BRITISH POLITICS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 962, 4 March 1911, Page 4

BRITISH POLITICS.

London, March 2. The debate on the Parliament Bill was continued in the House of Commons yesterday. Mr J. A. Clyde, Unionist member tor Edinburgh West, protested against the idea of the powers ot the House of Lords remaining in abeyance to enable the Government to pass Bills that have not been submitted to the country. Mr Horatio W. Bottomley, Independent Liberal member for Hackney South, warned the Government that the country was resolved to secure, with the Lords’ veto, reform of the Upper House. The public was determined to have a second revising Chamber, and desired that that reform should be achieved by agreement. Mr Bottomley added: “If the Lords’ reform scheme is rejected the Government is bound to produce an alternative.” Mr Walter Ruucimau, President of the Board of Education, emphasised the importance of the two years’ delay prescribed in the Bill, after which no contentious measure to which the nation really objected could be passed. One serious evil in Lord Curzon’s and Lansdowne’s reform schemes was that they were only reform schemes. It was known that they would abolish the peers’ hereditary right to sit in the Second Chamber, and if they sat there merely because they were selected by other peers or somebody else the Crown’s prerogative to appoint new peers —which was the only way to settle deadlocks—would disappear. The Government would never agree to such a proposal.

Mr Philip Snowden, Labour member for Blackburn, declared that a compromise recognising the hereditary principle was impossible, and added that the Labour party supported the Bill as a temporary expedient for relieving an intolerable situation; but not as a lasting settlement. He was opposed to the preamble to the Bill, as the drag ot a Second Chambei was not needed.

Sir Charles Cripps, member for Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, who presided over the meeting of Unionists held on Tuesday, describes the allegations by the Times—that the Unionists have no coherrent plan for reform of the Lords, and that the official report of the meeting was misleading, as members were waiting for details of Lord Lansdowne’s Bill—as “monstrous.” He adds; “The official announcement was very carefully drafted by Mr G. Younger, Mr R. A. Yerburgh, and myself, and actually expressed the sense of the resolution passed by the meeting.” The Times, in reply to Sir Charles Cripps, says many Unionists who were present at the meeting were surprised to learn that a resolution had been passed ; doubtless it was passed after members had left the room.

In the House of Commons, the financial business has been postponed. The committee stage of the Parliament Bill is expected to occupy some weeks.