HC Deb 23 February 1869 vol 194 cc210-23
VISCOUNT BURY

rose to move for leave to bring in a Bill to repeal section 26 of the Act of the sixth of Queen Anne, cap. 7, relating to the Re-election of Members accepting Office under the Crown. Under ordinary circumstances he should not have detained the House by any observations in support of his Motion; but since he had come down to the House he understood that the Motion was to be opposed. He did not know on what grounds that opposition was to be based; but he would earnestly entreat the House not to decide until they had the Bill before them, and had an opportunity of forming a judgment upon the merits of his proposition. He submitted that it was rather an unusual course that a Member who asked leave to bring in a Bill should not be allowed to lay it on the table. He felt it would be more respectful to the House not to make a speech on the present occasion, and he should therefore be glad if he should be allowed to wait for a few moments to see what course the Opposition might take, and then to submit any observations in reply he might have to offer.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to repeal section twenty-six of the Act of the sixth year of Queen Anne, chapter seven, relating to the Re-election of Members accepting office under the Crown."—(Viscount Bury.)

MR. WHITE

said, that he would oppose the introduction of this Bill, and when the noble Lord complained of it as an unusual and, he believed, an unwarrantable proceeding, he begged to remind him such was not the case. Some ten or twelve years ago, when the noble Viscount was a Member of the House, a Bill was brought in by Mr. Wrightson, the Member for Northallerton, which went no further than the proposal contained in the measure of the late Government—namely, that certain Officers in the employment of the Crown, in case of promotion or transference, need not vacate their seats; and leave to introduce it was refused on every occasion it was moved for. It was not for private Mem- bers to be tinkering and tampering -with the fundamental principles of the Constitution of Parliament. Again, in the last Parliament, of which the noble Lord was not a Member, it would be recollected that Lord Amberley moved a clause to the exact effect of the Bill the noble Lord now proposed to introduce, and the right hon. Gentleman who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer very properly remarked—and in that he had the acquiescence of the House—that the clause in the Reform Bill of 1867 went as far as was desirable in mitigating the severity of the statute of Anne. But now the noble Lord seemed to think that no one ought to take exception to his bringing in a Bill of this kind. The House would have plenty of work to do, quite enough to engage their utmost attention, without this Bill of the noble Lord. If the noble Lord had proposed to bring in a Bill not to repeal but to amend that section of the Act of Anne, they might have a Committee upon it, for they all knew there were many anomalies, exaggerated by process of time, which it would be desirable to have removed, but which still were not of so exigent and pressing nature as to engross public attention at the present time. It struck him as somewhat singular that the very first Resolution of the Whole House in Committee, to which they had come unanimously, should have been for the convenience of placemen, and now the noble Lord desired to bring in a Bill for the convenience of men who wished to be placemen. He had no sympathy with the noble Lord in that attempt. He was strongly of opinion that the present Parliament would be quite as jealous of the privileges of the people as the former Parliament, and he ventured to think that the proposition of the noble Lord was repugnant to the spirit of the Constitution, and in direct contravention of the rights of those who had sent them there. It was an infringement of the privileges of the people, because if a man when chosen by the Crown to fill Office was not to go back to his constituents, what was that but saying that he was to be independent of them, since their consent was not to be taken as to whether he should or should not accept Office? Suppose, two or three years ago, when, as was notorious, Lord Derby applied for co-operation to a right hon. Gentleman, a very conspicuous Member of the present Government, that right hon. Gentleman had accepted the offer, did the noble Lord mean to say that an appeal ought not to have been made to his constituents to ratify the proceeding? And yet if this Bill had been law at the time, no such appeal would have been necessary. The noble Lord seemed quite oblivious of a constant and wholesome principle of the British Constitution. When the statute of Anne was passed it should be recollected that they had triennial Parliaments, and yet our ancestors were so wisely jealous of the Constitutional privileges of the people, that they passed an Act that on the acceptance of Office under the Crown it should be necessary to appeal to the constituency. In the first place, the Crown was endowed with the right to choose whom it pleased for Office; and that being so, he held that the people had an equally undoubted right to say whether the men so chosen, if Members of this House, should continue to represent them. It was on that principle he opposed the introduction of this Bill, which he believed would do violence to a fundamental principle of our Constitution, and infringe the undoubted rights of the people. Suppose a man was chosen, as many were, because he happened to be independent, however consonant it might be with his own feelings to support the principles he was sent to represent when he became a Member of Government, yet there were constituencies which would not like to be represented by a person who was hampered by the acceptance of Office. If the Bill which the noble Lord asked leave to introduce should become law, he did not hesitate to say that in a Parliament of ordinary duration, it might, as Lord Lytton once remarked, prove a shelter to tergiversation and a shield to apostacy. The noble Lord might be enamoured of the Prerogative of the Crown, but he preferred to support the privileges of the people. He trusted he had not used unduly strong language, but he had been provoked by what had fallen from the noble Lord, who seemed to think any opposition to his unconstitutional proposal utterly unjustifiable.

