case of the town which returns my right hon. and gallant Friend (Captain Craig), whose reputation for adherence and loyalty to a certain set of political principles is known all the world over. We had proportional representation there. Would the House believe it that the constituency which returns my hon. Friend with a majority of 15,000 or 16,000 put at the head of the poll a Sinn Feiner? [HON. MEMBERS: "Shame!"] I agree with my hon. Friends it is a shame, but there it is. Who can defend a system which is so completely a negation of a proper reflex of known public opinion? What is the use of contending that a system like that gets rid of anomalies? It does nothing of the kind. I will take another case, again in Belfast. An hon. Friend has asked me for some figures which I should like to quote. The line of cleavage is well known in Belfast, where the people know their own minds, and stick to their opinions when they have established them. There are others who are somewhat more fickle. I do not quarrel with them; they are welcome to their choice; I prefer to know my own principles, and stand by them.

Be that as it may, here is what happened under proportional representation. In the old Parliamentary days, the minority had one-fourth of the representation of the City in Parliament, and it was represented, as hon. Members know, by a gentleman whose personal domination and fine qualities of oratory have often charmed and mastered the House. I desire to pay him that tribute. What happened to him under proportional representation? The representation of the City was raised to 16 Members, and it was divided into four gigantic constituencies of 100,000 each. I wonder what some hon. Gentlemen who are advocating proportional representation would think of having to contest a constituency of that magnitude, with the cost that it involves? What happened? The majority of that one-fourth got one-sixteenth of the representation in Parliament, and that in default of a quota. I challenge any one in this House who disputes the old system to show me an anomaly that will in any way parallel that. This one-fourth, under this heaven-sent system, which is infallible and is to triumph over mere human weakness, which cannot break down, furnishes that classic test. If any of those who represent minorities would like to find themselves in that position, they ought to go in for proportional representation.

I carry that further, and go out over the entire six counties. Let me give the House only a figure or two. Of the 52 Members of Parliament elected on the basis of population—and the House will remember how rigid is the line of demarcation—they should have returned one-third of those 52 members, that is to say, 17. They, in fact, returned only 12, and two of those did not obtain the quota. When we are talking of anomalies, I wish some of the hon. Gentlemen who reject the old system would tell others what they think of that. When you come to look even at minorities and majorities, these anomalies are even more marked. There were 60,904 Nationalists, and their six members were returned by, on an average, 10,150 votes each; but the Sinn Fein group polled 104,500 votes, and yet they secured only six seats. In plain words, 45,000 odd Sinn Feiners were disfranchised. I do not quarrel with that result. I quite want to agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury). I should like to know, however, what the Sinn Feiners would think of it, and what others think who say that this system gets rid of anomalies. It does not, and there is the proof of it. The worst that ever happens under the old system is more than paralleled under this one. It was because that was so that all these bodies, representative of the public for whom they spoke, demanded the abolition of proportional representation, and not one voice was raised in favour of its retention.

3.0 P.M.

Let me now turn to the questions of cost and of counting. I notice that the representatives of the Labour party in Glasgow were nearly startled out of their self-possession when they were told that it took the best part of a day and a night to count the results in Glasgow. But if they think they are unique in that respect, they are quite wrong. In the case of the County of Down, a whole army of counters filled a huge hall, and it was five entire days before the count was completed. The House will hardly believe that, but the officials of the Proportional Representation Society were there, and saw it. What about the cost to the candidate and the public? I have here some figures to which I will ask the attention of the House. They are the official returns taken from the clerks of the several councils. In Lisburn, the increased cost to the public was 600 per cent.—six times the old cost. In the neighbouring town of Lurgan, it was 700 per cent., and an almost identical figure in Portadown. In Belfast, where I heard the secretary of the Proportional Representation Society say, and justly say, that he had never in the whole of his career seen a count taken with greater efficiency, the official cost was raised to 400 per cent., and that, in fact, is the average of the entire six counties. When we are told that this system should be conceded in the interests of economy, I want the House to bear in mind exactly what has happened, and will happen again.

