Beamish Budget

Such a power in British politics is stern, hawk-featured Neville Chamberlain, Chancellor of the Exchequer, that the House of Commons received him and his 1935-36 budget with cheers this week after his un-English hamstringing of the Prime Minister and Sir John Simon while they were away at Stresa (see p. 19).

Ramsay MacDonald, arriving home by airplane, was in time to be ignored by the house while every eager eye followed the tall Chancellor's stork-like dipping into his notes, the swift gestures of his right hand in which he held his eyeglasses and the Chamberlain mannerism of emphasizing a point by tapping smartly with the twinkling glasses.

It was a beamish budget.

So exhilarated was the Chancellor that he said to a friend three nights before, "I am up to my eyes in my surplus and I simply don't know what to do with it." Had he applied it to Britain's overdue War debt to the U. S. there would have been no surplus but a substantial deficit. Instead the Chancellor geared his -L-729,970,000 ($3,540,354,500) budget to bemuse Britain's electorate into sensations of overflowing plenty. If this works, the Conservative Party may be able to win a general election and five more years of power. "Last year," cried the Chancellor, in his at times lyric budget speech, "the people of this country sweetened their lives with 80,000 more tons of sugar, smoked 6,500,000 more pounds of tobacco and washed away their troubles with 270,000,000 pints of beer!" Beamishly Mr. Chamberlain announced, and as his words were uttered they instantly became effective throughout Great Britain, that the nuisance tax on cheap cinema seats is no more, pay raises go to the Army, the Navy and the Civil Service, the tax on the first -L-135 ($675) of lower-bracket incomes is cut from two shillings threepence to one and sixpence in the pound, exemptions for additional children are raised and taxes go up only on things like "heavy oil." In fine Chamberlain fettle, the Chancellor closed his budget amid laughter and cheers. "I do not claim that our methods are better than those of other countries," he exclaimed with English modesty, "but it does not seem unpardonable to point out that nowhere else can you find a parallel to the results achieved here!"

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