GREAT BRITAIN: Parliament’s Week: Dec. 6, 1937

The Commons —

¶ Advanced through second reading the Coal Royalties Bill whereby His Majesty’s Government are to acquire on July 1, 1942 upon payment of $330,000,000 all coal in the United Kingdom (TIME, Nov. 22).

¶ Were refused details of what took place at the meeting of Adolf Hitler and Viscount Halifax (TIME, Nov. 29 et ante), but were told by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that “the visit has been valuable in furthering the desire, which I believe to be generally felt in both countries, for the establishment of a closer mutual understanding.” This sounded so pro-German that Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who is not pro-German, succeeded in getting French Premier Camille Chautemps and Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos invited to London, where they arrived this week to try to discover where His Majesty’s Government stand.*

¶ Heard President Roosevelt — whose New Deal is being approached by the Cabinet with an eye to arranging a trade treaty whose benefits to Britain are political rather than commercial (TIME, Nov. 29)—attacked by Conservative Robert John Graham Boothby, onetime Parliamentary Private Secretary to Winston Churchill when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

“If the President pursues his policy which discourages investment in capital goods industries and which violates every economic principle, it is bound to have an adverse effect on our well-being in Great Britain,” said Mr. Boothby.

“In the spring of this year he suddenly announced that it was his opinion that commodity prices were too high, although they actually were lower than the level of 1926. He followed this up by doing everything in his power to restrict freedom of markets and the freedom of capital goods industries in the United States. This led inevitably to acute devaluation with the result that, at the most critical moment, the underlying strength of the democratic countries has been greatly diminished and the dangers of war perceptibly increased.”

* An extremely long British Foreign Office off-the-record statement was made last week in an effort to convince the press that: 1) Britain is not trying to tamper with either end of the Rome-Berlin axis at the expense of the other, and Germany’s attitude toward London-Paris is equally platonic; 2) while Hitler told Halifax that any right to interfere in the destinies of Austria & Czechoslovakia should be Germany’s alone, Der Fiihrer did not say, as has been rumored, that Austria should hold a plebiscite to determine whether it is to go Nazi or that the Czechoslovak regime should be altered; 3) efforts will be made this week to draw London-Paris and Rome-Berlin into closer relations without offending Moscow; 4) Britain recognizes the existence of a problem concerning the future of the former German colonies, wishes any disgorging d them to be done by all the countries which swallowed such territory and not merely by herself; 5) Prime Minister Chamberlain and Premier Chautemps will discuss Japan’s invasion of the rights of the powers at Shanghai with a view to securing the co-operation of President Roosevelt. Obviously some of these off-the-record points are jumbled, self-contradictory or misleading. But the easygoing, aristocratic British Foreign Office was not yet ready to sort out its ideas and go on the record.