HOUSE OF COMMONS

Evening Star, Issue 19533, 14 April 1927, Page 8

HOUSE OF COMMONS

■MINISTERS ANSWER QUESTIONS (British Official News.) Press Association—By Wireless—Copyright. LONDON, April 13. (Received April 14, at noon.) Asked in the House of Commons whether the Government intended to carry the Bill enfranchising women at the age of twenty-one into law sufficiently early to allow time “for the now voters to be put on the register by the , summer of 1928, Mr Baldwin replied that that was a rather difficult question to answer. If the life of Parliament lasted its normal length—namely, until the autumn of 1929 there would be no difficulty in the new voters being able to vote. The only case in which a new voter would be unable to vote would be in the event of an unexpected catastrophe bringing the life of the present Parliament to an end. Mr Baldwin said he hoped to close the present session at the end of July and to begin the new session in sufficient time before Christmas to enable one or two of the principal measures of that session to be read a second time before Christmas. Ho indicated that the Suffrage Bill would be one of these measures. Mr J. R. Clynes (Labor) asked the Prime Minister about the negotiations on disarmament at the Preparatory Commission at Geneva. The Prime Minister said he thought there would be little advantage in making a statement at that stage, particularly since the full reports of the proceedings had appeared in the Press. He assured Mr dynes that the British representative had been in constant communication with the Government at home, and the suggestions which he had made to the Government had had the greatest weight given to them; in fact, it was true to say that the concessions on important points had mostly come from the British side. Sir Austen Chamberlain was asked ahont the progress of the negotiations between Britain and the Sultan of Nejd. The Foreign Minister replied that those negotiations were in no way connected with the future of the holy places of Islam, that question being a matter purely of Moslem concern, ‘ in which it would be unfitting for His Majesty’s Government to intervene. Negotiations were temporarily suspended in. December in order that the British negotiator might return to London to consult His Majesty’s Government on certain points. An arrangement had now been made to resume them in the near future.