BRITAIN’S EFFORTS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 299, 19 December 1933, Page 7

BRITAIN’S EFFORTS

SIR J. SIMON’S STATEMENT 1 British Offic:a Wireless, j RUGBY, Dec. 16. The Disarmament Conference will continue to engage the closest attention of 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 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 had resolved that the work of the conference would at this stage best be assisted by parallel and supplementary efforts between the various States with the full use of diplomatic machinery. Th e 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. The object was to get, if possible, an agreement between a great number of States. 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 between France and Germany. The French demand was for security and the German demand was for equality. Reconciliation of those two points of view had been the greatest difficulty since the conference began.