BRITAIN AND FRANCE NEAR AGREEMENT

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18985, 3 February 1930, Page 1

BRITAIN AND FRANCE NEAR AGREEMENT

CONFERENCE CEASES , WORK UNTIL TUESDAY. (Received February 3, noon.) RUGBY, February 1. There will be no committee work during the week-end by the Naval Conference delegates. M. Tardieu is paying a short visit to Paris, where M. Briand preceded him yesterday. Signor Grandi and Count Wakatsuki are going to the seaside and Mr MacDonald is going to his official country residence, Chequers. The delegates will take much work them, including papers relating to the proposal whereby the British category and French global theories are correlated on this complicated and important problem. There is hope of a solution in Mr MacDonald’s optimistic statement that the partition dividing the French and British is so thin as to be almost transparent and this is borne out in French delegation circles. Britain is unlikely to accept the compromise proposal formally, however, until the views of other delegations at the conference have been defined and until the whole matter has been thrashed out in committee. The so-called First Committee has now been turned into a committee of all delegates and is in effect the conference sitting as a committee in private. The next such meeting as at present arranged takes place on Tuesday. The newspapers call attention to the significance of recent announcements regarding the reduction in the British naval construction programme for 1929-1930. It is reckoned that the naval tonnage which Britain would in the ordinary course have laid down in the current financial year has been reduced by nearly 30,000 tons or over 50 per cent This is regarded as an impressive iead to the conference, although some newspapers consider the cancellations excessive, particularly as they have been made without any effort to use such reductions as a bargain counter with other naval powers.