Revival: The Future of the British Empire (1936): After Ten Years by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller

Author:Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller [Schiller, Ferdinand Canning Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138558311
Google: tjKpuAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 43673521
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

XII. THE DECLINE OF “DEMOCRACY”

THIS process has been the outstanding feature in the political scene during the past ten years. It may be traced more or less everywhere—even in the States which still profess to be democracies. These are now reduced to three great powers, Britain, France and the United States, different as are their conceptions of democracy, the Scandinavian States, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. The rest of Europe is under more or less obvious military dictatorships, largely of the type which has long prevailed in South America.

But what is even more ominous than the decline in the numbers of democratic States is the internal weakening of the democratic principle. It is threatened on two sides, by the attractions of Fascism on the right and of Soviet dictatorship on the left, and the methods which have destroyed democratic forms in Russia, Italy, and Germany are easily applicable to America and England.1

For England indeed Sir Stafford Cripps, probably the ablest of the Labour leaders, has worked out a beautiful scheme for a complete Socialist revolution that could be forced upon the Labour Party and carried through within the lifetime of one Parliament. It troubles as little about the wishes of the people as did the method by which the Bolshevists rose to power, but it may easily seem the only practicable policy for the next Labour Government to adopt. Sir Stafford Cripps has realized that there will probably never be a Socialist majority in the electorate, at any rate in his time, and further that even if there were, it would not be large and permanent enough to stand the prolonged strain of enacting the full Socialist programme in the ordinary parliamentary way, which would allow the House of Lords to hold up the programme for two years and to compel an appeal to the people. What he proposes therefore is this: the next time the electors, in a fit of disgust at the ineptitude of the Conservatives, or perhaps merely for the sake of a change, return a Socialist majority, however small and precarious, to the House of Commons, even though it may, and probably will, represent only a minority in the country, let the new Socialist Government first of all bring in a bill for the abolition of the House of Lords. This bill will not of course be acceptable to the Lords, but it can be forced through their House by the creation of new Peers, 500 or 1,000 or more, pledged to vote for their own extinction. After that the Government obtains from the House of Cornmons authority to enact laws by decree, and the country is transformed into a Socialist (or Com-munist) State at one stroke. In other words “democracy” can be made to abdicate legally, in Britain as in Hitler’s Germany.

There is only one reply to this scheme, and it would be effectual; but it would equally involve the supplanting of democracy—in this case by a sort of Fascism. To succeed it would need only

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