GREAT BRITAIN: Parliament’s Week: Aug. 3, 1936

The Commons:

¶ Met at 3 p. m. and grew angrier & angrier for 28 consecutive hours debating relief for Britain’s jobless until finally the House had to be suspended in its most unruly scene since 1881 when police were called to eject honorable members by force.

The explosion came after brittle, over-bearing Home Secretary Sir John Simon, long the Empire’s highest-paid lawyer, claimed that jobless men will get more benefits from the dole as administered by the National Government than they do in the radical municipality of Glasgow.

“You’re lying!” shouted George Buchanan, one of the four Independent Labor Party members in the House. When asked by the Speaker to withdraw, Scot Buchanan cried, “I can’t withdraw my remark, even for you, because it’s true ! The Home Secretary is not telling the truth. He is lying!”

At this the Speaker asked a vote to suspend George Buchanan, but before division could take place Scot Campbell Stephen, M. P.. also of the Independent Labor Party, got up to say: “His Majesty’s Government’s supporters are cowardly robbers and murderers of the working class. The Minister of Labor, Mr. Ernest Brown, is a dirty, contemptible little rat who ought to be hounded from public life. The Home Secretary is a lying scoundrel, and I will not sit down and listen to him. The Minister of Health, Sir Kingsley Wood, is also a contemptible little rat.”

At this, furious uproar burst from both sides of the House. Unable to still its bedlam, the Speaker got up from the chair and by stalking out suspended the session. Twenty minutes later he stalked back to ask suspension of the Independent Labor Party’s Buchanan & Campbell Stephen. This was voted, 248-to-53. Home Secretary Sir John Simon resumed his interrupted speech, and all seemed about to go off smoothly when Frederick Seymour Cocks of the Labor Party rose to face Sir John and declare in calm, measured tones: “This Right Honorable Gentleman we all know to be a liar.”

Instead of calling a vote to suspend moderate Laborite Cocks for having committed the same offense as radical Independent Laborites Buchanan and Campbell Stephen, the Conservative occupant of the chair showed favor by merely chiding Mr. Cocks for using the word “liar.” Taxed with favoritism, the Speaker sniffed: “I have to deal with cases as I find them.” This touched off John McGovern, a third Scottish Independent Laborite famed for having once loudly abused King George (TIME, Feb. 18, 1935).

“If there is one rule for the Independent Labor Party and another for the Labor Party in this House,” shouted Jock in his thickest Scottish burr, “then I say the Home Secretary is a liar!”

Fresh bedlam broke at this but the Speaker grimly got a vote of 262-to-11 suspending Mr. McGovern, who by this time had called King Edward a ”despicable individual” who was stingy with his mother Queen Mary. Tempers passed the boiling mark and His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition started shouting, “Baby Starvers!” and “Dirty Rats!” at His Majesty’s Government as Scot McGovern walked out past Sir John Simon snarling at the impassive Home Secretary, “Everybody knows you’re a liar!”

Suddenly for the first time in the history of the House of Commons, the ”Mother of Parliaments,” men leaped up to sing The Red Flag. The singers were not Independent Laborites but ordinary Laborites. Overpowered by the implications and excitement, Reporter James Johnston of the Birmingham Post dropped dead in the House’s press gallery.

Nevertheless, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Home Affairs, Sir John Allsebrook Simon, icily resumed, finally completed his speech and won a vote of confidence, 357-to-155, exactly 34 hours and 18 minutes after debate began— the longest session of the House in more than half a century.

¶ Were treated to hair-raising accounts of the speed with which Great Britain is rearming by the new Secretary of State for Coordination of Defense, pontifical Sir Thomas Inskip, at whom Laborites were soon chanting with mock groans, “Nineteen-fourteen all over again!”

Sir Thomas revealed that the Government has bought land for 40 new combat aerodromes, offered munitions contracts to 52 firms, and is enlisting as fast as possible Britons up to 50 years of age with a knowledge of gunnery to man anti-aircraft batteries ”for the simple purpose of defending their own homes.”

Sir Thomas cited with indignation the recent speech by the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Laborite Major Clement Attlee, in which this War veteran cried: “I am not going to support a recruiting campaign by a Government whose foreign policy I cannot approve.”

“What does that mean?” boomed big Sir Thomas turning toward the Labor benches. “Do you mean to leave the crowded cities and centres of employment and your own homes undefended and at the mercy of an invader because your leader distrusts our foreign policy?”

Gibed back Laborite Will Thome: “Who is the invader?”

“You will know who the invader is,” snorted Sir Thomas, “when your house is bombed!”

Labor kept on twitting the Government for being scared-cats, next trying to egg ministers of the Crown into naming a country they expect to have to fight. Finally the Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain scathingly intervened, “That would be a nice contribution to international peace! Anyhow dangers do not always come from the same quarter but change rapidly.”

¶ Prepared to rise for the summer recess with these harrowing words of the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill ringing in their ears last week: “Germany is spending six times as much as ourselves upon increased armaments! … As far as this year is concerned, and I fear also as far as the next, we shall not overtake them. . . . Everyone is going away for the holidays soon and when we come back we shall be looking forward to the Coronation. Do not forget that all the time those remorseless hammers are descending day & night and that the Germans—the most warlike and in many ways the most efficient people in Europe—are becoming welded into a tremendous fighting machine, equipped with the most fearful agencies of modern science!”