RUSSIAN IN COMMONS

Press, Volume CI, Issue 30004, 13 December 1962, Page 12

RUSSIAN IN COMMONS

“Unforgettable Picture" (N.ZP.A -Reuter—Copyright) LONDON. A description of Britain’s House of Commons at work and of members of Parliament “sleeping, yes, sleeping, snoring away and smacking their lips in their dreams,” was broadcast over Moscow Radio by the radio's London correspondent, Mr Genrig Trofimenko, after his first visit to the Palace of Westminster.

Mr Trofimenko, whose comments are published in the “Daily Telegraph,” said that a stranger looking down from the visitors' gallery would gain an unforgettable picture—“a picture, I venture to bet, will stay in your memory for ever and ever. It is a picture of some 20 or 30 people languidly lounging in picturesque poses, engaged in some private talks of their own, or else sleeping reclined on leather-covered benches. In this setting someone will be standing up tediously speech-making on a subject which obviously is of absolutely no interest to the others.

“The bewildered visitor will be asking himself is this Parliament? Surely not. The members of Parliament are otherwise engaged. They are working, they are entertaining important personages for dinner in the lobbies or else they are busy signing cheques, concluding contracts for the sale of concrete, or the purchase of copper, at personal chambers somewhere close to Parliament,” said the commentator.