SERIOUS ALLEGATIONS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 117, 17 April 1934, Page 2

SERIOUS ALLEGATIONS

3.45 P.M. EDITION

BREACH OF PRIVILEGE. (United Press Association —By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.) Received April 17, 2 p.m. LONDON, April 16. Mr Winston Churchill’s allegations in the House of Commons, that the series of negotiations with the Indian section of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce amounted to pressure being brought to bear upon them to procure a fundamental alteration in the evidence already submitted to the Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, will be investigated by a Committee of Privileges including Mr Ramsay MacDonald, Major Attlee, Sir Thomas Inskip, Mr Stanley Baldwin, Lord Hugh Cecil, Sir Austen Chamberlain and Sir A. M. Samuel. The Committee, which will sit in private, will meet immediately. Apparently there is no precedent for a Committee of Privileges dealing with allegations against a Cabinet Minister. Mr Churchill contended that full indication of the character of evidence'of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce representatives had reached Sir Samuel Hoare early in June. A dinner was held at Lord Derby’s house on June 27 at which Sir Samuel Hoare and two other Ministers were present. This was tho beginning of a long series of negotiations amounting to pressure on the Chamber of Commerce representatives, whose new statement, submitted in November, was a mere ghost of the original evidence, a poor, shrunken, emasculated thing. Though no malice or corruption was imputed, there was irregularity and impropriety enough to constitute a flagrant breach. Sir Samuel Hoare said he did not see the first Manchester memorandum until July 7, when he thought some passages would not facilitate a settlement. His efforts to obtain a modification had failed. It was only four months later, on the suggestion of the Lancashire delegation then in India, that the modification was made.

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