BRITISH CONSTITUTION.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 6 December 1924, Page 13

BRITISH CONSTITUTION.

AND THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM,

Students of our political history will be interested by Mr. Ghurohill’s claim ; that the British Constitution rests on the two-party system, and that the two ; ancient parties must surrender their j separate identity in order to defeat a); tim'd, states a correspondent of the j Manchester Guardian. Obviously i; there is some confusion of thought here,! since the Constitution was well develop- ! . ed before the two-party system appeared. But, beyond this, initial confusion, there is also a tendency among Mr. Churchill and his friends to overlook the fact that any claim for long continuity of a two-party system is subject to considerable limitations. Mr. Churchill , eeems to look forward to a. future in 1 which there shall be two parties defiri- ! itely aligned against each other and constantly at war on the question of Socialistic ideas. But that is not the two-party .system as we have known it, for foreign observers have uoted with admiration the fact that the system is solvent, that the carrying on of the King’s Government is paramount, and that, in great questions like that of reform, the ranks- were broken. Nor is it true that a. third patty is a novelty;. it' is only the superficial observer who , sees the Parliaments of the past cleft-!, nitely divided between two parties. Chamberlain■ and Dilke were at least as far from, the Whigs of 1880 as from the Tories: the whole history of Parliament for fifty years from the first Reform Bill was one of struggle between; parties fanning from extreme Left to extreme Right. The Radical and the Whig, the Tory and the newer Conservative were far apart. The truth , is that parties come together on lines of natural development. ' To attempt, as Mr. Churchill would have us do, io fuse . Conservatives and Liberals suddenly into one party is contrary to the genius of polities. If the thing was done bv degrees between Conservatives and Liberal Unionists it was the result Gvith some exceptions) of natural tendency; neither Whig nor Tory had to 1 move very far. But to suggest that, in three or four months. Liberals and

Conservatives can become identical is a flight of fancy rather than a sober contribution to current problems