POWER OF REJECTION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9669, 7 December 1909, Page 4

POWER OF REJECTION.

'Mr J. A. R. Marriott discusses in one of the English reviews the constitutional position of- the House of Lords in relation to money Bills, and, after an examination of precedents, inclines to the conclusion that the revising Chamber woutf be justified in treating the various divisions of Mr Lloyd-George's composite Finance Bill as separate measures, retaining or rejecting each, as it held fit. "By general admission," he argues, "the Finance Bill of 1909 is no ordinary Budget. The dark threats that ) preceded it; the method and manner of its introduction; the place accorded to it in the legislative work of the session; the breadth of the principles it involves,; the wide range of its proposals; the almost insoluble complexity of ita details; the vagueness of its details; the gaugeness of its financial forecasts-—all combine to proclaim it as an exceptinal and unprecedented measure. .The present Chancellor has bettered the example of his predecessr of 1861 (i.e., Mr Gladstone's , tacking of the Paper Duty Repeal to the Finance Bill). He has combined into one conglomerate ! Bill not only all the tax Bills of the year, but virtually all the legislative proposals of the session,, not to say all the rejected proposals of an entire Parliament. He has, in a word, provided the 'reductio ad absurdum' of the vicious innovation which Mr Gladstone was permitted to establish in 1861." May, in his "Law of Parliament," lays it down that the Lords must "be a consenting party" to taxation, though they have not the right of initiation. "The legal right of the Lords to reject any Bill whatever cannot be disputed," he says, adding, "Even their constitutional right to reject the whole of a Money Bill has been admitted by the | Commons themselves." I