REPRESENTATION IN PARLIAMENT.

Hokitika Guardian, 21 August 1929, Page 7

REPRESENTATION IN PARLIAMENT.

“ No one imagines that anything is gained in the long run by a grotesque misrepresentation of the voting in the country by relative party strengths in the House of Commons,” says Professor A. F. Pollard, Professor of Constitutional History at London University, Director of the Institute of Historical lltooaroh, in the ‘‘Daily News.” “Such reform might indeed tend to make more lasting the continuance! of three parties, none of them having a clear majority in the House of Commons, but it never has been the accurate view of the Constitution that members of the House of Commons should bo simply the recording machines of decisions reached outside. The British Constitution depends for its effectiveness upon the effectiveness of the House of Commons ns a deliberative body forming a collective judgment after more continuous and intimate mid better informed discussion than is possible for some 28 million voters in the constituencies. What is sometimes willed a deadlock, or in other words the absence of a single party majority, tends to make a Government depend more upon reason than upon voting strength in the lobbies, and the House of Commons is far more likely to regain its earlier position in the eyes of the electorate and of the world at large in circumstances like these than in circumstances in which argument and reason "seem to lie powerless against the brute force of a mechanical vote.”