DISARMAMENT DEBATE

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 113, 9 November 1933, Page 11

DISARMAMENT DEBATE

SIGNIFICANT FEATURE

SUPPORT FOR LOCARNO

AGAINST ISOLATION

(British Official Wireless.) (Received November 9, 11 a.m.) RUGBY, November 8.

One significant feature of last night's disarmament debate in the House of Commons was that every party leader who spoke supported Sir John Simon's declaration that Britain would stand by the Locarno Treaty, while no one found anything favourable to say for the policy of isolation. The sense of the House bore out fully the Foreign Secretary's expressed conviction that the whole country, irrespective of party, desired above all the avoidance of the (process of re-armament, either at home or anywhere abroad, and that the nation, without any qualification, were believers and upholders of the League of Nations as the best available instrument of peace.

Particular interest attached to the remarks of Sir Austen Chamberlain upon the Locarno Treaty, with the conclusion of which he, as Foreign Secretary at the time, was so closely identified. Sir Austen said: "It is ■my firm conviction that as the signature .of Locarno did give immediate relief to the,tension of the preceding year, so it is just as we are loyal to Locarno and maintain it that we can hope for better things and a relaxation of present tension. If the key of peace can be said to be in the keeping of any one nation, it is in our hands, and that knowledge of our loyalty—knowledge not untested and not unproved—the loyalty of this country to its engagements, is the firm rock on which alone you can ever hope to build the reconciliation of France and Germany and to establish a stable peace of the Continent of Europe." In concluding the debate, Mr. Anthony Eden said that, although the last disarmament negotiations had failed, they had got to try again, if only because agreement was the only alternative to an armaments race.

Remarking that the policy of isolation had been largely featured in the debate, he said that the world was too close in these days for any country to afford such a luxury. That was one of the reasons why the departure of Germany from the Conference was regretted, for they wanted to work in friendship with Germany as well as with other nations. He hoped that-it would not be long before Germany's two years' notice of resignation from the League was withdrawn.