MR. VERNON HARCOURT

said, he hoped he should not be considered presumptuous if, in the first stage of the discussion of this question, he ventured to express Ms decided—he hoped his noble Friend would excuse him for saying his vehement—dissent from the proposal before the House. The noble Lord had said that it was unusual to oppose a proposal of this kind in the first stage of the discussion. Whether it was unusual or not be did not know; but he was looking that day at the record of a Motion of a similar character made in the second year of the Reformed Parliament—when, upon the advice given by the sturdy common sense of Lord Althorpe, that Motion was negatived in its inception. His noble Friend (Viscount Bury) was not in the usual position of a Member introducing a measure like many of those which had been introduced this Session, upon questions which everybody admitted ought to be dealt with, and where the difference of opinion was only as to the manner in which they ought to be disposed of. He (Mr. Harcourt), for one, was not ready to admit that this was a question which required to be dealt with. He could not forget that this was a Bill to abrogate a principle which was coeval with—he might almost say congenital with—our present system of Parliamentary Government. The principle was established when, after the Revolution of 1688, the relations between the Crown and the House of Commons, and between the House of Commons and the people, were settled upon a permanent footing. Therefore, he thought that the onus of proof lay on his noble Friend—although he had disclaimed it that night—to show that there was some cause for disturbing a settlement which had now existed for a period of nearly two centuries. The noble Lord had thought himself altogether dispensed from advancing any argument on which to support his proposal; but it seemed to him (Mr. Harcourt) that it needed a great deal of argument to induce the House of Commons to entertain it even at its first stage. There could be no question that originally this principle of the Constitution was introduced as a safeguard against the power of the Crown. Fortunately for them, in the generation in which they now lived, the jealousy of the power of the Crown had been disarmed, by the conduct of the Sovereign. For many years past the fear which at one time was so sensitively alive in the minds of the English people had disappeared altogether; they had been so accustomed to a scrupulous fidelity in the observance of the principles of the Constitution on the part of the reigning Sovereign, that some persons had come to think the safeguards of the English Constitution wholly unnecessary. But it seemed to him that that was not a conclusive reason why these safeguards should be wholly abolished in the future. When they spoke of the Crown everybody knew that they did not mean the personal influence or authority of the Sovereign—they meant a great deal more; they meant the personal influence and authority of the Executive Government; when they spoke of the Speech from the Throne they knew that they were speaking of the Speech of the Administration, and of the policy of the Government of the day; and it was because the provisions of the statute of Anne were a safeguard against the power of the Executive, that it seemed to him quite as necessary at the present moment as at any former period of our history that they should be religiously preserved and jealously maintained. The history of that Act was probably familiar to all the Members of that House. In the original Act for the Settlement of the Crown a provision was made that all Ministers of the Crown should, after the accession of the House of Brunswick, be excluded absolutely from the House of Commons, in the fourth year of the reign of Queen Anne—when the terms of the Act for regulating the Succession to the Crown were re-settled—it was proposed by the House of Lords, which in those days was a Liberal Assembly, that this provision should be done away. At that period the Tory party in the House of Commons—under the guidance, he imagined, of Lord Bolingbroke—insisted on putting in a provision by which all Ministers of the Crown should be excluded from the House of Commons; and they were joined on that occasion by a section of the Whig party—he supposed a Whig "cave"; but they failed in carrying their project; and the settlement which now formed the statute of Anne was the result of a compromise which passed both Houses of Parliament, and ever since that period it had regulated the relations between the Crown and the House of Commons. It was by the happy accident of that arrangement that they had escaped the condition of things which now exists in America,—an example which, certainly, the recent experience of America led them to rejoice that they had not followed. The principle laid down in the Act which his noble Friend proposed to repeal was this:—That the choice by the Sovereign of her Ministers should be ratified by the people as represented by the constituencies who elected them. That was a principle which for a century and a half had been fundamental in the English Constitution; and he confessed that he was at a loss to conceive what were the grounds on which the noble Lord proposed that it should be changed. There had been practical inconveniences, no doubt, in particular Ministers who were moved from one Office to another having to go back to their constituents; but those inconveniences were removed by the Act of 1867, to which both Houses of Parliament gave their entire assent. What, however, his noble Friend proposed was a totally different thing—namely, that a change of Government should take place without any form of appeal to the people for their approval of the new Administration. Now, he ventured to say that although fear of the influence and power of the Crown had disappeared from the minds of the English people, there remained a danger quite as great—indeed, still more formidable—and that was the danger, within the House of Commons itself, of political cabal and Parliamentary intrigue. There was no event which happened in a free country so important as a change of Administration. There was nothing which was of more urgent importance than that they should guard against a change of Government which was not the result of an alteration of policy, but the effect merely of personal combinations; and it was in such a statute as that of Anne that they had a real protection against the spirit of Parliamentary intrigue; because there was an appeal under it from Parliamentary combination to the people outside as represented by the constituencies who were asked to re-elect the Members who were to form the new Government. The statute operated practically like a small dissolution of Parliament. He had been reading the other day in the Memoirs of the late Sir Robert Peel, published by his executors, a memorandum, in which he gave the reasons why he dissolved Parliament in 1834 when he had taken Office with a party which was in a minority in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel said that one of the considerations which drove