I said that I would discuss the position in Southern Ireland. I see my hon. Friend the Member for the Scotland Division of Liverpool (Mr. O'Connor) straining at the leash, eager to be unloosed against me, and I am going to give him something to worry about. If he thinks he is going to butcher me to make a Roman holiday, he will not find me a pleasant mouthful. A most illuminating correspondence has been going on in the columns of a Dublin Nationalist newspaper for a number of weeks past between a gentleman whose Gaelic hieroglyphics I am quite unable to make out, and the secretary of the Irish Proportional Representation Society.

On a point of Order. May I ask if correspondence in Southern Ireland has anything to do with this Bill?

I think it is open to argument.

I am delighted to hear my hon. and gallant Friend manifest an intelligent interest in what is going on. I should never have suspected it. I was telling the House that the combatant on the other side was the secretary of the Irish Proportional Representation Society, and it would have been thought that he would have been eager to plunge into the fray. But, the other correspondent having shown where the system had completely broken down, and having thrown out a public challenge, what do you imagine happened? He heroically declared that he would rather discuss the matter in private with him. He was wiser than some officials of the Proportional Representation Society, for, bad and complete as was the breakdown in many other directions, this letter was one of the most complete exposures of the system that I have ever seen. I would that I could flatter myself that I could produce something like it. There it is; he would not go into the arena, and discuss the matter in public. There the matter stands.

That is the story of proportional representation alike in Northern and Southern Ireland. Long study and close examination of the question for many years, and participation in many of the discussions and controversies concerning it, have forced me to the conclusion that, so far from proportional representation being a system intended for the protection of minorities, it is a system which aims at the disfranchisement of majorities. What can be a truer or simpler test than a clear-cut straight issue and a decision upon it. The old system gives us that. No other system that has been tried has produced anything like it, or ever will. I do not stand alone in my judgment, because we do not hear much to-day, as we did upon other occasions, of what happens to proportional representation elsewhere. I will read a recent extract from the Official Report of the New Zealand House of Representatives. A Motion was brought forward in the following terms: A year ago, or a little more, we had a visit in this House from a distinguished member of the Legislature of Manitoba. I was one of a large group of Members who heard him tell that group what had happened in Manitoba. He said,

I am glad to note that from some of the speeches that this is not a question that can be decided on party lines. There is no party which is united on the question. One of my hon. Friends, now almost an old Member of the House, because he was a Member of the last Parliament, speaking for Labour made a very strong speech against proportional representation. I do not know the opinion of other hon. Members above the gangway, but that speech proves that there is a strong division of opinion amongst the Labour party on this question. I dare say there is division of opinion in the Liberal party, and division of opinion amongst the Conservative party. The right hon. Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury), whose Conservatism is beyond suspicion, has been quoted as one of the supporters of proportional representation. Therefore, I think we can discuss this question not on party lines.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Belfast (Mr. Moles) has not discussed it on party lines; but I know him a little better than other Members of the House. It is said that you should set a thief to catch a thief. Set an Irishman to catch an Irishman. I do not know that I am going to commit a bloodthirsty assault on my hon. Friend. Indeed, I must apologise for speaking on this occasion. My only reason is that I am not helped by the presence of Joseph Devlin, a Belfast man, who understands this question a good deal better than I do, and whose exclusion from this House is an object lesson as to the necessity of some different form of election in Ulster than there is at the present time. When we think of the position that Mr. Devlin holds among his fellow Nationalists in the six counties and in the City of Belfast, of which he is, I think my hon. Friend opposite will agree, an honoured citizen, and that he represents one-fourth of the entire population of Belfast, and represents also—there are two minorities in Belfast—a large body of Labour and Unionist opinion—

indicated dissent.

My hon. Friend shakes his head. I will give some figures presently. When a man who represents one-fourth of the population of Belfast, and in addition to that one-fourth representing his immediate supporters amongst his co-religionists and fellow politicians, he also represents a section of Labour and Unionist opinion, and he is excluded, and everyone of his supporters is excluded from representation, then I say, whether it be proportional or some other system, that system cannot be right.

