The Week in Parliament Our Parliamentary Correspondent writes : As
was to be expected, the Budget debates so far have produced so little criticism that Mr. Chamberlain, in winding up the general discussion last Thursday, found little to which to reply. The most effective comment came from Sir Robert Horne, who has the impressive trick of speaking entirely without notes. He made a very strong case for the application of the 1933-84 surplus to repayment of part of the debt of the Unemployment Insurance Fund, and Mr. Chamberlain's reply did not dispel the impression that the only argument for its use to repay ordinary debt is the pedantic satisfaction of having repaid last year as much as was borrowed the year before. Apart from this question, the voice of the expansionists was stilled ; and it was rather academic of the Labour Party to explain what they would do with surpluses, when everyone knows they would not have had a surplus at all. Mr. D. R. Grenfell did the best he could- with the unconvincing case that nothing substantial had been done for the unemployed, but the Opposition badly needs effective Parliamen- tarians.
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