REPRESENTATION OF “INTERESTS”

There is a third reason for dissatisfaction with the composition of the House of Commons, which has become more prominent in recent years.  It is that, increasingly, organised interests are making use of the deficiencies of our electoral system to secure representation for themselves.  If I may take as instances two men whom, in themselves, everybody would recognise as desirable members of the House, Mr. J.H.  Thomas plainly is, and is bound to think of himself as, a representative of the railwaymen rather than of the great community of Derby, while Sir Allan Smith as plainly represents engineering employers rather than Croydon.  There used to be a powerful trade which chose as its motto “Our trade is our politics.”  Most of us have regarded that as an unsocial doctrine, yet the growing representation of interests suggests that it is being widely adopted.

Indeed, there are some who contend that we ought frankly to accept this development and universalise it, basing our political organisation upon what they describe (in a blessed, Mesopotamic phrase) as “functional representation.”  The doctrine seems to have, for some minds, a strange plausibility.  But is it not plain that it could not be justly carried out?  Who could define or enumerate the “functions” that are to be represented?  If you limit them to economic functions (as, in practice, the advocates of this doctrine do), will you provide separate representation, for example, for the average-adjusters—­a mere handful of men, who nevertheless perform a highly important function?  But you cannot thus limit functions to the economic sphere without distorting your representation of the national mind and will.  If you represent miners merely as miners, you misrepresent them, for they are also Baptists or Anglicans, dog-fanciers, or lovers of Shelley, prize-fighters, or choral singers.  The notion that you can represent the mind of the nation on a basis of functions is the merest moonshine.  The most you can hope for is to get a body of 700 men and women who will form a sort of microcosm of the more intelligent mind of the nation, and trust to it to control your Government.  Such a body will consist of men who follow various trades.  But the conditions under which they are chosen ought to be such as to impress upon them the duty of thinking of the national interest as a whole in the first instance, and of their trade interests only as they are consistent with that.  The fundamental danger of functional representation is that it reverses this principle, and impresses upon the representative the view that his trade is his politics.