Parliament's Week

The Commons

P: Marveled at the silence of female M. P.'s after Minister of Unemployment James Henry ("Privy Seal Jim") Thomas had challengingly declared: "It is against the nation's interests for women to work for what they call 'pin money' and thus deprive other people of their legitimate work and livelihood. . . . Legislation cannot cure this evil. It is a question of moral responsibility."

Rebuttal came neither from Lady Nancy Astor M. P. (Conservative) nor from Margaret ("St. Maggie") Bondfield M. P. (Laborite), but from Britain's biggest businesswoman, Viscountess Rhondda. the "Coal Queen of Wales," Directress of Cambrian Colleries Ltd.; a peeress in her own right and therefore ineligible to sit in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords.*

"Everyone either works or is kept by someone else!" snapped Lady Rhondda in a statement to reporters. "It is strange that Mr. Thomas, a Socialist, should be advocating idleness for any section of the community. It is ridiculous to say that it is against the interests of the nation for women to work. ... Is it fair to expect a father to support a family of grown up daughters?"

"We think the Thomas statement is simply scandalous!" chirped pretty Miss Florence Underwood, Secretary of the British Women's Freedom League. "Like the old Adam, he is just trying to blame women for everything, even unemployment."

This appeared perilously near truth. As Minister of Unemployment. "Privy Seal Jim" can point to few achievements. Last week he parried 15 specific questions in the House as to what if anything he is doing to find work for Britain's 1,295,000 unemployed, with the statement: "I am exploring every avenue."

P: Booming, bumbling Tom Shaw, one-time weaver, now War Minister, made the Parliamentary bloomer of the week. Trespassing on the fiscal preserves of Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden without Cabinet authority, and possibly without knowing what he was doing. Right Honorable Tom blandly remarked that holders of British War Bonds are receiving too high a rate of interest: "They are getting $500,000,000 a year to which they have not the slightest moral right! . . . That is a fact that has got to be faced before this country can be put on its feet again."

Instantly the Commons was in such pandemonium as might be caused in Congress by barely hinting that the U. S. cannot prosper without cutting the interest rate on Liberty Bonds. "Explain! Explain!" roared Conservatives at pallid, crippled Chancellor Snowden; but for two whole days he maintained impassive silence. Horrid inference: the avowedly Socialist Labor Cabinet harbors hopes of someday tampering even with sacrosanct War Bonds.

Eventually Mr. Snowden found a suave formula for explanation: "A condition of all government loans is that the government has the option of redemption at specified dates, and naturally it will take advantage, in the interest of the taxpayers, of any favorable opportunity for redeeming the loans or converting them to a lower rate of interest."

P: For the first time since the MacDonald Cabinet came in last June, mercurial Welshman David Lloyd George led his Liberals into opposition. Had they all followed him, and had all members of the House been present, the Labor Government would have been defeated. Prominent Liberals who did not follow their leader included Sir Walter Runciman, potent shipowner, Ian MacPherson, onetime Minister of Pensions (1920-22) and Sir Donald Maclean, late Chairman of the Liberal Party (1919-20). The issue: messenger boys.

At the last election Liberals made a special and successful appeal for the votes of small shopkeepers--butchers, bakers, grocers--the class which employs gangling, pimply youths to run errands. Such employers see no sense in that clause of the Laborite Unemployment Insurance Bill which would give out-of-work errand boys over 18 a "dole" of $3.36 per week (TIME. Nov. 25). Many of them work today for a wage almost as low. If the bill passes, small tradesmen fear that boys who might otherwise run cheap will either stay home or charge double. Therefore last week David Lloyd George, the War Prime Minister of Britain, the onetime equal of Wilson and Clemenceau, rushed into the opposition lobby with Conservative Leader Stanley Baldwin to please butchers and bakers, left Laborite Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in a precarious fix. Cried gleeful Conservatives: "Baldwin and Lloyd George are going to fix up a new Cabinet!"

Nose-counting quelled the glee. So many Conservatives chanced to be absent, and so many Liberals refused to follow Mr. Lloyd George that the opposition rolled up only 167 votes to the Government's 237. Normally, of course, the MacDonald Laborites and the Lloyd George Liberals stand together in a coalition of 347, opposed by Conservatives numbering 262.

*As editress in her spare moments of Time & Tide--"The Review with Independent Views on Politics, Literature and Art," she often but vainly asserts her right to the seat in the House of Lords once held by her father, from whom she inherited her title.

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