The speech of Mr. Neville Chamberlain fell below the standard
of his actual proposals. It was ponderous and undistinguished, and at times oddly irrelevant. For instance, he suddenly broke into a soliloquy about the dangers of the declining birthrate. Seeing that all he was proposing was to raise the Income Tax allowance for all children from £40 to the £50 now allotted for the first child, the grandiloquence of his preface seemed slightly ludicrous. In any case there is tragically little justification for pleading for a larger population when for four weary years unemployment has not once fallen below the two million mark. There was also Mr. Chamberlain's curious reference to Mr. Hore-Belisha. It was surely unpre- cedented for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, when describing how he was proposing to use the surplus revenue from another department, to declare that the Minister had parted with the money " with considerable reluctance." I am assured that the explanation was that Mr. Chamberlain was " joking with difficulty," but Mr. Hore-Belisha sitting near him on the Treasury Bench found himself quite unable to produce a smile.
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