Chapter VIII — Democracy at Work
Local Government
To-day in Great Britain, in America, in the self-governing colonies, and in many European countries, we can sec the principles of democracy in working order.
The whole system of local government in Great Britain and Ireland is essentially democratic. The municipal councils of all the large cities are elected on household suffrage, and have enormous powers. There is now no sex disability to prevent the election of women to these bodies, and, except in the case of the clergy of the Established Church, who are disqualified from sitting on town councils (but not on county or district councils), all ratepayers are eligible for nomination. The result is that on nearly every city council, and on a great number of county councils, London borough councils, urban and rural district councils, boards of guardians, and parish councils, there are working-class representatives, while women members have been elected to the great councils of Liverpool and Manchester, and sit on many boards of guardians and parish councils.
All these councils are of recent creation. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 placed the election of town councils for the first time in the hands of the ratepayers, but the real reform of local government dates from 1888. In that year the Conservative Government established county and district councils and Lord Rosebery became the first chairman of the London County Council. Six years later the Liberals set up parish councils in the rural districts, with parish meetings where the population did not exceed three hundred. In 1899 the Conservatives displaced the old London vestries by borough councils, and in 1902-3 abolished in England the school boards created in 1870, and made the county council the local authority for public elementary education. Scotland was allowed to retain its school boards, and strong but unsuccessful opposition was made in London and the chief cities to the suppression of the specially elected education authority.
As far as rural England is concerned, county councils, district councils, and parish councils are, generally speaking, very reluctant to put into operation the wide powers they possess. The average county council, though popularly elected, is composed in agricultural England of landowners and the bigger farmers, who, as a common rule, do not favour a land programme for labourers, and are anxious to keep down the rates. The rural district council and board of guardians are equally averse from any display of public enterprise, and the parish council, which often consists mainly of labourers, rarely accomplishes anything except at the prompting, or with the sanction, of the parochial landowner. The result is that allotments, rural housing, village baths and washhouses, an adequate water supply, public halls and libraries, are not regarded as the concern of rural elected authorities, but are left to the private enterprise of landowners. Civic pride, which glories in the public proprietorship of lands and libraries, tramways and lodging-houses, waterworks and workmen’s dwellings, art galleries and swimming baths, and is a living influence in the municipalities of, let us say, London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Birmingham, West Ham, and many a smaller borough, does not exist in rural councils. To the farmer and the peasant public ownership is a new and alien thing. The common lands and all the old village communal life have gone out of the memory of rural England; but the feudal tradition that the landowner is the real centre of authority has survived, and it is the benevolent landowner who is expected to build cottages, grant allotments, and see to the water supply, as fifty years ago he built and managed the village school. Political organisation could break through this tradition, but farmers and agricultural labourers are without this organisation; and so the authority of the landowner remains, in spite of the democratic constitution of local government. The people can allow their power to remain in the hands of others, just as a king can be content to reign without ruling, and the local government of rural England is an oligarchy elected by a popular franchise.
In the factory towns and the mining districts it is a very different matter. Here the people are organised, and take their share in local government. In the county of Durham, for instance, the working class predominates on local councils, and the influence of trade unions prevails in these assemblies wherever a strong Labour party exists. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain began his public career on the Birmingham Town Council, and his municipal services earned for him the enthusiastic support of Birmingham for all his later political ventures. It would be difficult to mention the name of a great statesman who laid the foundations of his fame in rural local government.
As in local government, so in the Imperial Parliament. Rural England sends no Labour member to the House of Commons. Only in very exceptional cases has a tenant farmer been elected. It is the social labour of the mine and the mill that has produced the Labour member of Parliament.
Mr. Joseph Arch made a valiant attempt to organise the agricultural labourers of England, and from 1880 to 1890 a rural labourers’ union, with some thousands of members, was in existence. For a time this secured a rise in wages, and when Mr. Arch was in Parliament, as a Liberal M.P. (1885-1895), the rural labourer hoped for lasting improvement in the conditions of life. But the Union fell to pieces, and Mr. Arch was not strong enough single-handed to force the claims of his constituents on the House of Commons.