RE-ELECTION OF MINISTERS BILL. (Hansard, 26 February 1919)

§ THE LORD CHANCELLOR

My Lords, this is a Bill the purpose of which, I hope, may be very shortly recommended to your Lordships. The object of the Bill, as its title discloses, is to render it unnecessary for members of the House of Commons who after their election become Ministers to submit themselves for re-election to their old constituencies. This class of problem is one from which your Lordships studiously and over a long period of time, as far as my researches inform me, disinterested yourselves, because it affects less privileged persons than your Lordships. If any of your Lordships is advanced to Ministerial rank such a new Minister returns here without the temporary inconvenience of re-establishing contact with the electors from whom, it may be, he has parted quite a short time previously. No such privilege has been conceded to members of the House of Commons.

Your Lordships, like the spectators by the bank of a rapidly-running stream, have seen the members of another House nantes in gurgite vasto. This necessity has been in the past irksome to members in another place, and the purpose of this Bill, as originally conceived, was to provide that it should be in no case necessary hereafter for members of the House of Commons, on being promoted to become Ministers, to seek re-election. To that private members in another place offered reasonable and legitimate objection, and an Amendment was inserted to provide that this protection should only extend for a period of nine months in a new Parliament.

The general nature of the provisions of this Bill, of which I beg to recommend the Second Reading to your Lordships, is that in future, if after a new Parliament has come into being any member of that Parliament who has recently come from his constituency is promoted to be a Minister, a by-election shall not be necessary, unless a period of nine months has intervened between the election and his promotion. This controversy has raged in the past. Different parties at different periods of their fortunes have taken different views as to the propriety of the old rule, and as to the reasonableness of the modification which is now recommended to your Lordships by the House of Commons. It has 389 sometimes happened that one Party when in opposition has taken a very different view of the reasonableness and usefulness of the old practice from that which it has felt in the embarrassment of a period of office which has perhaps lost its earliest popularity. It is perhaps not unfair to suppose that the compromise which is now recommended in this Bill is reasonable as between the different views which at different times have been held. I beg to move.