The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. TUESDAY, JUNE 4, 1929. ELECTION FIGURES

Southland Times, Issue 20791, 4 June 1929, Page 6

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. TUESDAY, JUNE 4, 1929. ELECTION FIGURES

Mr Baldwin should not require any prompting about the course he should pursue at the close of the elections. His party has lost its clear majority in the House of Commons, but it cannot be said that he has lost the confidence of the majority of the Chamber. No doubt a vote of No Confidence will be carried against him, because if the Liberals are true to their preelection utterances they will be compelled to follow at the heels of Mr Ramsay Macdonald, after which they will have to consider what their conduct will be with the Labour Party in power. But until the House of Commons has voted, Mr Baldwin is not able to say that he cannot carry on. The proper course, it seems to ue, is for him to meet. Parliament as quickly as he can and put on the members of the Commons the responsibility of saying whether or not he should carry on. Mr Ramsay Macdonald seems to suspect that some effort will be made to jockey the Labour Party out of the fruits of their victory, but that is not likely. Mr Baldwin, though he has not the largest party in the House, can claim the largest electoral following and this fact will direct attention to the votes obtained by each party, a comparison with the 1924 figures being of some interest:

This means that the votes cast increased by 0,003,776 and these were split up between the parties as follows: Conservative 698,610 Labour 2,893,436 Liberal 2,301,472 Others 110,258 The easy explanation of these figures is that of the extra votes the parties opposed to the Government secured about 5,000,000, but as the Liberal vote of 1924 showed a shrinkage of about 1,500,000 compared with the 1923 figures, it is fair to assume that a large portion of these votes returned to the Liberal candidates from the Conservative candidates, thus causing Mr Baldwin to lose many seats in spite of the largest number of votes being cast for his followers. This is enough to show who suffered most from the triangular contests: Mr Baldwin or Mr Lloyd George. Another point arising out of the figures is the lack of sympathy between the number of seats gained and the. votes cast. In 1924 Mr Baldwin with about 50 per cent of the votes cast for his candidates, and sixteen uncontested seats secured in his favour, obtained 413 out of the 615 seats, a result wholly disproportionate to the following expressed in the votes. This year though his party polled about >220,000 votes more than the Labour Party he must be content with 33 fewer seats in the House of Commons. The Labour Party increased its aggregate by 2,893,436 votes and thereby secured 137 seats; the Liberals increased their voting strength by 2,301,372, and obtained only 18 additional seats. Thus we see that the division of public opinion is not repeated in the House of Commons, wjiich by no stretch of imagination can be said to be really representative of the country. If we examine the position of the Liberals we find that for 'many years the voting strength of the Liberals was over 4,200,000 and if we restore that figure to the party as the normal, the increase from the larger register is about 1,000,000, while if we take 1,000,000 from the Conservative total, we find that Mr

Baldwin secured from the added voters something like 1,700,000, leaving the Labour Party with' an accretion of about 3,000,000. It is important to remember that under Mr Lloyd George and Sir Herert Samuel, backed by large funds the Liberal Party made a supreme effort with a campaign that started long before the election was mooted and was carried on without remission. That is our reason for suggesting that Mr Lloyd George as a political power in the Old Country has come to the end, and that the Liberals have failed. Mr Baldwin, it seems to us, has been the chief sufferer from this triangular fight, but he is not entitled to any sympathy in his plight, since he was in a position to give the country a rational electoral system, The Labour Party is not likely to do anything in this matter either, because it is in the strongest position when a threecornered contest is called. In New Zealand the situation is different, and probably wc will see some change in the electoral system—not Proportional Representation, though that has been on the Liberal programme in the past, but something which will be based on preferential voting, because the United Party will expect to derive some benefit from it. In Britain preferential voting might have kept Mr Baldwin in power, but it is hard to say and speculation is as unprofitable as that pleasant game of assuring the public that the Government secured a minority of the votes, when it is painfully obvious that in any situation arising out of the election just closed any one party can be shown to be in a minority.

1924. 1929. Conservative . 7.838,225 8,536,835 Labour . . . 5,423,589 8,317,025 Liberal . . . 2,925,142 5,226,614 Others . . . 197,673 307,931 16,384,629 22,388,405