WAR DEBTS

Hawera Star, Volume XLIX, 5 September 1929, Page 5

WAR DEBTS

THE HAGUE SETTLEMENT. PRINCIPLE OF BALFOUR NOTE. OPINION OF EX-CHANCELLOR. (Australian Press Association—Unitea Service.; VANCOUVER, Sept. 3. Air Winston Churchill, ex-Chancel-lor of the British Exchequer, declared in a speech here to-day that The Hague agreement and, the Young plan impaired the principle of the Balfour Note, and that the' time had arrived for a restatement of the British position on war debts on terms more favourable to Great Britain. “We can no longer say,” Air Churchill remarked, “that wo are obtaining ais much from Europe, including arrears, a, s the United States is receiving from us.”

Air Churchill referred especially to the repudiated Russian debt which,, he said, France and Italy should be asked to agree was outside the “self-denying limitations of the Balfour Note.’’ He regarded the Russian debt as not impossible of collection if Russia re-dons the “garb of civilisation” in the next ten or fifteen years. Air Churchill warned the present British Government that the outbreak in Palestine was “only a bloody foretaste” of what would happen in Egypt and India if the .protecting and guiding hand of Great Britain was withdrawn. He had no doubt the dismissal of Lord Lloyd and the proposal of the Labour Government to clear the British garrison out of Cairo and Alexandria was taken as a sign of weakness by the Arabs in Palestine.

Air Churchill thought a very satisfactory conclusion had been reached by The Hague conference. No British Government could have accepted the Young plan as it, stood. FT© believed Mr Snowden was right in his stubborn resistance and in his final concession.