The Week in Parliament Our Parliamentary Correspondent writes ; The
debate on air expansion in the House of Lords was extremely disappointing, both attack and defence appearing to be perfunctory. Any competent journalist could have written Lord Ponsonby's attack upon rearmament before it was delivered, and the same is true of Lord London- derry's explanation of how relatively small our present Air Force is. For the critics, Lord Reading made the soundest point that the announcement of expansion was inconceivably inopportune, in view of the new hopes of strengthening the peace machinery held out by M. Barthou's visit. Lord Cecil's amazement at the Govern- ment's action before the Disarmament Conference had ended was also transparently sincere. The proper answer to these and other criticisms would, of course, have been to point out that the Government's announce- ment was purely provisional, and an attempt to galvanize the nations into a limitation of air armaments, including the suspected crypto-armaments of Germany. Lord Londonderry, however, preferred to give chief place to the arguments about how good we have been, and about how necessary is something called " parity " in the air. The only result of the debate was to show that attack next week in the Commons will not be all on one side.
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