S. AFRICAN CONSTITUTION

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 March 1934, Page 12

S. AFRICAN CONSTITUTION

POSITION OF THE KING

[BY CABLE——PEESS ASSN. —COPYEIGHT.]

CAPE TOWN, March 15.

The Statute Bill, which the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, General Hertzog, will shorlty introduce in the Union Parliament, will incorporate the Statute of Westminster and the various resolutions of the Imperial Conference of 1926 and of 1930 into the Statute law of the South African Union.

The Bill, it is understood, will clearly lay it down that the King must be the King of Great Britain and Ireland, who is to be declared the head of the Executive in the Union of South Africa, and declared to be acting in that capacity only upon the advice of his Ministers in the Union of South Africa.

The sundry clauses in the original Act of Union relating to power for tho reservation of Bills for the King’s assent, are repealed. This is in view of new constitutional practice, whereby His Majesty’s Ministers in England do not advise the King in the affairs of the Dominions. ALARMIST VIEW. LONDON, March 15. Under new Constitutional Bills .of General Hertzog’s South African Union Government, the King of England in future, is to be known merely as the King. Professor J. H. Morgan, a constitutional authority, discussing the Bills, recalls the Preamble of the Statute of Westminster. The Professor says that if General Hertzog’s proposal is intended to elevate the Dominion of South Africa into a separate kingdom that will be bound to England as Hanover was bound to her before the accession of Queen Victoria, by merely the dynastic tie, it is a revolutionary departure, and is unquestionably a step in the direction of the dissolution of the Empire. Moreover, he says, if the Dominion became a separate Kingdom, it might, like Hanover, be neutral in the time of a war when Britain was a belligerent.