I have never had the pleasure of reading "The Pilgrim's Progress," but I understand there is a character in it called Mr. Plausible. John Bunyan described that character with the literary genius which he possessed, and he certainly could not have described it much better if he had lived long enough to have made the intimate acquaintance of my hon. Friend the Member for South Belfast. In history, has there ever been a more remarkable example of what is called, popularly, crocodile tears than my hon. Friend, in his argument against proportional representation, shedding tears over the non-representation of the Sinn Feiners under proportional representation.

I thought I made it perfectly clear that I by no means regretted the fact—I merely stated it.

My hon. Friend ought to have regretted the fact. I am, as he knows, just as much of a Sinn Feiner as he is, but if there be a large body of Sinn Feiners in a constituency, why not give them representation? But my hon. Friend, pursuing his sauve tactics as Mr. Plausible, forgot to tell the House that there are two minorities in Belfast. There is the minority represented by Catholics and nationalists, but there is another minority, and one of the real objects of my hon. Friend and those who act with him in opposing proportional representation in Belfast is not merely to suppress representation of Nationalists in Belfast but to prevent representation of Independent Labour in Belfast. These labour men in Belfast in time—it will not be to-day or to-morrow—and perhaps in other parts of Ireland will solve the problems of Ireland, or at least contribute towards their solution. Nothing impressed me more favourably towards my hon. Friends above the Gangway and the principles of their party than to find, among the representatives from Glasgow and the adjoining region, four or five men who are Irish, if not by birth, by blood, and Catholic by religion. You will not see that in Belfast, and I am sure that a day will come—it may not be very far distant—when the men of the Labour movement in Belfast, putting the economic question above the question of theological differences, which never ought to enter into politics and never does enter into politics without prejudice both to politics and religion, will make a sane appeal and a Christian appeal to their fellow workmen of all creeds to get rid of the wretched and destructive religious differences and unite together in uplifting the mass of the Irish people Catholic and Protestant.

I asked my hon. Friend a question, and he endeavoured to parry it with a joke at my expense. I do not object to this. I have lived nearly three-quarters of my life in England. I shall die in England and I shall be buried in it, if I can affect the poor question of the disposal of my dead remains, and I am proud of the fact that I am a living testimony that an Irishman can get sympathy, affection and support from English and Scottish constituencies. I wish you could get that doctrine as much realised by some Irishmen who have never left Ireland, as it is testified by the election of a good many Irishmen and Catholics to the party above the Gangway. What was the division of which my hon. Friend was giving us the history? I have a dim suspicion that Mr. Plausible had a hiatus—not an uncommon example of the method of the Plausible of Parliamentary Debate. He said that I would not know the constituency if he named it. That is quite true. I know very little of Belfast, though I have been there several times. The whole atmosphere is so mediaeval to me that really it requires some trouble on my part to try to understand it, and even then I fail. He told me that the ward of which he was speaking was the Victoria Ward. I may be able to supply some answers to my hon. Friend with regard to Victoria Ward.

Proportional representation was passed by this Imperial Parliament in accord with the best traditions of Imperial Government in all this Empire. At the very first possible moment it was abolished by the Parliament of Northern Ireland. It was abolished, according to my hon. Friend's statements, in the interests of the minority. It was all for the good of the minority, Labour as well as Nationalist, that it was abolished, so we are told. The beneficent result was what I will indicate in a moment. What was the representation of Victoria Ward before the abolition of proportional representation? It was as follows: Unionist or Reform—rather a contradiction in terms—4; Nationalist, 1; Labour, 1; Sinn Fein, 1. That seems to me to be a fair representation. There were four representatives of the predominant party. What is the representation now? There is no Nationalist. I do not know whether there is a Labour man or not, but I understand that there are five out of seven representing one party.

We have put back the boundary to the old wards. It is quite a different plan now.

I know all about putting the area into wards. I have heard all about gerrymandering.

My hon. Friend was responsible largely for getting these wards 30 years ago.

My hon. Friend is making too severe a demand on my memory when he asks me what I did 30 years ago. I will give the true inward- ness of the change in Victoria Ward. There is a gentleman called Alderman Duff, and he has given the history of the change. He said:

"So far as Victoria Ward was concerned they could return another Unionist member to the Corporation if proportional representation was abolished."

