"REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS"

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 123, 20 November 1935, Page 10

"REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS"

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —Britain boasts of her "representative institutions," yet, as the "Manchester Guardian" points out, in the new British Parliament "every Opposition member represents twice _as many electors as every Tory." But it might have been worse. In a previous Parliament Mr. Baldwin had in the House a very comfortable majority of members, although in the country as a whole there was a majority of some 3,000,000 votes against him.

The British Official Wireless message gives the aggregate of the Government votes as 11,732,381, and the Opposition aggregate as 10,142,636, whereas the Government got 426 seats as against the Opposition's 183 only. Take the Government's total, in round figures, as 12,000,000, and the Opposition's total as 10,000,000 only, and it will be found that in proportion to the votes cast the Government should hold 332 seats only instead of 420, while the Opposition should hold 277 seats instead of 183. So that the Government's majority in the House, if proportionate to its majority in the country, would not not 243, but 58. That is to say, the Government's majority in the House is rather more than four times as much as it would be under representative institutions that really represented the electorate fairly.

I note that at Masterton on Saturday the Democrat Leader, Mr. Hislop, said "his party would put the present Government out, but would not put Labour into power. It would force through preferential voting, and, if necessary, the people could then decide the political future at another election." But why "preferential voting"? Why not proportional representation, the only honest and scientific electoral system? Under preferential voting Mr. Baldwin might still have go* a big majority in that previous House of Commons, though in a minority by three million votes in the country.—l am, etc.,