COMMONS DEBATE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 April 1939, Page 6

COMMONS DEBATE

LIBERAL AND LABOUR VIEWS DIFFERENCES OVER METHOD. MR CHURCHILL ON NAZI MENACE. (Received This Day, 1.20 p.m.) LONDON.. April 27. In the House of Commons, Sir A. Sinclair, moving the Liberal amendment, stressed the unity of all parties on the subject of defence and said differences related only to method. Mr Winston Churchill said we must be careful hot to fall in the common cause. Parliament had accepted a new policy to build up a defensive bloc, pledged to resist further Nazi aggression, in pursuance of which we had made a series of tremendous and staggering commitments, which all parties had approved. This policy might easily be injured if the Government had not taken the latest step. ■He added: "We pay far too much attention to Hitler’s speeches and too little study to the marshalling of his forces and spread of his authority.” .Mr Churchill expressed the opinion that the conscription plan was somewhat small and urged that more classes should be called up. He declared that the main resistance to the Nazi dictatorship came from the mass of the people. We had reached a point when gestures were not enough. We wanted not only gestures, but an Army, and that quite soon. There had been a war going on for nearly three years which we had been losing. Commander Wedgwood said that whatever the result in the Lobbies that night, the country would remain united. The difficulty was that it was badly led.. Compulsion would not strengthen the defences one iota within six months.

Mr A. Duff-Cooper, who had just returned from Paris, described 'the effect of the new British policy as electric in France, Where there had been for many weeks an intense anti* British campaign.

Mr Arthur Greenwood, winding up for Labour, said the Prime Minister had ho right to put the country in pawn because he had made commit* ments to three countries Who would never want one division of British infantry. "Indeed,” he said, ‘‘we could not get it there. The British Labour movement is not going to sacrifice freedom at the dictates of totalitarian states, but warns potential aggressors that it will keep its freedom and that it will fight for what it has won.”