Parliament's Week

The Lords:

P: As the Empire's superior court of appeal, squelched the lengthy efforts of the Crown to squeeze further income tax payments out of Hon. William Waldorf Astor, shy young son and heir of bold Nancy Astor's mild Viscount. On. Nov. 13, 1929 Mr. Astor transferred stocks and shares to a U. S. trustee, hoping thus to escape taxation of the income by Britain.

Delivering judgment last week, Life Peer Hugh Pattison Macmillan, Baron Macmillan of Aberfeldy and Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, stressed the essential point that Scion Astor, in setting up his U. S. trust, "reserved the right to revoke the trust wholly or in part during his life." Hereafter Heir Astor will pay British income tax only on that part of his U. S. income which is brought into Great Britain.

Heir Astor, so shy that he often swallows twice before answering a simple question, was sent by the League of Nations' cowardly Lytton Commission to investigate Northern Manchuria when they deemed it too dangerous to go themselves (TiME, May 30, 1932). Next year, stopping in Manhattan's new Waldorf-Astoria, Mr. Astor remarked: "When my friends try to telephone me and ask for Waldorf Astor the operators say, 'Oh, yeah?' I suppose it is rather like calling up the Aquarium and asking for Mr. Fish."

P: Saw their recent hot debate on the abuse of clapping the King's subjects into jail for debt (TIME, March 11) crowned last week by a remarkable circular letter to British magistrates from Home Secretary Sir John Gilmour, who urged greater leniency from the bench toward debtors unable to pay.

Cited was an instance in which one of His Majesty's subjects was arrested last year "for using the wrong swing in a public park," sentenced to pay a fine, jailed when he proved penniless. In 1932, the latest year for which Sir John could cite statistics, one-half of all persons jailed in England and Wales were incarcerated for nonpayment.

The Commons:

P: Learned without dismay that the Mother of Parliaments will have spent $200,000 on her own history of herself in 40 volumes when it is completed in 1945 for the years 1264 to 1918.

The first three volumes will soon be off the press, announced Col. Josiah Wredgwood, Laborite Chairman of the Committee on House of Commons Records since 1929. The first volume will contain biographies of 2,600 "known" Britons who sat in both Houses between 1439 and 1509, many being unknown.

"Hitherto historians have tried to deal with Parliament solely from the institutional side," said Col. Wedgwood. "We have known nothing of the composition of Parliament. We are now agreed that the only way of throwing new light on the history of England and of Democracy is by determining who were the people who represented their country in Parliament.

"The compilation of the first volume has been extremely difficult. No printed works of reference dating from the period exist and the manuscript records in many cases are incomplete or missing. It is impossible, for example, to say with certainty who among the Bishops sat in Parliament, and it is known that many of the Peers were not summoned to sit when they belonged to the 'wrong party.' "

P: Rejected 424-to-79 a Labor motion censuring His Majesty's Government for their White Paper on strengthening the Empire's defenses (TIME, March 11 & 18).

Communists, Socialists and smartly dressed young women of Mayfair twice succeeded in showering the House last week with leaflets, shouting, "Tear up the White Paper! Not a penny for War!"

Since the White Paper offers to disarm with any large group of nations willing to disarm, and since it faces realistically the fact that all the Great Powers are arming, spokesmen for the National Government could and did defend it from whatever angle pleased them best.

"In it," said Lord President of the Council Stanley Baldwin, "a democratic government has told what it believes to be the truth to a democracy and I hope to show that some of the greatest perils to democracy have come because leaders have not had the courage to tell what they were."

P: Hear-heared as First Lord of the British Admiralty Sir Bolton Eyres-Monsell stated during the White Paper debate the terms on which His Majesty's Government desire a new World Naval Treaty:

1) No admission of Japan to naval parity with the U. S. and Britain.

2) Capital ships limited to 25,000 tons each and 12-in. guns.

3) Cruisers limited to 6,000 tons each and 6-in. guns.

4) Aircraft carriers limited to 22,000 tons each and 6-in. guns.

5) In anticipation that other powers will certainly reject Great Britain's perennial demand for abolition of the submarine, "We would desire drastic reduction of submarine tonnage."

P: Ho-hummed as statesmen of the Occident's Great Powers received an especially able dressing-down from Laborite Major Clement Attlee on the notorious collapse of their Oriental policy. Cried Major Attlee: "When the testing time of the League came with the Chino-Japanese dispute and Japan was determined the aggressor, the British Government and all the others defaulted on all their pledges. The covenant and the Pacific treaties and the Nine-Power Treaty became scraps of paper. Of course. China isn't one of those territories described in the White Paper as on the other side of the Channel, whose integrity is important to our safety, and therefore the pledges of those treaties can be disregarded. But this failure to make the League effective is the real cause why the world is in the condition it is today, and why everywhere there is talk of war and rearmament, whereas four years ago every one was talking of disarmament."

P: Sighed with preponderant but premature Conservative relief when the renegade Conservative Churchills, Father Winston and Son Randolph, failed in their second attempt to knife a Conservative bye-election candidate by running an Independent Conservative.

Last month at Wavertree. Son Randolph stood as the Independent, knifed the Conservative and threw the seat to Labor (TIME. Feb. 18). Last week the Churchillean knifer in Norwood, a London constituency, was a Mr. Richard Findlay, loudly supported by Son Randolph. Knifer Findlay polled only 2,698 votes, the regular Conservative. Mr. Duncan Sandys, winning the seat with 16,147.

The defeated Labor candidate, Mrs. Barbara Gould, rolled up 12,799 last week, whereas at Norwood in 1931 Labor polled 7,217 and the regular Conservative 30,851. Norwood voters were so apathetic last week that few more than half of them went to the polls, but the drift to Labor, now seen all over Britain, remained ominously clear.

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