SECOND READING. (Hansard, 6 April 1900)

§ MR. EDMUND ROBERTSON (Dundee)
, in moving the Second Reading of the Bill, said: The purpose of the Bill is to change the law with respect to the election of parish councils. By the existing law the election of parish councils takes place on the same day as the election of 1499 town councils. That is the effect of the section of the Act of 1894 which I propose to repeal. This Bill proposes that the election of parish councils should take place on a different day. That is the whole object and scope of the Bill. I will only add that it has been drafted and brought before me at the instance of the Association of Burgh Officials of Scotland.

§ *THE LORD ADVOCATE (Mr. A. GRAHAM MURRAY,) Buteshire
It is my fate really to preserve the legislation of the late Government, of which the hon. Gentleman who has just spoken was a member. This, as the House will remember, was a debated question in the Committee upstairs on the Bill of 1894, and it was really one of the provisions—the provision for having both classes of elections on the same day—which Sir George Trevelyan, who had charge of the Bill, thought was a great feather in his cap. The matter was debated, and a division taken upon it, and the overwhelming sense at that time was that the provision was a good one. Subsequently we at the Scotch Office were bombarded with applications to undo the legislation of my right hon. friend and to make some arrangement whereby the elections should take place on separate days. All sorts of disasters were prophesied if we allowed the matter to stand as it was, and allowed the elections on the same day. The view the Government took was that it would not be fair to try to undo what our predecessors had done without good reason, and that it should be put off to give the arrangement a trial. Accordingly we resisted these demands. The term of three years ran out, and now there has been an actual election. What was the result? The result was that all those disasters that were prophesied did not come to pass. As a matter of fact the arrangements made in the original Bill were found to work very satisfactorily. That being the case, I really cannot feel it consistent with the duty of the Govern- 1500 ment to give a Second Reading to the Bill, because although the hon. Member is correct in saying that it represents the feeling of certain burghs, I am not prepared to assent to the proposition that it represents the feeling of most of the burgh officials. I do not think it represents the feeling of most of the burghs, and I should never think it right to overturn the legislation of another Government unless there was some very good reason for it. The truth is that the experiment has been found to work very satisfactorily, and therefore I am not prepared to agree to the Second Reading of the Bill.

§ SIR WALTER FOSTER (Derbyshire, Ilkeston)
I was about to ask one or two questions about the Bill, but the speech of the Lord Advocate has to some extent answered them. In England we have got nothing like the uniformity of elections on one day which many people desire. When you have attained that to some extent in Scotland, this Bill would seem to be a somewhat retrograde stop, and going back from the ideal previously placed before the Committee upstairs which we sought to attain. On the other hand, there may be a certain amount of inconvenience felt in certain burghs. My hon. friend, in placing the Bill before the House, says there is a desire to have a change, and not to have these elections running at the same time as other elections. I think the House will be guided by the amount of evidence my hon. friend and others are able to bring forward on this subject. If there is a large amount of evidence in favour of the change, I should not be on academic grounds inclined to oppose it, but if there is not that evidence, I think the position taken up by the Lord Advocate is the position one would feel bound to sustain.