Another gentleman, speaking in Pottinger Ward, said:

"He was bitterly opposed to any system that would allow a Sinn Feiner to represent such a loyal division as Pottinger."

That is applauded by the hon. Member for Dulwich (Sir F. Hall). He represents the bull-terrier type of the irreconcilable Tory. I apologise; I should have said the bull-dog type. The hon. Member always objects to the representation of any hostile minority which he can suppress by political or any other machinery. Mr. Senator Wood said:

"Let them do away with proportional representation so that the Unionist majority might have a stronger position in the six counties."

Now you see how Mr. Plausible's sauve statements bear examination. I will take another case. There are, I believe, 13 Members in this House for the Northern Counties, but Nationalist representation of the Northern Counties is excluded by gerrymandering and the abolition of proportional representation.

It was done here, and not by the Northern Parliament.

Yes, against the protests of the Nationalist party.

You voted for it.

I did not. I was in America at the time—

My hon. Friend spoke in the Second Reading Debate. If he looks up the OFFICIAL REPORT, he will see that is so.

—and as my hon. Friend is so mediaeval, I may remind him that radio-telephony was not invented at that time. To proceed with my point, the Nationalists—excluding the Labour men—are one-third of the population of the Six Counties and they have two Members. All the other Members belong to the party of my hon. Friend opposite. No man in this House is more anxious than I am for the reconciliation of all religions in Ireland. I give my hon. Friends opposite credit for that desire; they have expressed it over and over again, but they are going the wrong way about achieving it. I say to every party, in this or any other country, "The one safeguard for the permanence of your institutions is full and fair play to all creeds and classes and above all to minorities." I will not ask my hon. Friend opposite to think Imperially on this question. When discussions were going on as to the attitude of Ulster in the old Home Rule days, and when this country was in a tight place in the middle of a bitter and difficult war, I said to a great Minister, "Why do you not get these Gentlemen to realise that it is not a question of a county or a parish in the North of Ireland, or of justice to this minority or that majority which is at stake in the world to-day, but a question of the whole British Empire, and the liberty with which it and its Allies are identified. Why do you not point out to them that by their attitude in preventing a settlement of the Irish question on reasonable lines of compromise, they are estranging some of the people whose aid to us is most necessary—namely, the people of my race in the United States." My right hon. Friends said to me: "We have made that representation, and the answer of the keen and astute Orange, wirepuller is that there is no use talking to his people about the Empire, because they are much more concerned about the politics of Belfast and about the winning of the war against the minority there, than about the fate of the Empire." I am in favour of all minorities; if I expressed all my opinions, I am not sure I would not be in a minority of one in this House. The more people are in a minority, the more we are called upon to deal out to them full justice and fair play. Take the case of Wales—a rather dangerous subject for me to touch. I know there are very strong and staunch Conservatives in Wales, but they are a minority, and I have seen Wales represented entirely by Liberal Members in the old days. The Conservative minority was without any representation at all, and while I was in sympathy with the Liberal party, as they were in favour of my own principles, I never forgot it was unfair to the Tory minority.

Take parts of our Empire. This House has a great lesson to give to the Empire to-day, apart from Belfast, or even from the Victoria Ward, and that is because the one cement that keeps this Empire together to-day, with its extraordinary heterogeneousness of race and religion and clime, is absolute impartiality and fair play between all races and all creeds. That is not always carried out, even in the Empire. It is the desire, and it is the tradition, and it is the inspiration of the Empire, but take South Africa, for instance. There is not a single supporter of General Smuts returned from the Orange Free State to the South African Parliament, but they are all supporters of General Hertzog, who is the leader of a movement in hostility—I think in foolish hostility—to a settlement between the two races in South Africa, and, undoubtedly, General Smuts, who is in favour of the consolidation of the Empire, not, however, of racial equality, has at least one-third of the voters of the Free State in his favour, and not one of them is represented. I take another example—French Canada. I must be very cautious in what I say about French Canada, because I am told by all the Protestants who live there that there is no distinction between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Quebec, and yet there is not from Quebec a single representative of the minority of that great State. That is all wrong. As I read the history of the world, from the history of Czars and Kaisers down to the history of triumphant majorities, I find the same lesson, that ultimate disaster and ruin comes to all dynasties, to all systems, and all parties that abuse their power and do not make adequate and timely concession to the minorities in their midst.

