SPEECHES IN PARLIAMENT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 October 1942, Page 3

SPEECHES IN PARLIAMENT

DAYS WHEN MEMBERS SAT MUM.

Sir Stafford Cripps, whose pleasant way of answering questions should put him high in the list of popular Leaders of the House of Commons, remarked not long ago that the first suggestion o limiting the strength of speeches was probably made 1000 years ago. He did not say where this might have happened, but in our own Parliament (says, a writer in the “Manchester Guardian ) the former difficulty seems to have been to get members to speak lathpi than to stop them, and there were occasions in the seventeenth century when all members sat mum till the House was adjourned. Authority suggests that it was at the close of the eighteenth century that the fashion of long speeches set in. In his diary for 1795, Speaker Abbot mentioned that ‘‘it seems agreed on all hands that the style of Parliamentary debating is grown intolerably ' diffuse and prolix. The most marked period of the introduction of long speeches was Sheridan’s five hours’ speech upon the charge against Hastings.” And in 1833 Sir Robert Inglis remarked: “Formerly very few members were wont to address the House; now the speaking members are probably not less than four hundred.” Apparently the nearest the House of Commons has got to a time-limit was in 1901, when a proposal to that end was lost by 117 votes to 83.