23 JUNE 1939, Page 6

I have never had much sympathy for the critics who

com- plained that the B.B.C. in its news bulletins on Saturdays and Sundays give undue publicity to the speeches of Opposition leaders, because the Labour Party, much more than the Conservative or Liberal, devotes the week-end to platform speeches. But anyone who listened last Sunday evening to the report of a speech by Miss Ellen Wilkinson, marked, if the summary did it justice, more by vehemence than by illumination, must have felt considerable perplexity about the grounds for its inclusion. Concerned lest my own judgement should be at fault, I examined the London papers on Monday morning to see what their estimate of the speech was. So far as I could discover, not one of them had given a line of it—not even the Daily Herald. (The Daily Worker, I admit I did not see.) What secured it a place in the brief Sunday night bulletin?

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