THE SPEAKER

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19944, 31 October 1934, Page 12

THE SPEAKER

HIS ROLE IN POLITICS TRADITION N*OT TO VOTE Recently the Legislative Assembly agreed to the adoption of a new standing order which provides for the election of the Speaker by exhaustive ballot (says the Melbourne “Age”). In Australian Parliaments it is the custom to regard the Speakership as one of the spoils of office, and therefore the vote for the election of a new Speaker is usually on party lines. There have been occasions, however, when each has been anxious to secure the election of a member from the opposite side to the Speaker’s chair. This is not because each party believed that no suitable candidate for the high office could be found in its own ranks, but because the voting strength of the two parties was almost equal, and the election of a Speaker would weaken the strength of the party to whose ranks he belonged. Of course, the Speaker has the right to vote on any division of the House, but he does not always do so; and his silence in debates and the absence of his name from the division lists are often a material gain to the party to which he is politically opposed. In Great Britain it is the custom to re-elect the same Speaker of the House of Commons at the opening of each new Parliament until he voluntarily retires. A change of Government as the result of a General Election seldom results in a change in the occupancy of the chair of the Speaker of the House of Commons. In other words, the Speakership of the Mother of Parliaments is not regarded as one of the spoils of office. During the past 200 years there have been only eighteen Speakers of the House of Commons, and one of them, Mr Arthur Onslow, presided as Speaker over five successive Parliaments, and filled the chair for thirty-three years. For Back Benchers The Speakership of the House of Commons is one of the few political prizes which come within the reach of members who occupy the back benches. The Speaker has a salary of £SOOO a year, and is provided with sumptuous residential quarters in the western wing of the Parliamentary buildings. When he retires he is elevated to the peerage—usually as a viscount—and is given a pension of £4OOO a year. An exception occurred in the case of Mr J. H. Whitley, who resigned the Speakership in 1928, after having filled the chair for seven years. He accepted the pension of £4OOO a year, but declined the offer of a peerage. The tendency in Great Britain for many years past has been to remove the Speakership more and more out of the atmosphere of political partisanship. It has been the custom of a new Government in a new Parliament to nominate as Speaker the holder of the office in the previous Parliament, even though he was originally a nominee of its political opponents. Of the nine Speakers who presided over the House of Commons during the nineteenth century only three were chosen from the Conservative side of the House. On four occosions when a Conservative Government was returned to office a Liberal Speaker was reelected. When Mr W. J. Lowther was appointed Speaker in 1905 it was the first time in seventy years that a Conservative had held the post. It is tr uethato n two occasions during the nineteenth century the Conservatives nominated candidates for the Speakership in opposition to the nominees of Liberal Governments, but on both occasions the Conservative candidates were defeated. A contest for the election of the Speaker of the House of Commons does not often take place. In order to obtain a unanimous vote of the House in favour of the Government nominee, it is the custom for the Prime Minister, to inform the Leader of the Opposition privately of the name of the Government’s candidate, and ask whether the Opposition will support the nomination. With the object of removing the Speaker from the sphere of political controversy it is customary at General Elections in Great Britain to give the Speaker a walk-over in his constituency When at the General Election of 1895 Mr William Gully, who had been elected Speaker just before the dissolution of Parliament, was opposed in the Carlisle constituency by a Conservative, Mr Asquith deplored this “departure from the finer and better traditions of English public life.” But Mr Balfour, the Leader of the Conservative Party, defended the attitude it had taken up. He said that he had not been consulted regarding the nomination of Mr Gully as Speaker, that the Liberal Government had secured his election by the narrow majority of eleven votes, and that if the Liberals wanted the tradition to be observed they should have found a safe Liberal seat for the Speaker, instead of expecting the Conservatives to present them with such a doubtful seat as Carlisle. But Mr Gully, who in his election address studiously avoided controversial questions, was elected by a small majority. The Liberal Government, however, was defeated, and when Paliament met many of the rank and file of the Conservative Party wanted to elect a new Speaker from their own side of the House. But the tradition of reappointing the Speaker of the previous Parliament prevailed, and Mr Gully filled the post of Speaker for ten years. Casting Vote For more than sixty years no Speaker of the House of Commons has participated in any of its debates. It used to be the custom for Speakers co participate in the discussions on Bills in committee of the House (when the chair is occupied by the Chairman of Committees, and not by the Speaker), but this is no longer the case. The last occasion on which a Speaker took part in a division in committee of the House of Commons was on June 9, 1870, when Mr Speaker Denison voted in favour of an amendment on one of Mr Lowe’s Budget proposals, which would have imposed a licensing duty on farm horses employed in carting materials for the repair of parish roads. Mr Speaker Gully went as far as to have his name omitted from the printed lists which are supplied to the clerks in the division lobbies for the purpose of recording the names of members and how they voted. It is very seldom that in the House of Commons with more than six hundred members there is a tie in a division and that the question has to be decided by the casting vote of the Speaker. Mr Gully gave only one casting vote during the ten years he was Speaker, and his predecessor, Mr Speaker Peel, gave only one in eleven years. Sir John Bowser, when Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Victoria, saved the Allan-Peacock Government in 1926 by his casting vote. In the British House of Commons in 1805 Mr Speaker Abbot was called on to give his casting vote in connection with charges of malversation brought against Lord Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty in Pitt’s last Cabinet, and the right-hand man and close friend of the Prime Minister. The

charges related to matters that had occurred more than twenty years earlier. It was established by a Commission of Inquiry that during Melville’s tenure of office as Treasurer of the Navy in Shelbourne’s Administration his paymaster, Trotter, who was also Melville’s private agent, Withdrew large sums of public money from the account of the Treasury in the Bank of England, lodged them in a private bank, and appropriated the accruing interest. Lord Melville admitted in his examination before the Commission that as advances of money had been‘made to him by Trotter at the time he might have made use of this public money unwittingly for his own private use. On April 8, 1805, Samuel Whitbread moved a series of resolutions in the House of Commons condemning Lord Melville for malversation of public money, and the voting was 216 on each side. “The painful issue depended on Mr Speaker Abbot’s casting vote,” states Mr Michael Macdonagh in his excellent book “The Speaker was overcome with the deepest distress. For a long time he sat in the chair, pale and trembling, in view of the crowded and exetied, but silent, House, before he could master his emotion and gather sufficient composure and strength of mind to raise and deliver his decision. It was against Lord Melville. It is said that Pitt crushed his hat over his eyes to hide his tears for the fate of his friend and colleague.” Melville was impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanours” before his peers In the House of Lords. The trial lasted fifteen days, and his defence, that he had not connived at Trotter’s use of public money, was accepted by SI votes to 27.