I rise for only a few minutes to state the attitude of the Government in regard to this Bill, and to answer one or two points which have been raised in this Debate. I think everyone will agree that we have had a very fair and restrained Debate, in which the arguments on both sides have been very fully and very well put. Perhaps I may be allowed to congratulate the Mover on his very clear speech. His task was an exceedingly difficult one when he attempted, and I think, with success to explain the intricacies of the working of the transferable vote, and therefore I feel sure that when he takes part again in our deliberations his interventions will be in the interests of clear and lucid explanation. There is one question which was asked by the hon. Member for Central Southwark (Mr. Gilbert), and that was whether, in Clause 4, the inquiries which the Secretary of State may cause to be made are to be paid for by the State or by the local authority, and if he will refer to the Section of the Local Government Act, 1888, quoted in that Clause 4, he will see that

The hon. Member for South Belfast (Mr. Moles) gave melancholy expression to the fact that it had been a very tranquil Debate. He did his best to stimulate it into a little more life, but even the introduction of the difficulties in Ireland failed. I thought, to rouse us to any great excitement. Indeed, so tranquil has this Debate been that earlier in the day the hon. Member for Burnley (Mr. Irving) showed very deep resentment because the solemn peacefulness of the atmosphere was for a moment interrupted by an appreciative cheer from one of my hon. Friends. I do not know whether there is any significance in this tranquillity. I do not know whether it would be fair or not to deduce from this that our constituents have not shown a deep interest in the subject. Certainly, so far as the Home Office is concerned, we have not been bombarded with petitions in favour of this alteration. Those who spoke in support of the Bill claimed that 80 municipalities had passed resolutions in favour of it. That 80 out of 1,250, which, I think, is about the total number—[An HON. MEMBER: "2,000!"]—I do not know about that; at any rate, 1,250 is enough for my argument—passed resolutions, is not a sign that there is a strong feeling about it. The hon. Member who moved the Second Reading gave the names of several boroughs, most of them familiar to us, which had been in favour of it, but by some strange omission he left out Oswestry. I certainly cannot remember a single question being addressed to me at the recent Election as to my views on this subject. So far as I am concerned, I must, like my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford University (Sir C. Oman), plead guilty to some inconsistency. Certainly, my whole record on proportional representation is one of terrible inconsistency. I can only explain it by the fact that after hearing for a long time arguments on both sides I felt that they are so evenly balanced. But as I have grown older, and am coming, as I hope, to maturer judgment, I am bound to say that I think the arguments against preponderate. I do not want to say more because I am only expressing my personal opinion, to show how I am going to vote, and why. The Government Whips will not be put on, and, therefore, perfect freedom will be given to hon. Members in the matter.

I am afraid that I cannot express any very great indebtedness to the Home Secretary for the speech which he has just made. I may, I hope, be allowed to assure him that Oswestry itself happens to be amongst the 80 local government authorities that have passed a resolution in favour of this Bill, and have asked for this power. Therefore, I would ask him if it is not too late to consider whether he cannot accede to the request put forward by his own constituents for this power.

The borough of Oswestry is not the only local authority in my constituency.

If we cannot feel much gratitude to the Home Office, I think we can pay a tribute of thanks to the Ministry of Health for its help in revising and putting this Bill into shape in another place. It is quite an unusual thing for a private Member's Bill to be discussed on a Friday afternoon, and for there not to be a single complaint as to the way in which the Bill has been drafted or has been brought forward. That is due to the fact that this Bill has a long Parliamentary history behind it, and has been on two occasions revised by a Government Department and put into its present presentable condition.

