12
European experience be regarded) creates "strong government" whilst
still founded on a demouratic basis (in Parliament).
To this last
was sometimes (but not always) added the vital and critical rider
"provided that there is in the country a stable 2 party system"
qualification
(a vital which cannot be gone into here).
The force, or lack of it, of these arguments is evident enough, but
there was also in the Colonial Office a strong prejudice against any other
system. Certain members of the Office, at the time (early 1960's) when
so many of the Westminster constitutions with which we had endowed our
newly independent colonies were failing, urged consideration of the
American system (which was of course, in reality, largely the reproduction
of our own classical 18th century constitution with its separation of
powers and 'checks and balances'), but the prejudice against this was
only too clear; if the criticisms then levelled against it
of producing
deadlock between Executive and Legislature-were believed, it would have
seemed impossible for the U.S. system to work at all !
-
The one great departure from our Westminster system in our colonial
administration was that recommended (and adopted) in Ceylon by the
Donoughmore Commission in 1928 where, to avoid the obvious danger of the
power of a virtually sovereign Parliament being wielded by an Execuživė” based onli, kred /a mere majority in a society deeply and widely divided into different
racial, religious and cultural communities, the Single Council plus
was recommended.
Committee system. This in practice failed, though it is far from evident
that that was due to any inherent defects in the system, and it is inske
instructive to observe the comments of the subsequent Commission under
Lord Soulbury of 1945 in defence of its recommendation of the Westminster
model as the remedy;
"We are well aware that self-government of the British Parliament- ary type carried on by a technique which has taken centuries to develop may not be suitable or practicable for another country
but it does not follow that the invention of modifications to meet different conditions elsewhere will be any more successful.... At all events, in recommending for Ceylon a const- itution on the British pattern, we are recommending a method of government we know something about, a method which is the result of long experience, which has been tested by trial and error and which on the whole works well".
- a comment hardly remarkable for its profoundity.