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PARTISAN REVIEW
torate voting had been going down. Sixty percent was considered a high
vote. In the big towns many people do not know the name of their MP
or which constituency they live in. A social survey at a recent election
showed that many adults now don't know the first facts about British
electoral procedure--e.g., don't know that the ballot is secret.
Nevertheless, I myself feel that Parliament has justified its existence
during the war, and I even think that its prestige has risen slightly in the
last two or three years. While losing most of its original powers it has
retained its power of criticism, and it is the only remaining place in
which one is free, theoretically as well as practically, to utter literally
any opinion. Except for sheer personal abuse (and even that has to be
something fairly extreme), any remark made in Parliament is privileged.
The Government has, of course, devices for dodging awkward questions,
but can't dodge all of them. However, the importance of Parliamentary
criticism is not so much its direct effect on the Government as its effect on
public opinion. For what is said in Parliament can'not go altogether
unreported. The newspapers, even the
Times,
and the BBC probably do
tend to play down the speeches of opposition members, but cannot do so
very grossly because of the
exist~nce
of Hansard, which publishes the
Parliamentary debates verbatim. The effective circulation of Hansard
is small (2 or 3 thousand), but so long as it is available to anyone who
wants it, a lot of things that the Government would like to suppress
get across to the public. This critical function of Parliament is all the
more noticeable because intellectually this must be one of the worst
Parliaments we have ever had. Outside the Government, I do not think
there can be thirty able men in the House, but that small handful have
managed to give every subject from dive bombers to 18B an airing.
As a legislative body Parliament has
becom~
relatively unimportant, and
it has even less control over the executive than over the Government.
But it still functions as a kind of uncensored supplement to the radio–
which, after all, is something worth preserving.
THE MONARCHY
Nothing is harder than to be sure whether royalist sentiment is still
a reality in England. All that is said on either side is colored by wish–
thinking. My own opinion is that royalism, i.e., popular royalism, was a
strong factor in English life up to the death of George V, who had
been there so long that he was accepted as "the" King (as Victoria had
been "the" Queen), a sort of father figure and projection of the English
domestic virtues. The 1935 Silver Jubilee, at any rate in the south of
England, was a pathetic outburst of popular affection, genuinely spon–
taneous. The authorities were taken by surprise and the celebrations were
prolonged for an extra week while the poor old man, patched up after
pneumonia and in fact dying, was hauled to and fro through slum streets
