Electoral Anxieties.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17937, 4 December 1923, Page 6

Electoral Anxieties.

Lead ; ug Liberals in Great Britain are complaining that the present method of electing members of Parliament may result in success for a party which has not received a majority of the votes polled. This result is possible, but no rational person will believe that it will bring trouble upon the Kingdom. It may happen that for every ten electors •who support Mr Baldwin twelve will support Liberal or Labour candidates, and in this case the warriors of the Opposition will declare that a minority is ruling the majority, that the antiBaldwin votes are to the pro-Baldwin votes as six to five, and so on. If the anti-Baldwin votes were a harmonious majority, such a result, as need hardly be said, would be very ■undesirable. But the anti-Baldwin votes are not the votes of a homogeneous party. The Liberals may not desire Mr Baldwin, but they desire Mr Ramsay MacDoaald aa little; the Labour voters may <W

the Liberals 110 less. The Labour votes are anti-Liberal, and tho Liberal votes anti-Labour. If the Liberals had to choose between Mr Baldwin and Mr MacDonaid, they might easily prefer Mr Baldwin ; so also Labourites might easily prefer Mr Baldwin to Mr Asq'uith if a choice had to be made. We arc hero stating facts which are at the back of the electorate's mind in all such cases, and which preserve the realm from that violent disorder which would assuredly result from the real disfranchisement of the majority. The truth is that very often it is impossible. by any method of voting, to give the government of the country into the hands of any party with a majority, for the sufficient reason that no party may actually have a majority of the people. If the election results in the next best thing—a majority of seats, but not an overwhelming one, for the party most clearly predominant —the political feelings of the country are well enough satisfied. For these reasons Mr Churchill's outcry against "the absurd, baffling, un- " fair and confused electoral system," in which those defects were not visible to Liberals so long as the Liberal Party was in power, will not cause much more concern to Englishmen than similar outcries by the Liberals in this country against the system under which they held office for twenty years. A more serious-looking complaint is Mr Lloyd George's. "I pre- " diet with absolute confidence," Re said, "that, whatever the represents " tion in Parliament may be, a vast "majority of the electors will vote "against Protection. You might have " millions [ ? of a majority] for Free "Trade, but a Protectionist majority "in Parliament. That raises a great "constitutional issue. If you under- " mine the respect for authority and "for the foundation of law in this '"country, there is no knowing what " the end may be." Mr Baldwin can easily afford, in the circumstances described, to smile at all talk of "a great "constitutional issue," For if a vast majority of the electors were opposed to Protection with intensity enough to make the issue supremo and. central, no Protectionist Government could be elected. If, however, tho Free Traders, although a majority, are not sufficiently moved by the issue to see that nothing else disturbs the giving of a clear national judgment in the matter —if, as is actually the fact, other issues intervene and supervene, and in soma places thrust the fiscal issue into the background—if in many constituencies the issue for Free Traders is not Freo Trade, but the plain party issue Liberalism versus Labour —then obviously there is 110 overwhelming passion promising any 6uch' crisis as Mr Lloyd George forecasts. This is not to say that Mr Baldwin can wl£h impuriity force Proteotion on a country which, if it voted on the fiscal issue alone, would vote Free Trade. He may, indeed, bring in Protection, but if the sentiment of the country is strongly in favour of Free Trade, the bringing in of that Protectionist policy will automatically make Free Trade the paramount issue at the next election. There is thus no danger whatever of any serious political or constitutional consequences arising out of the present electoral system, which can fis easily work well in the future as it has done in the past.