him to that dissolution was the fact that under the operation of this very statute of Anne his Government must have gone to the constituencies. That, it seemed to him, was a very important argument in favour of the existence of such a provision. They all knew that Governments in a minority were not always very easily driven to a dissolution; and as it had been placed on record by the late Sir Robert Peel that having taken Office in the peculiar circumstances which attended the formation of his Government in 1834 the necessity of the re-election of his Cabinet led Mm to a conclusion in favour of dissolving Parliament, that was, he thought, a very strong reason why they should not now dispense with so valuable a safeguard for their protection under similar circumstances. But they need not go so far back as 1834 for evidence of the value of such an Act. There were circumstances even more recent than those of the year 1834, to which he should hardly have ventured to allude had they not been already referred to by the hon. Member for Brighton (Mr. White). There were cases in which a section of a party might sever itself from its own political connections on a great question of policy and might join the opposite party in Parliament. Now that section might, on a change of Government, take Office, or it might not. Probably the latter alternative might be the more prudent one. But supposing that persons who had severed themselves in action from their own party were to take Office by what was ordinarily called a coalition with a party that was opposed to them—he wanted to know whether their constituents were not entitled to express their opinion on the course they had pursued? And if the statute of Anne had operated before and might operate again to prevent such combinations as these, it seemed to him that it was a useful statute, and one with which they could not afford to dispense. The hon. Member for Brighton (Mr. White) had alluded to the question of short Parliaments. Now, he did not know whether that was a question which was to be soon raised; but if his noble Friend (Viscount Bury) should succeed in carrying his Bill, that circumstance would afford the strongest argument for short Parliaments which he could possibly conceive. But they need not go back far for reasons in favour of the existing condition of things. What had happened within the last few months should be sufficient to satisfy them that the present law was one which they ought to desire to preserve. Why, they had had a change of Government within the last three months; and, except the Ministerial explanations which had been given at the hustings, there had been no official explanation rendered to Parliament or the country of the causes which had led to that change of Government. They had seen, indeed, a sort of semi-official circular from the right hon. Member for Buckinghamshire, addressed to the Members of his own party; but that was not what was generally understood by a "Ministerial explanation." Parliament opened, and there was no Ministerial explanation from the Government of the change which had occurred or of the policy which was to be pursued; and the only explanation which the country had received had been from the Ministers upon the hustings. Some of those explanations were of a very important character. He thought his right hon. Friend the Home Secretary (Mr. Bruce), on the hustings at Renfrewshire, used some expressions on the subject of the Ballot which cast a light on a paragraph in the Speech from the Throne which otherwise might have been less intelligible than it was. There were other instances in which he was quite sure the House and the country at large would have been sorry to lose the public statements which this statute secured on the occasion of a change of Government. He might refer to an event which had given profound satisfaction to the country, and also, he believed, to both sides of the House of Commons—namely, the acceptance of the responsibilities of Office by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham. Now, he wanted to know, would not everybody have deeply regretted if, under these circumstances, the right hon. Gentleman had had no constitutional opportunity of stating to his constituents at Birmingham the view he took of his new position, and of giving to the country at large and to those who, both in and out of the House of Commons, had followed his teaching, an assurance that the same principles which he had enforced as a leader of the people he intended to act upon as a Minister of the Crown? Why, then, should the noble Lord endeavour to deprive persons in the situation of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham of an opportunity of making those explanations which the Constitution approved, and which certainly in. his (Mr. Harcourt's) belief tended very much to the satisfaction of the people? He had to thank the House for the indulgence with which they had heard him; and, in conclusion, he would venture to ask the noble Lord to consider the grave and weighty words of warning addressed by the historian of the Constitution to our generation. Mr. Hallam, after giving a history of the origin of the statute of Queen Anne, and after blaming the original terms of the Act of Settlement, and approving the final compromise upon which they were arranged, went on to say in reference to these very sections of the statute— These restrictions ought to be rigorously and jealously maintained, and to receive a construction in doubtful cases according to their constitutional spirit, not as if they were of a penal nature towards individuals—an absurdity in which the careless and indulgent spirit of modern timed might sometimes acquiesce."—[Constitutional History, chap, xv.] He felt assured his noble Friend would not suspect him of any disrespect towards him if he ventured to protest against what Lord Castlereagh would have called an "ignorant impatience" of small inconveniences when dealing with great constitutional principles. The principle involved in the statute of Anne he regarded as part of the essential and living fabric of the Constitution. His noble Friend, however, appeared to be dealing with it as if it were some old sword which having been a long time in the family, was of no further use, and which might, therefore, be sold off to some old curiosity shop. But he (Mr. Harcourt), for one, did not look at the statute from that point of view. It had done great service, and he believed it might do great service again. It was the sword of our fathers, and it was our duty to keep it bright and burnished as we had received it from our ancestors. While sailing on a calm and unruffled sea we ought not to confine to thoughts solely to the present because seemed prosperous; but we should make provision also for the future, when a political tempest might arise, and, following the advice of Mr. Hallam, jealously preserve those safeguards which our forefathers had provided—those safeguards which had proved hitherto, and might prove hereafter, alike a security for the stability of the Throne and for the liberties of the people.