I should like, if I may, to recall the attention of the House to what the Bill itself actually proposes. In the first place I disclaim for myself, and I think all supporters of the Bill, that we have any interest in this matter beyond the one interest of all parties. I believe it is in the long run in the interest of all parties to have such a share of governing power as corresponds to its voting strength among the electors. That is all. That should be felt as much by the Conservative party and the Labour party as by the Liberal party. People say that this Bill is a Bill to enable cranks to get into Parliament and on to local governing bodies. All I can say is that no crank can get on to a local governing body under this Bill unless he gets his quota of reasonable common-sense electors to vote for him, and there are not enough cranks to go round, after all, a crank cannot get elected unless he gets his quota. I am sure that the electors where this principle will be applied will see that sensible people are elected. I contend that this system should not be looked upon as merely one to give minorities representation, but one to give representation in accordance with voting strength. The present system not only disfranchises minorities, but sometimes majorities. The present system is an exceedingly capricious one, and sometimes it gives political power to an actual minority. This Measure would see that the majority gets the power to which it is entitled, and that is not so under the present system.

A great deal of this discussion has turned upon the effect of proportional representation in Parliamentary elections, but before hon. Members vote I want them to realise that this Bill does not, in any way, touch the question of Parliamentary representation, and therefore many of the objections and difficulties felt about parliamentary representation simply do not apply. The House is being asked to grant permissive powers to these provincial authorities. The House of Commons has already expressed its readiness to do so. In 1910, when the same power was asked for by Resolution, this House, without a Division, declared that it was a fair and reasonable thing if any local authority wanted this power, that it should have it. At that time not one single local authority had asked for it, but the House of Commons then conceded the claim, admitting that if any local authority wanted it, it should have it, and the House did not even divide against that Resolution. I am not going into the question of the Irish elections. I have the figures here, but Ireland is a law unto itself, and even if it is just and right that there should be an overwhelming ascendancy in Ulster, I think that Irish experience can be utilised in this country with advantage under our entirely different conditions. The experiment in Ireland began at Sligo, One borough in Ireland asked for it because they thought it would work well, and the House, although dead against proportional representation in Parliamentary affairs, conceded that claim, and now you have 80 local authorities in this country asking for it. Under these circumstances, is it reasonable that the House should refuse this to those great boroughs who want it. Some hon. Members may come from places where they do not want it, but I do not see why they should deprive those local authorities of a power which they have asked for. It is very difficult to argue from other countries. We have been told that proportional representation is a great failure in New South Wales. This is the telegram from the Solicitor-General for New South Wales about the last proportional representation election:

We have heard about the Scottish Educational authorities' experience, and that it took one day to count all the votes in the Glasgow School Board election. There were 265,000 votes counted in one day, so it was not a bad record, and at all events, in my last election, it took all night to count our votes. I should like to draw the attention of hon. Members who are opposed to proportional representation for Parliamentary elections to one opinion which I think ought to carry great weight. Lord Bryce, speaking on this Bill in another place, said that he had never been able to convince himself that proportional representation would work well in Parliamentary elections. He laid stress on the difficulties of forming a Government, but he said that if he had never convinced himself that it was of use in Parliamentary elections, yet in local government elections he did advocate it. That was also the view which was taken by the Royal Commission on Electoral Systems, in 1914, which reported with great hesitation about proportional representation for Parliamentary elections, but said that nevertheless in local elections there would be an opportunity for its use. It has been put forward once or twice in the Debate that it is impossible to understand the system. But people are now conscious that the system is in operation over great

parts of Europe and also in our own country. It demands that the elector shall be able to mark his voting paper 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, in the order of preference, and it is not very difficult to make an audience understand that. It requires also a returning officer who can do a rule of three sum. We are anxious to press this principle for local elections, because we realise how important it is to get men and women to come forward to take their part in the work of local government, and we also desire that all parties should have a chance of joining in it.

rose in his place, and claimed to move, "That the Question be now put."

I do not think that Motion is necessary. There is no desire to continue the Debate.

Question put, "That the word 'now' stand part of the Question."

The House divided: Ayes, 157; Noes, 169.

Words added.

Main Question, as amended, put, and agreed to.

Second Reading put off for six months.

The remaining Orders were read, and postponed.

Whereupon Mr. SPEAKER adjourned the House, without Question put, pursuant to Standing Order No. 3.

Adjourned at Ten Minutes after Four o'Clock till Monday next (26th February).