SAFEGUARDING DEMOCRACY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 58, Issue 84, 19 January 1938, Page 4

SAFEGUARDING DEMOCRACY.

Lecturing on “The Future of Parliamentary Democracy” Sir Charles Grant Robertson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, said that for Great Britain the fundamental issue to-day was whether the Reform Act of 1918, supplemented by that of 1928, was a last and desperate effort, through manhood and womanhood suffrage,- to maintain a system of representative government hallowed by long tradition. Changes since the war had affected Parliamentary democracy, notably the immense increase in the electorate with consequent increase in the size of tfye constituency, admission of women to the franchise, and congestion of legislative business due to the great increase in the sphere of administration, central and local. Those difficulties had led to demands for “direct action,” superseding the slower working of the Parliamentary system, and, also, to attempts to give the system a more democratic character and place it on a more representative basis by some organisation of a vocational and functional character. A more serious menace had come from the principles of the totalitarian State, an analysis of which ‘proved that it was quite impossible to reconcile the totalitarian system with Parliamentary democracy as understod in Britain. Therefore, the lecturer suggested, they should seriously reconsider the recommendation of the Speaker’s Committee of 1917 for adopting proportional representation in a modified form. The issue in the challenge of the totalitarian State must be met. It had yet to be proved that the totalitarian State was more efficient as an administrative organ than Parliamentary democracy as it worked in Britain. The totalitarian State would destroy the free exercise of citizenship and the free press on which Great Britain had worked out her destiny. Just as in the 17th and 18th centuries Great Britain, by refusing to follow the movement that led to the establishment of absolulist monarchy in Europe, had thereby saved Parliamentary democracy for the world, so to-day there was a special duty laid on Great Britain to maintain at all costs the principles of Parliamentary democracy for which she was an especial trustee.