The Week in Parliament Our Parliamentary Correspondent. writes : Tuesday
was a day of contrasts. At question time the dockyard disMissals raised a storm. No one indeed challenged the validity of Sir Samuel Hoare's contention that it was impossible to state the reasons publicly, and that in the interests of the security of the State it was also impossible to hold a public inquiry. But this did not. allay the feeling, which was by no means confined to one side of the House, that the men concerned should at least have been informed of the nature of the charges against them and given :n► opportunity of making their defence. After Mr. Attlee had announced that he would raise the matter again, the House passed to a somewhat dreary debate on Empire migration arising out of the continuance of the Empire Settlement Act. 1922. It was a topic that failed to enthuse. even though Sir Henry Page Croft and Mr. Annesley Somerville were almost dithyrambic about the great empty spaces waiting to be populated. From the Labour benches Mr. Aneurin Bevan urged that the ease for migration was destroyed by recently-published calculations about the falling birth-rate. In sixty years our population would have shrunk to a mere 14.000,000. Why fill empty spaces in Canada in order to create then► in Great Britain ?
Previous page
