— Portrait or the Week— MR. MACMILLAN arrived in Salisbury
and appeared at a public meeting with Sir Roy Welensky. He was generally regarded as having explained .away for Sir Roy's benefit the reassurances he had given in his Lagos speech to the people of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, in a speech described as 'a masterpiece of non-commitment' by The Times, a good judge of masterpieces of non-commitment. More people were killed in renewed anti-tax riots in Uganda. The Kenya Constitutional Con- ference in London became M boycotted, bogged down and bewildered. The London talks on Cyprus were adjourned, and the transfer of sovereignty postponed. The Canadian Government announced its intention of amending the Canadian constitu- tion without reference to Westminster, and the South African Government approved the issue of a five-shilling piece to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Union—without the Queen's head, but still, with unexpected magnanimity, called a 'crown.'
AUTOMATION came even more fully into its own : Mr. Khrushchev announced a cut of one-third in the Soviet Union's conventional forces. pointing out that the country's defence needs were more than adequately met by her rocket-nuclear arms and 'a fantastic weapon' now being deVised. The Soviet Union agreed to finance the second stage, as it had the first, of-Egypt's Aswan High Dam, to the tune of some £400 million; did a price- maintenance deal in diamonds with the Diamond Corporation of South Africa; and arranged to sell its lvtoskvitch and Volga ,motor-cars in Britain, thus making it possible for the Joneses to keep up with the Ivanovitches.
Ent AM:NAILER hit upon a happy German solution to an unhappy•German problem when he broad- cast his advice that Germans who caught other Germans writing rude words on walls should give them a good old German beating-up. The United States signed a treaty committing it to the defence of Japan, and Britain an agreement with Spain that will entitle us to share in all the benefits of Spanish atomic research. Belgium brought forward the proposed date for Congo's independence, Which was just as well, the Congolese nationalist movement having bound its men not to shave and its women not to let their hair down until it was granted. President de Gaulle summoned General Massa to Paris to explain his mutinous-sounding tough talk in Algeria; Mr. Sean Lemass said that the horrors of the Irish horse-trade had been exaggerated; and Mr. John Beresford Hatch pro- posed ' that the Massachusetts. House of Repre- sentatives should petition Congress to appeal to Queen Elizabeth Il to reverse the sentences passed by an English court at the Salem witchcraft trials in 1693.
111E NATIONAL UNION OF RAILWAYMEN asked for more money now. A strike of 300 men at a radiator factory stopped work for 3,500 workers at the BMC works at Cowley. Back to work went Most of the two thousand mealy mouths who had downed tools because a foreman used a naughty Word. Every British newspaper printed a great deal about the strike; none reported what the word was. A joke on Panorama about stock-market slumps led to a widespread list of falls in share prices on the London Stock Exchange. The Daily Mail head- line. 'Lord Reith takes over the State,' turned out 10 have commercial, not constitutional. signifi- cance: he had joined the board of the State Building Society. The Court of Criminal Appeal quashed the conviction of three men found guilty after Mr. Justice Stable had told a jury to get a move on. Sir John Hunt ceremonially opened the first of eighty cinemas to be converted to Ameri- ean-style skittle alleys. The election of Mr. George Murray, leader-writer of the Daily Mail, as chair- nlan of the Press Council, was hailed as a wise ,ehoice by the Daily Express, pointing out that he 'a firm Tory and a stalwart believer in Britain and her Empire.'
Previous page
