Speech

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, enthroned in the House of Lords, sat with lowered eyes and attentive mien last week while His Majesty King George notably triumphed over his speech impediment, read off without a single mispronounced word and with few hesitations the Speech from the Throne, thus opened the first Parliament of the new reign. The 18-minute speech, composed as usual by the Cabinet, promised that His Majesty's Government will: press on with Rearmament; speed air raid precautions; inaugurate penal law reforms; regulate the coal mining, electric power, milk and whitefish industries ; combat stock frauds; add judges to unjam the divorce courts; publicize the health services; expand housing; regulate the working conditions of truck drivers and raise the efficiency of the United Kingdom's fire brigades.

King George confirmed that the King of the Belgians will pay him a State visit in November, announced that King Carol of Rumania had been invited to pay him a State visit next spring. "I am looking forward with interest and pleasure" said His Majesty "to the time when it will be possible for me to visit my Indian Empire. ... I pray that under the blessing of Almighty God the outcome of your deliberations may advance the happiness and well-being of my people and the peace of the world."

"Yellows!" The British General Election held in the Jubilee Year of the late George V gave such a huge majority to what is now the Cabinet of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (bedded by gout while the King was reading his speech) that His Majesty's Loyal Opposition knew they could make no effective attack last week, proceeded to vituperate.

According to Labor speakers, the Speech from the Throne was a "cowardly" desertion of the League of Nations, and this desertion has been "progressive" in each Speech from the Throne for several years, thus:

1934 King George V: "They (the Government) will continue to make support and extension of the authority of the League of Nations a cardinal point in their policy."

1935 King George V: "My Government's foreign policy will as heretofore be based on firm support of the League of Nations."

1936 King Edward VIII: "The policy of the Government continues to be based on membership in the League of Nations."

1937 King George VI: No mention of the League of Nations last week.

In laboring this, their major point, Labor orators failed to show last week the zest and punch of that fine old vituperator, David Lloyd George. Once more, the fiery Welshman wagged his forefinger in the faces of members of the Cabinet, calling them "Yellows!" "The London Committee on Spanish Non-Intervention" (see p. 21), shouted Orator Lloyd George, shaking his hoary, tousled head, "is the basest fraud ever perpetrated by great nations on a weak people!"

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