IN HOUSE OF COMMONS

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 23, 27 July 1945, Page 8

IN HOUSE OF COMMONS

Former Wellisgtonian (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright.) Rec. noon. LONDON, July 26. An election sidelight is that the Dominion is now "represented" in the House of Commons by the former Rhodes Scholar Mr. John Platts-Mills, of Wellington, who won by a handsome majority for Labour at Finsbury. Captain R. Lowndes, another New Zealander, was defeated in what had been consid.. Ed as a safe Conservative seat at Clapham. mittee, said he thought it would cause considerable uncertainty in international relations. Senator Aiken, a .Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee, predicted vast repercussions in India, and also said the Labour Government would not be so anxious to restore the Italian King. Representative Rankin (Democrat) saw Mr. Churchill's defeat as a Communist trend. He declared that it should be a warning to the American people, and added: "I am disappointed. Churchill is a great man and a great servant of his country in a time of crisis. His defeat is distressing." Mr. William Green, president of the American Federation of Labour, said that the Labour victory must be interpreted as the outcome of the British workers' insistent desire for higher living standards and greater economic security. The results should not be viewed as a repudiation of Mr. Churchill's brilliant war leadership, but rather as a rejection of the Conservative Party's stand-pat domestic policies. The mine workers' journal, in an editorial on June 1, said that the British Labour Party did not want to win this election, recalling that Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald's Government carried the onus of the reconversion difficulties after the last war. The Japanese Saigon radio described Mr. Churchill's defeat as his deathblow,'and added: "The most interesting new? is that it has freed India of her arch-enemy, Amery, the high priest of British imperialism." All Canadian political circles expressed surprise at the result. A Government spokesman raid that the British elections had been fought largely on domestic issues. Labour and the Conservatives were pretty well in agreement on foreign policies and in-ter-imperial relations. Mr. Sidney Hillman, chairman of the C.1.0. Political Action Committee, said: "The British election is an occasion for rejoicing by liberal and progressive forces everywhere." The American Zionist Emergency Council stated: "The Labour victory gives hope that the intolerable regime in Palestine will now end."