The Dominion WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 1931. THE NEW MORALITY

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 147, 18 March 1931, Page 8

The Dominion WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 1931. THE NEW MORALITY

Time was when a British Government accepted an adverse vote in the House of Commons as a blow at its prestige, a gesture from the electorate, and with appropriate promptitude and dignity surrendered the seals of office. The generation which remembers such events has lived to see the development of a new morality in politics. Other times, other manners. . . _ , . The British Labour Government, a minority Government in the first instance, has suffered a series of reverses in by-elections and Parliamentary divisions which plainly indicates a lack of confidence both in the electorates and in the House. Yet it clings to office, its latest reverse has occurred in connection, with the Electoral BUI, which seeks to establish. the system of the alternative vote in parliamentary elections in place of the traditional first-past-the-post. Much more serious, as involving the repudiation by the House of one of its cardinal policy measures, was the rejection of the Trades Disputes Bill. There was also the rejection by the House of Lords of the Trevelyan Education Bill. The defeat of these three domestic measures heavily overbalances any credit the Government may claim for its adventures in foreign policy. .... The MacDonald Government’s apparent attitude is that a. Parliamentary reverse is merely the record of a difference of opinion, and that the determination of its existence is a question for a general election. It could not, of course, continue in this attitude were it not for the fact that Mr. Lloyd George will not put Mr. MacDonald out in a crucial division to put Mr. Baldwin in. The present state of affairs is practically the same as thaHwhich moved Mr. J. L. Garvin in The Observer in January last to expose these tactics in very frank terms: The majority of the Cabinet, on the advice of its electioneering managers, have been bent on playing for time. They reason that for an appeal to the country no time could be worse than now, when the figures for unemployment are rising toward two and three-quarter millions. The majority of Ministers have no’ present desire to give up their offices just when a dissolution might mean total debacle. For the same reason the majority of Labour members want to cling to their seats. Liberals, for the same reason, though bound, as affairs stand, to harass and discredit the Government, desire to prolong its existence until the alternative vote is passed.

Now that the prospects of the Electoral Reform BUI passing have been seriously prejudiced,, it remains to be seen whether the Liberals can continue to support the Government without grave risk to their own prestige in the country, such as it is. They are' really, according to Tlie National Review, on the horns of a dilemma. “It they vote against the Government and Mr. MacDonald decides to go to the country,” says that journal, “the Liberal Party, already very reduced, would disappear.” The situation is a fit subject for the wit of a political cynic. Mr. MacDonald’s latest reverse has been over a measure which evoked little enthusiasm from his own party. The alternative vote is a Liberal device, accepted by Mr. MacDonald as the price of Liberal support for the Trades Disputes Bill. He has now been left with the baby, so to speak, and his Trades Disputes Bill has gone into the limbo. Political observers have hazarded the prediction that the Government may survive “at least until Mr. Snowden’s Budget in April.” That may be so. In the meantime it presents the unedifying spectacle of a Government “loathing its life, and dreading still to die.”