WORK FOR DISARMAMENT

Taranaki Daily News, 19 December 1933, Page 5

WORK FOR DISARMAMENT

ATTITUDE OF THE BRITISH

AGREEMENT AMONG STATES

FRENCH SECURITY DEMAND

GERMANY ASKS EQUALITY

British Wireless. Rugby, Dec. 16 The Disarmament Conference will continue to engage the closest attention of the British Ministers during the next few days. The British Government’s continued efforts to end the deadlock were referred to in a speech ’by Sir John Simon, Foreign Secretary, at Chester. He said that the withdrawal of Germany from Geneva had added greatly both to the complications ,and anxieties of the foreign situation. Last month the executive committee of the Disarmament Conference resolved that the work of the conference would at this stage best be assisted by parallel and supplementary efforts between the various States, with full the diplomatic machinery. The British Foreign Office had been at work ever since in accordance with the terms of that decision. ' The object was not to make an isolated pronouncement or produce a noble gesture but to secure, if possible, an agreement between a number of No Government could by its own single declaration produce a solution of the disarmament problem. Britain had gone a long way in reducing armaments, and he often wondered .if her own isolated action really made disarmament easier to-day. Again, no machinery could by itself alter the fundamental difficulties of the situation. The gravest and most stubborn of those difficulties, at any rate so far as Europe was concerned, consisted in the divergent points of view of France and Germany. The French demand was for security and the German demand for equality. Reconciliation of those two points of view had been the greatest difficulty since the conference began.