BRITISH POLITICS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 823, 7 April 1910, Page 3

BRITISH POLITICS.

London, April 5

Mr T. P. Ci’Connor cabled to the New York Times that the Irish were ready to swallow nearly everything in the Budget in order to keep the Government together, but a section of the Cabinet was seeking to conhise the issue over the House of Lords. They were equally ready to discredit Mr Lloyd-George, whose Budget and personality were equally disliked.

Mr O’Brien states that Messrs Redmond and billon relused to join Mr Healy and himself in an interview with Mr Lloyd-George, in consequence of which Ireland lost a million sterling per annum. He advised the Government to omit Ireland from the Budget and defy Mr Redmond to oust them from office upon the. pettifogging point of giving precedence to the question of the veto. Speaking in the House of Commons, the Premier denied having promised the Nationalists any kind of concession in the Budget. In the House of Commons the Hon. Alfred Lyttelton administered a slinging rebuke to the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill for his ungenerous and unseemly fashion of imputing to the King a policy which the King was unable to deny. The fact was that there was not a shadow of foundation for Mr Churchill’s suggestion of an alliance between the Radicals and the Throne. In the Democratic Constitution granted to Australia the rights of the second Chamber were recognised. Only last year when the Government was so conscious ol its necessity that it imposed a Second Chamber with the right to reject money Bills upon South Africa. Colonel Seeley, in replying, sail the Government had not imposed, but South Africa herself had proposed the Second Chamber. Had the Government attempted to set up a Second Chamber resembling the House ot Lords no self-governing Colony would have endured it and no Colony would give power to a Chamber based on the hereditary principle. If the House of Commons submitted to the Lords’ pretentious the self-governing Dominions would think the English people not lit to manage their own affairs.

Mr Gibson Bowles sharply' criticised the resolutions.

Mr Bonar Daws made a telling summing up for the Opposition. Mr Iffoyd-George concluded the debate, and declared that it would be better that the Liberals should be out of office a decade than longer submit to the House ot Lords mutilating the Bill. If the people reallj’ wished for revolutionary measures, the Lords' veto was as useless as the King’s veto during the French revolution. Mr Finlay’s amendment was rejected, and Mr Asquith’s motion agreed to by 35S to 252,