Hmm, in that case - IIRC there was a proposal floated a while back that would have used STV for urban constituencies and IRV (or AV, since This Is Britain (TM/MC)) everywhere else. Is that that same Commons bill, or am I thinking of a different bill? Another possibility that could have been interesting is an alt-Parliament Act that reforms Parliament along Australian lines, giving it another possibility (although Australian political history suggests bloc voting as an intermediate step in the Senate - which the UK already had experience with, up until that point, in multi-member constituencies).
That's the one.
211 constituencies in urban areas; AV in the rural ones.
The batting back and forth over it, the compromises, and changes, and eventual death of it by a thousand cuts in early 1918... it was really involved. The thing tat surprised me was how cross-party the arguments were - you had Unionists arguing fervently for STV whilst other Unionists argued against it, and the same for Liberals.
Lowther was a Conservative before being elected Speaker, and he was reportedly
furious that it PR got dropped. And it was a Tory-dominated House of Lords that kept insisting on putting STV back in. (Of course, the Tory Lords, who weren't going to face election, had a different point of view from quite a few of their Commons colleagues (although certainly not all!) and their main cynical motive was, "Christ, did you see what happened in 1906? A mere 6% lead, under half of the vote, and the damned Radicals ended up neutering our entire House, and levying
taxes on us! And now the working classes and Radicals are really on the march. Dear Lord, I can see the day when
Labour might have a landslide victory, dash it all - this notion will at least prevent a huge Radical landslide on a mere plurality of the vote")
There was another potential PoD in 1931, after the House of Commons passed AV for all constituencies, but the Lords rejected it. The MacDonald Government collapsed before being able to force it through with the Parliament Act (to be fair, it may have still been more fraught to finally get through - it only got through with strict whipping, as a quid pro quo for the Liberals to support the Labour minority Government and would have required at least two more such successful whipping operations)