MR. LOCKE KING

said, that while agreeing with the opinions expressed by the last speaker, he wished to remark that his hon. and learned Friend and the hon. Member for Brighton had revived a very inconvenient practice in that House. The custom of discussing the merits of Bills which hon. Members had not yet seen used to prevail in the House many years ago, and few Members had suffered more than he had from Bills being thrown out before they were brought in. Of late years, however, the practice had grown up of allowing Members who had taken the trouble of drawing up Bills the privilege of having them printed, and so giving hon. Members the opportunity of examining their contents. That privilege had, he believed, always been possessed by Members of the other House, where every Peer had simply to lay his Bill upon the table in order to insure its being printed and circulated. It would, in his judgment, be unfair to the noble Lord (Viscount Bury) to deprive him of the opportunity of having his Bill introduced and discussed after hon. Members had made themselves acquainted with the precise nature of its provisions. He trusted the House would allow the noble Lord to introduce his Bill, and then see what were its provisions.

COLONEL SYKES

said, his hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Mr. Locke King) had anticipated him in the remarks he was about to address to the House. His experience justified him in saying that it was a waste of time to discuss a Bill before hon. Members had seen its details. But, putting this consideration aside, unquestionably the noble Lord's measure would deprive the people of a constitutional right of great value, and he was unable to bring himself to believe that one of the first acts of that House, which had been elected by the people, would be to deprive the people of an important right.

MR. HENLEY

said, he would not detain the House more than a moment, for he thought that the first stage of a measure was undoubtedly a very inconvenient one to raise a discussion on it; but as the general question had been partly raised and commented upon, he could only repeat what he had said on several previous occasions—namely, that he did not like cutting the connection between the House of Commons and the people. The House went far enough—and indeed farther than he thought right—in what they did a year or two ago. And as far as this measure was concerned, as the present Parliament might be kept together for six or seven years, surely the people had a right to express their opinion if during that period a change should occur in the governing power of the country. It would, he thought, be a great calamity if a great change were made in those constitutional principles which had been so admirably set forth by the hon. and learned Member for Oxford (Mr. Harcourt), and he took this opportunity of congratulating the House on their having so sound a constitutional authority among them. He should be sorry to see any measure passed that would abrogate those principles which, in his opinion, were soundly laid down when the Act of Parliament passed in the reign of Queen Anne.

MR. KINNAIRD

said, that though no doubt this was an inconvenient stage at which to raise a discussion on a measure, yet greater inconvenience would arise if a Bill were allowed to be introduced when the majority of the House were opposed to its main principle, as he believed they were in the present instance. He thought it would be better to take the opinion of the House at once.

