GREAT BRITAIN: Parliament Opened

One day last week, the King-Emperor slipped on his silk stockings, donned regal robes and with the Queen-Empress drove from Buckingham Palace to the Palace of Westminster, where sit at their Parliamentary sessions the Lords & Commons.

Through the streets of London stirred a cold fuliginous fog. The King’s coach, drawn by eight superb horses, moved gingerly. The Beefeaters from the Tower of London who marched beside it seemed like ghosts who now and again disappeared into a slowly rolling gust of fog. Ghostly, too, was the scant crowd which peered at the nearly invisible Royal procession.

At Westminster, the King retired to the Robing Room where with help of chamberlains he donned “the ermine, the purple and the crown.” Then he and Queen Mary entered the great Gothic hall of the House of Lords.

Resplendently clad Peers and heavily robed bishops rose. In the galleries diamonded Peeresses stared, rustled, bowed. Lights blazed and kindled the darting iridescences of a thousand gems. No gem, however, burned more richly than the famous Cullinan Diamond which, as all could see, the Queen-Empress was wearing (see p. 50).

His Majesty strode to the Throne. His train stretched behind him, his crown flashed. Then he turned and faced his Ministers and the Lords of his Realm. The Commons were summoned and appeared. All was in readiness for the King to open Parliament with his Speech from the Throne.

What would the King say? For everyone knows that it is not really his own speech which the King reads, but Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s speech. And everyone knew, last week, that on the previous day the great Liberal peer, Viscount Grey of Fallodon (Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916, had ended his long political silence, had risen like a disturbing, provoking ghost, and had bitterly flayed the Conservative British Government for concluding with France the recent and notorious naval and military agreement or Pact (TIME, Aug. 13, et seq.).

Ghost Grey reverberantly charged that, although the Pact is now defunct, it has so embittered Anglo-U. S. relations that only the most reassuring moves by the British Government can win back U. S. goodwill.

“What we want to be sure of,” cried Lord Grey, “is that the Government has instructed the Admiralty that in drawing up the program of British naval requirements it should not take the United States fleet into account. Previous British Governments have never done that.

“The principle on which the Canadian boundary is secure is the only method on which Anglo-American security can be maintained. . . .

“The military as well as the naval part of the British and French bargain must be declared null and void.”

What answer would the King’s speech make to Ghost Grey, a Liberal whose fame recalls the bygone years when Britain’s cabinet was also Liberal?

Commenced the King: “My relations with the foreign powers continue to be friendly. . . .” Ears strained to hear the bugaboo name of the Anglo-French Pact. But His Majesty in deep clear tones praised instead the Kellogg-Briand treaty renouncing war (TIME, Sept. 3), and omitted entirely to discuss that other Pact on which all thoughts were focused.

When His Majesty had finished the unusually short Speech from the Throne, the Commons returned to their House. There fiery Labor Leader James Ramsay MacDonald sprang to his feet, fixed bold, wrathful eyes on Speech Writer Stanley Baldwin, and thundered accusations.

Said he: “The [bugaboo] Pact is not an agreement to limit armaments. It is an agreement not to limit armaments. It sacrificed the most elementary considerations of Britain’s safety. … .”

During the attack, Mr. Baldwin remained tightlipped, immobile. Curtly, when Mr. MacDonald had finished, Mr. Baldwin informed him that the Government would make no reply unless and until the Labor party moved a formal vote of censure.

Thereupon, crippled Socialist Philip Snowden, onetime Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924), indignantly moved adjournment of the House as a protest against “the Prime Minister’s insult to Parliament in refusing to make a statement” regarding the Pact. With deadly calm, Mr. Baldwin accepted the motion. Nervous, excited, the House adjourned.

Not until next day did the Conservative Government mention the Pact officially. Then Acting Foreign Secretary Baron Cushendun almost imploringly insisted that “Britain is now in exactly the same position as if she had not made” the Pact.

Nowhere in his speech-did Lord Cushendun say that Great Britain would withdraw her Pact-pledged support of the present French policy of maintaining great conscript reservist armies.

Said he instead: “We are under no obligations and could if we liked alter our attitude. . . . But Britain is not likely to do this because it would be absolutely futile. . . .”

In plain language this means that, although the naval clauses of the Anglo-French Pact have been scrapped, the military clauses (technically also scrapped) will in fact be lived up to “voluntarily”‘ by Great Britain.

Thus the Government weasled on a vital subject which it had not permitted the King even to mention. Subjects which the King did mention in announcing the Government’s program of forthcoming action were: 1) a general redistribution of taxes (TIME, May 7) under which agricultural lands or buildings should be exempt from municipal taxation, and three quarters of the present tax levy taken off industrial and transportation properties; 2) an imposing project of “labor migration” particularly aimed to transfer workless miners from areas of depression or absolute unemployment to the Dominions.

Next day this “migration” scheme was caustically ridiculed by Laborite John Robert Clynes. He then startled the Conservatives by suggesting that the British Government allow trade with Soviet Russia without resuming diplomatic relations.

While Laborites, Liberals and Conservatives argued in the House, their leaders kept anxious eyes on the Nation to catch signs of what Great Britain would do in the General Election next spring. Disturbing to the Conservatives were Labor’s great gains in England during the municipal elections of last fortnight. Gratifying to the Conservatives was the loyalty of Scottish voters who in Aberdeen, Dundee and Greenock remained Conservative. In Glasgow, however, the Laborites won one seat.