SPAIN AGAIN DEBATED

Southland Times, Issue 23544, 25 June 1938, Page 7

SPAIN AGAIN DEBATED

REBEL BOMBING OF SHIPS

BRITAIN REFUSES TO CHANGE POLICY

OPPOSITION’S DEMAND FOR ACTION REITERATED

(British Official Wireless) (Received June 24, 6.30 p.m.) RUGBY, June 23.

After a scene in the House of Commons the Speaker granted leave to the House to debate the bombing of British ships in Spanish waters. It is significant that the debate was forced by two Conservatives, Mr Duncan Sandys and Captain Sir Walter Brass, .supported by Mr David Lloyd George (Liberal) and all the Labour members. The debate resulted from an answer by the Prime Minister (Mr Neville Chamberlain) .to a private notice of question from Mr Sandys, who is a son-in-law of Mr Winston Churchill. Mr Chamberlain, after outlining the attacks on the Thorpeness and the Greek ship Sunion, said that the Government was asking the rebel authorities at Burgos for an early explanation of these attacks.

Mr Sandys then asked: “Does the Prime Minister realize that the failure of Britain to offer any resistance to these unlawful acts of violence is an encouragement to law-breakers not only in Spain but all over the world?” Mr Chamberlain replied: “The policy and position of Britain has been fully explained.” The Leader of the Labour Opposition (Major C. R. Attlee) and Mr Lloyd George joined in supplementary questions and finally Major Attlee announced that he would move an adjournment. OBSERVERS ON BOARD Moving the adjournment, Major Attlee said there was no doubt at all that these ships were engaged in perfectly legitimate trade. They had non-intervention observers on board—in one case a Frenchman and in the other a German. The attacks were delivered at a low altitude and therefore must have been deliberate.

This followed a long series of other attacks on British ships and the latest British protest at Burgos, said Major Attlee, yet the Prime Minister declared that nothing could be done. Major Attlee claimed that this was really an extraordinary position if the powerful British Navy could not assure protection or exact immunity for British shipping from General Franco, whose naval forces were relatively negligible. Major Attlee recalled that Mr Chamberlain had insisted that the attacks must be regarded as made by aeroplanes and pilots under the control of General Franco, and argued that in that case the position was simplified, for if the Government took action no complications, he inferred, could arise with any other Power—least of all, he suggested, with any other Power represented on the , Non-Intervention Committee, which must share the British feelings about these attacks on merchant ships operating within the provisions of the non-intervention system and under the surveillance of the Non-Intervention Board’s officers.

A British ship was as much part of British territory as Gibraltar, and a British sailor just as much a British subject as any other person, said Major Attlee. The Prime Minister must be more specific if he wanted the House to believe that he could not defend them.

Mr Chamberlain in reply announced that the British Government had instructed the British agent at Burgos (Sir Robert Hodgson) to ask that an explanation of these latest attacks be given without delay, and had directed him to return to London as soon as he received a reply so that the Government might consider, in consultation with him, the situation which would result from the terms of the answer received. The Government, however, was not going to change its policy. It ha 1 already proclaimed that the motive of that policy was not a preconceived id? in favour of one side or the other in the Spanish civil war but the will to preserve the greatest of British interests—peace. INTERRUPTERS EJECTED All through the object of the nonintervention policy had been to avoid what the Government conceived to be the inevitable result of intervention—the spread of the conflict beyond the borders of Spain until it became a European conflagration. Once a warlike action started, whether against General Franco or against some other objective, who could tell that the operation would end- there? Mr Chamberlain asked whether it was claimed that the country should go to war or take action which might conceivably involve it in war to give protection to people who had gone in for the purposes of making profits in this risky trade in spite of the warnings given by the Government. Mr Chamberlain twitted the Opposition with a new-found enthusiasm for the defence of British rights and property, and expressed doubt if its motives were entirely unmixed. He charged it with really desiring to see intervention on the side of the Spanish Government, and when Major Attlee intervened and asserted that the Labour movement had accepted the non-inter-vention policy until it had been shown to be absolutely one-sided, Mr Chamberlain said that if any of the opposition were still for non-intervention it behoved them not to be diverted from it by any provocation. The Prime Minister was subjected to considerable interruption from _ the Opposition benches, and at one point in his speech interrupters had to be ejected from the public gallery.

SHIPS’ MASTERS SEE PRIME MINISTER

INTERVIEW AT HOUSE OF COMMONS (British Official Wireless) RUGBY, June 23. Two masters, Captain Llewellyn and Captain Jones, whose ships were among those which have been attacked by aeroplanes in Spanish waters, were received by the Prime Minister (Mr Neville Chamberlain) in his room at the House of Commons immediately after the end of questions in the House. The British destroyer Isis is convoying the crews of the Thorpeness and the Sunion to Marseilles. Confirmation has been received in

London of the African Trader incident, in which an insurgent aeroplane circled over the vessel, a British merchantman, off the east coast of Spain and ordered her by wireless to go to Palma, the capital of Majorca. In reply to an S O S the British destroyer Imogen raced to protect the ship, which she afterwards escorted to Gibraltar.