VISCOUNT BURY

said, in reply, that the speeches of the hon. Members for Brighton and Oxford, excellent as they were, ought to have been made on the second reading of the Bill. His hon. and learned Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Vernon Harcourt) had, he thought, not traced quite accurately the history of the statute. In the first instance, the House of Commons introduced into the Act of Security a long clause enumerating various persons who should be eligible for a seat in the House of Commons. All persons whose offices were not named in the Act were to be absolutely excluded. The Bill was sent up to the House of Lords, and was by them rejected. Two or three con- ferences were held between the two Houses, and in the end the Lords compelled the Commons to give way; but a provision was inserted with the view of saving the dignity of the Commons, to the effect that any Member accepting any Office whatever under the Crown should acknowledge the supremacy of the House of Commons by vacating his seat. The original intention, therefore, of the House of Commons, in making this concession, was, not to save the rights of constituencies, but to adopt a roundabout way, since they were debarred from adopting the plain way, to prevent the Crown from creating too many placemen. Far from being a great constitutional safeguard invented by the deliberate wisdom of our ancestors, it was a compromise forced upon them by the superior power of the House of Lords. Now, in his opinion, the present practice was very inconvenient, and productive of much waste of valuable time. Suppose, for example, a Government was defeated in the middle of June. In such a case there would be very little time available for the passing of the necessary legislation of the Session; and yet the Prime Minister, after spending at least three weeks in getting together his Cabinet, was obliged to go down to his constituency again for re-election. He maintained that this custom was not; such a constitutional safeguard as the hon. and learned Member for Oxford had described it to be. "Wiry should the House delegate to a single constituency—such as Tiverton, for example—the duty of deciding whether the man selected by the Crown for its Prime Minister was a fitting person to hold that high position. Surely the House of Commons ought to retain in its own hands; the right of deciding such a question. Long before the Minister could have been re-elected by his constituency—or, it might be, rejected, in which event another complexity would arise—the House of Commons might itself have determined, on a Motion of Want of Confidence, whether the Prime Minister ought to remain in Office. They had had recent experience of the inconvenience of the existing system. He hoped the House would allow him to lay the Bill on the table for the purpose of discussion.

MR. GLADSTONE

My noble Friend (Viscount Bury) is certainly as well en- titled as any man to ask at the hands of the House any courtesy which the House is accustomed to accord; because those who remember my noble Friend at former periods when he was a Member of this House—to which I am exceedingly glad he has returned—know very well that there is no man more competent to do full justice to the cause he has undertaken. But I think there has been a disposition on the part of some Members rather to overstate the extent to which the practice of the House is carried with respect to the introduction of Bills as an act of courtesy to individual Members. When a Bill contains details of a complicated character, bearing one upon another, and depending upon minute terms of expression, or even when anything that is serious may be said to depend upon the mode in which the measure may be drawn and its purposes expressed, then there is very great convenience in allowing the introduction of the Bill and deferring the objection that any one may be disposed to take to its principles; but when a Bill raises a point which is perfectly and absolutely simple, and which really involves no more than saying "Aye" or "No" in answer to a particular question, undoubtedly, so far as my knowledge and recollection go, it cannot be said to be the general, far less the uniform, practice of the House to allow the introduction of the Bill which it is seriously intended to contest on the second reading. Take, for example, the well-known cases of Bills for the introduction of Vote by Ballot. I believe I am correct in saying that, in very many instances, it has been the practice to contest the introduction of these Bills without waiting for the second reading; and that if, upon any occasion, a Bill has been introduced, and a division taken on the second reading, it has been due to the state of the House at the moment when the Motion was made, and the view taken, by the opponents of the measure, of the policy of postponing discussion, rather than to any general admission that a measure proposed seriously by a Member competent to do justice to it ought, as a matter of course, to be laid on the table; and upon this occasion we must feel that the discussion, though not a prolonged one, has, notwithstanding, taken the form of a discussion upon the principle of the Bill. My noble Friend (Viscount Bury) has stated well many arguments which can be urged on each side of the question, and both my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton and the hon. and learned Member for Oxford, who addressed the House with so much ability, and in a manner to lead us to entertain such great expectations in regard to his future contributions to our debates, have entered so far into the question that I own I think it would be a waste of time if on this occasion we were to vote upon anything except the principle of the measure. There are, no doubt, some inconveniences attending the operation of the existing law; but I cannot doubt, and I believe it is a conviction shared by both sides of the House, that after the settlement arrived at two years ago, it is premature to re-open the the question; and I would therefore recommend my noble Friend not to press the House to a division on this occasion.

VISCOUNT BURY

said, he saw it would be useless to go to a division, and he therefore withdrew his Motion.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.