21 AUGUST 1920, Page 3

Several papers on Thursday published a series of wireless communications

between Tchiteherin and Litvinoff relating to Russian transactions with Mr. Lansbury of the Daily Herald. We have written on the whole subject elsewhere and need not repeat the facts here. But we wish to make two or three additional comments. In the first place, we should like to know why the information was conveyed casually to newspapers instead of being formally given to Parliament, which had a right to hear it. To judge from the dates of the wireless com- munications, they must have been in the possession of the Government for some time. Owing to the present relations between Labour and Russia the facts are specially important, and they would have produced a far greater effect if they had been announced in Parliament. What, we wonder, would Mr. Clynes and Mr. Thomas have said in face of such a revelation ? Their halting apologia for their association with the British Soviet would have been.,demolished.