THE BRITISH POLITICAL SITUATION.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1123, 10 May 1911, Page 4

THE BRITISH POLITICAL SITUATION.

The House of Lords Reform Bill brought down by Lord Lansdowne is strictly according to tho specifications outlined by its author in his speech of March 2S last, from which we printed some extracts yesterday. The Government has lost 110 time in announcing, through Lord Ivlorley, its disagreement with the Bill, a disagreement, if the cable agent is an accurate .reporter, that extends to .every one of the constituent proposals. Since it is clear enough that some time must elapse before the House of Lords reform advances to the stage of being current business—at present it is still a problem for which everybody has his own solution —there is nothing to be gained by examining Lord' Lansdowxe's schemc just now. The fact, however, that it is a detailed and practicable scheme is itself of importance, since it will emphasise the failure of the Government to propound the plan of reform that is hinted at in the preamble to the Parliament Bill, but. of which nobody outside the Government has b3gn_ permitted to obtain even an "elusive glimpse." In his speech at Manchester Me. Asquith, ..who always chooscs his. language with great care, went the length, so a belated message tells us to-day, of saying that '"'the Second Chamber must be small and not rest on an hereditary basis. It must not claim to be a co-ordinate, competing authority, and must not be predominantly one-sided and partisan. Unless those conditions are satisfied," lw added rather perplexingly, "we shall bo no parties to a change." We clo not know what the Manchester audience made of this negative, specification, but it is pretty certain that the four or five thousand different ideas of the Government's plan which the audience took away from the meeting arc all as wide of the mark as the Prime Minister doubtless intended they should be. The continuance in office of Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Haldane looks like a guarantee that the Government has some plan, for, contrary to the practice of "Liberal" Ministers in New Zealand, British statesmen have usually refused to remain in office when it has meant alliance with ideas to which they are opposed and which they believe arc injurious to the national interest. When Lord Lansdowne gave notice on March 28 of his intention to move an address to the King praying his consent to a Bill being introduced limiting the Royal prerogative as to the creation of Peers and tho issue of writs to attend the House, the Radical press was convulsed with fury and alarm. It quickly appeared that the object was merely to observe an important formality essential to the introduction of tho Bill, and the Government, without any question, announced its intention to advise his Majesty to give the_ necessary consent. The London Nation, however, out of the exhaustlcss fountain of its mendacity, to borrow Mr. Churchill's language, actually laboured to persuade its public that "the Laxsdowne schemc is, in truth, so subversive, so unconstitutional, that it cannot even be put into the four corners of a printed Bill without a special advertisement from the Crown." This is as honest as it would be to say of any financial proposal of our own Government that it is so subversive and so unconstitutional as to require a special advertisement from the Governor. In moving the address, which, of course, was unanimously agreed to, Lord Laxsdowne did not say a word as to how he will act towards the Parliament Bill, but there were some significant passages in his speech on Lord Balfour of Burleigh's Reference to the People Bill. He did not go the full distance with this Bill, but he was emphatic in his belief that the Referendum is an inevitable addition to Britain's Parliamentary machinery, and he used these words at that point of his speech in which he was destroying tho absurd plea that an electorate that can be trusted with the work of voting on vague and complicated men and vague and complicated programmes cannot be trusted to vote on a clear detail like a Bill:

You at this moment, I believe, claim a mandate in favour of tho Parliament Bill, and that Bill was produced at the last moment at our instance in this House and did not go before the electors at all. Now if the contents of this Bill could be mastered by the voters and also the details of the non-existent Homo Rule Bill, I think I may say that the electors will be competent to deal with tho problem of a Bill referred to them.

It is still possible, if not probable, that the Lords will add a referendum clause to the Parliament Bill. The Government, since it has not scrupled to disturb the serenity of the Coronation season by forcing the issue, when no reason whatever exists, or has even been pretended to exist-, why the settlement should not bo fixed for July, is certain to stop at nothing in its determination to establish single-Chamber government and "damn the consequences." Accordingly wc may expect to find

Sir Hexry Lucy correct in his. forecast that if the Bill is amended, there will be an instant prorogation and an immediate rc-summoning of Parliament coupled with the creation of a swarm of dummy Peers. The astonishment of Lord Hosebery at the attitude of the Government will be shared by thoughtful people throughout the Empire. "Was there,'' he asked, in a dramatic intervention in the formal debate of March 30, "was there ever in the civilised world such a state of things as exists in this country now, when the Government are proposing to sweep away—as they can sweep away by their power—a House of coeval antiquity or greater antiquity than the House of Commons, and to substitute nothing—not the slightest check, not the slightest control over the proceedings of that House !" It will certainly be interesting to the delegates to the Imperial Conference to see the British Government bent on destroying the bi-cameral system that is so firmly supported in the overseas Empire that destruction would be the lot of any colonial Government that, should seek to subvert it.