Unparliamentary papers and other diversions

by Reginald Berkeley

It must not, however, be supposed that the Speaker exercises his functions of authority harshly. His principal weapon, in fact, is a kind of awful benignity. It is doubtful if there has ever been a Speaker of the House of Commons who maintained his position by severity; indeed, the House of Commons, which is far from being the unintelligent assembly one might suppose, if one judged by the Press, would never choose a person with whom there was the slightest risk of friction; for the House is very jealous of the rights of members. An indication of the kind of results that might be produced by an assumption of too pedagogic a heaviness, on the part of the Chair, was given in the Debate on the Army and Air Force Annual Bill in the last Parliament. In the early hours of the morning, after a trying all-night sitting, Sir Frederick Banbury, who was temporarily in the Chair, raised his voice a little beyond the pitch of good humour in calling to order Mr. Lansbury, who was addressing the House, whereat the latter bluffly retorted: “You must not shout at me. Order yourself.” Strictly speaking, Mr. Lansbury was out of order in making this retort. He should have deferred to the ruling of the temporary Chairman, and, if necessary, raised the matter with the Speaker after questions on the following day. But there has never been in modern times a member so jealous of the privileges of the House as Sir Frederick Banbury. He realised that tempers, his own perhaps included, had worn a little frayed during the sitting; and therefore, contenting himself by reminding the offender that he must not challenge the decisions of the Chair, he dexterously shepherded the discussion into safer channels.

Speaker Whitley keeps order by an unbroken suavity of manner, a great sense of fair play and a wise lenience towards faults committed in error, from which it will be seen that his hold upon the House is very largely due to the feelings of personal affection, in addition to natural respect and loyalty, with which he is regarded by all members, even the most junior. He is quite capable of administering a rebuke, but he prefers to conquer by gentleness: that is his peculiar quality. With Speaker Lowther it was a keen sense of humour and, if necessary, a blasting and ironic wit, that gave him his ascendancy. This is not to say that Speaker Whitley is always grave; far from it. His rulings are most often touched with humour. But it is a quiet, gentle humour, like the man himself—the humour of a serious man, not the esprit of a wit. With Mr. Speaker Peel the governing factor was a tremendous, awe-inspiring dignity—something of the same kind as that traditionally ascribed to Dr. Arnold of Rugby School.

It must not, indeed, be imagined that the House of Commons never gets out of hand: nor must it be imagined that the House of Commons has only got out of hand since the Labour Party grew large. The House of Commons must always have been a troublesome body. “Scenes” in the House have taken place right back to the days of Oliver Cromwell; indeed, Mr. Drinkwater in his play gave a vivid representation of a scene in the House in those days. The very carpets on the floor are eloquent of what took place in former times; for the red line, down the outer edge of the strip that borders the front benches, is no less than a warning to members that, in speaking, they must not put their feet beyond it, on pain of being “out of order”: and the purpose of this rule is to keep them from engaging each other with their swords instead of their tongues in the heat of Debate! There were scenes in the House, constant scenes, in the old Reform Bill days and in the old Irish days. Mr. T. P. O’Connor still tells the dramatic story of the expulsion of Bradlaugh, and equally dramatic stories of the bodily removal of Irish members. Mr. Lloyd George himself has stories of suspension to tell. There were scenes in Parliament just before the war—when, for instance, Mr. McNeill threw a book at Mr. Churchill. There were scenes in the last Parliament, as when the four Labour members were suspended, and on other occasions. There will inevitably be scenes in the present Parliament; and it is safe to say that scenes will take place so long as the Commons shall survive.

But whereas in other countries, despite the muffin bell and the top hat, the President cannot avoid being drawn in, in the Mother of Parliaments the Speaker is something more than a restraining influence, he is the embodiment of law and order. He has behind him for the suppression of disorder the whole power of the State. He could fill the House of Commons with police, and suppress disorder of any magnitude; and if such an occasion arose, and threatened, as it would, our whole Parliamentary institution, the Speaker for the time being would unhesitatingly do so. But that situation will hardly arise. We do most things in this country in the spirit in which we play our games. Members know that, if they transgress the rules beyond a certain point, they will be suspended. They know that when suspended the Speaker will sign to the Sergeant-at-Arms and the Sergeant-at-Arms, advancing up the floor of the House, will require them to leave the Chamber. And because it is part of the rules of the game that they must do so, they will do so, in the same spirit as they would accept the decision of the umpire in a cricket match. So much for individuals. And if a party—which happened once in the last Parliament—as an organised whole, were to make business impossible by concerted noise, the Speaker has yet another weapon in his armoury. Under Standing Order he may, “in view of grave disorder,” adjourn the House “without question put,” and give the forces of reason time to reassert themselves.

