Parliament's Week

The Lords and Commons reassembled last week, from a generously long Easter recess, and briskly sat to business:

P: A new "Red Scare" was set palpitating in the Commons by Sir William ("Jix") Joynson-Hicks, pious and reactionary Home Secretary.

With an air of crying "Boo!" Sir William revealed that Scotland Yard had just rounded up a gang of Irish smugglers of arms, in London, and had traced banknotes found in their possession to "a Russian bank in this country!"

When the House received this revelation with equanimity, Sir William nursed his suckling Scare and took it before a Conservative rally at Leamington, where he cried: "We are asked to put up with the subsidizing of crime by a Russian bank in this country. . . . There is a direct chain from the Russian bank to Communist agitators in all the great cities of this land. ... I have the most complete evidence. . . ."

P: Because the famed Votes For Flappers Bill is perhaps the outstanding piece of legislation before the House (TIME, Feb. 20), Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was sorely nettled, last week, when Labor hecklers peppered him with questions designed to make him admit that the Flappers Bill is actually opposed by three leading members of his Cabinet: Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain, and Secretary of State for India the Earl of Birkenhead.

Only in the case of the Earl did hecklers score. They reminded Mr. Baldwin that Lord Birkenhead had recently written in the Good Housekeeping magazine (British) : "The incursion of women into. industry and politics has failed, is failing, and must of necessity fail."

When the Prime Minister was asked how such a statement could be squared with the Cabinet's support of the Votes For Flappers Bill, he frowned and brusquely replied: "If there has been an error of judgment on Lord Birkenhead's part, that is the worst that I can say."

P: Amid cries of "Hear! Hear!" from members of all parties, First Lord of the Admiralty William Clive Bridgeman announced that the Admiralty Board has, in effect, reversed the moral implication of the sentences of "Guilty" recently passed at Gibraltar upon two officers of the Royal Navy who had complained against the shameful conduct and awful oaths of their superior, Rear Admiral Bernard St. Collard (TIME, March 26 et seq.).

Mr. Bridgeman revealed that Oath Swearer Collard would be compulsorily retired as "unfit for high command,"* whereas the two officers convicted of technical misconduct in complaining against him will receive fresh commands at sea, "as soon as vacancies appear." A fresh sensation stirred when one of the officers slated for reinstatement, Commander H. M. Daniel, abruptly resigned from the Royal Navy, last week, and joined the staff of the newspaper which has been loudest in his defense, the Daily Mail.

P: Since Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain continued, last week, to hobnob with Dutch Royalty at the Hague (TIME, April 23), it became the duty of his trusted Under Secretary, Godfrey Lampson Tennyson Locker-Lampson to salute the House in substance as follows: His Majesty's Government considers that no useful purpose would be served by making representations to the Government of the United States respecting the repudiation by the Confederate States of their obligations to British bondholders.

Thus the Cabinet squelched several persistent committees of British bondholders who have recently petitioned for aid in dunning U. S. States which were once Confederate. A chuckle rippled across the Commons, as the sole Communist M. P., famed Shapurji Saklatvala, a swarthy Indian demanded: "Does not the Under Secretary think this another case where His Majesty's Government ought to send troops of occupation to protect British interests?"

*His pension will be -L-1,142 ($5,550) per year for life.