615 Into 437

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 324, 7 September 1945, Page 5

615 Into 437

IX into four, we learnt at school, will not go; nor will ’ 615 into 437. But that is not a worry at Westminster. A little over a year ago Mr. Churchill explained to what we thought at the time would be an astonished House of Commons why he wanted the new building to be a copy of the one the Germans had destroyed. Now it is announced that work on the new House is about to begin, and that the seating accommodation will be "437 members and about 500 other persons." There are of course 615 members, and 178 will either have to stand, stay away, or sit on the steps and fellowmembers’ knees; which is precisely what the architects would be instructed to plan for. A House big enough to accommodate all the members would often be halfempty, and that, Mr. Churchill argued, was too depressing to be faced. House of Commons speaking, he insisted, should be conversational; conversational speaking required‘a fairly small space; and great occasions demanded a sense of crowd and urgency. So it was not an astonished House after all that heard this speech, but a broadly approving one. The new House will be like the old because the old met the requirements of the average member-gave him what. Mr. Churchill called an indispensable sense of intimacy, lifted the nation’s affairs "above the mechanical sphere into the human sphere," and gave Parliament itself a "collective personality." It was a fine example of the special pleading that is at once accepted as wisdom where it is spoken and folly everywhere else. Except for some simplification in the decorations, some worldliness in the windows, and the shattering precedent of the loud-speakers, Westminster in a year or two will be precisely what it has been for 100 years or more, and there may even be significance in the colour of the seats and the carpet. It would certainly be reckless to assume that such things are accidents.