How undramatic! Yes. But the whole point about the Speaker is that he is not a Loud-Speaker.

LORDS AND COMMONS

Though housed in the same building, though separated by a mere matter of yards of stone-flagged corridor and lobby, no two assemblies more essentially different in character, than the House of Commons and the House of Peers, could easily be imagined. They exist, it is true, for legislative purposes, the one being complementary to the other; but when that has been said not many points of similarity remain. The Speaker of the Commons is enthroned in a majestic canopied chair, dominating the Assembly over which he rules; the Lord Chancellor, who presides over the proceedings of the House of Lords, squats on a monstrous crimson cushion, like a feather-bed gone mad, facing a yet more monstrous crimson cushion upon which, on occasions of State, His Majesty’s Judges sit back to back, reproducing that obsolete formation, the hollow square, with which we won the battle of Waterloo. The Speaker of the Commons is so called because he so seldom speaks—because, indeed, he is the only member of the House who may not speak, except as the House directs him. The Lord Chancellor, on the other hand, may, and habitually does, indulge in any flights of dithyrambic eloquence that happen to surge out of his teeming brain; and, though, unlike the Speaker, it does not lie with him to determine the order in which Noble Lords shall address the House, he might, if he chose, monopolise the whole time with his own speeches. Indeed, when Lord Birkenhead was Chancellor such a happening was not regarded as....

Fortunately, no such proceeding is possible in the House of Commons, or, with a series of stunning reports, Mr. Pringle, Commander Kenworthy and Mr. David Kirkwood would explode from suppressed mortification; and there are others whose peace of mind would be seriously impaired. But in the House of Lords they are only too anxious to avoid speaking; indeed, the difficulty usually seems to be, to overcome the natural reluctance of Noble Lords to allow their voices to be heard, in that rarefied atmosphere, before they have reached the years of threescore and ten, laid down by the Psalmist as the normal span of mankind.

In such circumstances of difference what wonder that each House regards the other as a sort of lusus naturæ, a freak, a giant pumpkin? This sense of strangeness finds the extreme of its expression, in the House of Commons, in such outbursts as Mr. Jack Jones’s bitter expostulation against “those marionettes,” on the occasion when the Commons were sent for by the Lords to hear a Commission read, and found in the Gilded Chamber five Lords Commissioners resplendent in robes, seated in line; a solitary Back Bench Bishop, and one very junior Peer, probably a mere Baron, who, having wandered in by mistake, sought to efface himself under the lee of Black Rod’s box. “That,” said Mr. Jack Jones bitterly, “is what they think of Us.” Indeed, a chilling disdain is the chief characteristic of the public attitude of the Upper towards the Lower House—as for instance when the latter, in a new Parliament, are haughtily bidden to “repair to the place where you are to sit,” as though they were fowls, “and proceed to the choice of some proper person to be your Speaker,” as though, without that admonition, they would choose somebody from the neighbourhood of Leicester Square. This well-bred contempt is repaid, in the Commons, by veiled references to “another place.” On this exchange of courtesies, the Peers seem to come off best; though, when it comes to practicalities, the positions are reversed, as any student of the Parliament Act knows only too well—little now remaining to the Peers of their former legislative glory.

They get it back upon the faithful Commons, in virtue of their position in the Constitution as the Supreme Judicial Tribunal of the kingdom, whereby it follows that, if, under the Parliament Act, they cannot oppose indefinitely the legislative will of the Commons, they can to some small extent indemnify themselves, in their capacity of final interpretative authority, after the legislation has been passed. In practice they delegate this function to the Law Lords, five of whom, seated on the red benches with rickety desks in front of them, spend interminable mornings appraising subtle and circumlocutory arguments addressed to them from the Bar of the House by learned Counsel, standing at a kind of lectern, and surrounded by their fellows eager to propound distinctions. There is, however, nothing to prevent any Noble Lord so minded from partaking in this intellectual feast. Indeed, a legend obtains of a sturdy independent Peer, jealous of what would be called in the House of Commons “private members’ rights,” who, for years, insisted on attending, on these occasions, and delivering himself of ponderous allocutions of which no one present, himself least of all, understood one word of the meaning. It says much for the self-restraint of our Hereditary Nobles that his example has not been followed in modern times—though with Sir Frederick Banbury elevated to the Peerage one can never be quite sure.