Foreign News: High & Mighty

Nancy Lady Astor turned her tart Virginia tongue last week upon Minister of Labor Oliver Stanley, gilded son of the Queen’s Bedchamber Woman, who fortnight ago confessed to the House of Commons the failure of the National Government’s attempt to reform Britain’s wasteful “Dole” (TIME, Feb. 18). Said the Noble Lady: “Government should have stood by their unemployment scheme and corrected its defects without so much everlasting apologizing to the Labor Opposition! It was all right for the Labor Minister to make his statement in this House, but it was not necessary for him actually to crumple up, as he did in the face of the minority.”

Lady Astor continued to be comforted by the stolid Toryism of the House of Chamberlain, mere second-generation though it is. Sir Austen Chamberlain, he of the affrighting icy monocle, grows dim; but even without a monocle his brother Mr. Neville Chamberlain, Chancellor of the Exchequer, remains perhaps the world’s most formidable Tory. Last week Mr. Chamberlain addressed the House of Commons, and Labor in particular, with such withering conservative rebuke that even when he referred to Britain’s 2,000,000 unemployed,” no M. P. ventured the impertinence of interrupting to observe that Government’s own official figure last week was 2,325,373.

Chamberlain of Birmingham punctured the ballooning rumor that David Lloyd George was about to be given a Cabinet portfolio by National Government in an effort to get the votes he is drumming up by his loud “New Deal” proposals to restore British prosperity by lavish public works (TIME, Jan. 28). Coldly, simply, Chancellor Chamberlain said: “The policy of providing public works always fails, and our past experience in this respect has been no different from that of other countries which have tried it.”

He continued: “By degrees we have built up a great measure of confidence in the finances of this country. We can see how easily that confidence may be disturbed by a few idle rumors over a week end. Talk of an imaginary crisis and impending elections can damage it by many millions of pounds.”

To demands, lately revived by British Liberals, for tariff cuts by His Majesty’s Government, Mr. Chamberlain retorted: “I entirely differ with the suggestion that it is necessary to take off tariffs in order to restore export trade. . . . Some may be contemptuous over our small advances in exports, but I do not believe there is any other country—unless it be Japan— which can show a similar increase.”

This high & mighty tone, National Government successfully maintained last week, defeated Labor’s motion of censure 374-to-68, after jamming the India Bill through second reading, 404-to-133.

Journeying up to Birmingham for the week end, Chancellor Chamberlain addressed his family’s ever faithful constituents. They could safely ignore, he counseled, ugly rumors that out of the recent ruin of prominent London pepper speculators there would soon erupt a British Stavisky scandal involving financiers and statesmen. Pooh-poohed the Chancellor of the Exchequer: “The pepper crisis has been cleared up, and I don’t think there is as much as a sneeze to be heard in the City today.”