Word: macdonald
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...That the Cabinet of Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald hangs in fact by a thread, and may fall after the Christmas recess perhaps during the Five Power Naval Conference, was evident last week when the bill to reorganize Britain's pitifully depressed coal industry (TIME, Oct. 28) came up for its second reading. In no sense Communist or Radical, the bill epitomizes Scot MacDonald's own brand of "safe and sturdy Socialism." It provides: 1) shortening the miners' working day from eight hours to seven and one-half; 2) establishment of a "National Industrial Board...
Conservative attacks on the bill were led by famed Winston ("Winnie") Churchill, whilom Chancellor of the Exchequer, who enjoyed a piece of Scot MacDonald's birthday cake in New York last fall (TIME, Oct. 21). Last week Cake-giver MacDonald lashed out at Cake-eater Churchill: "You are making politics of this [coal bill] and nothing else. All your wit and polished phrases are for the sole purpose of forcing us to go to the country for another election. If you do we will beat...
...some of the worst and none of the best features of Socialism." The Clydeside Laborites, who want the Government to nationalize the coal industry and pay high wages (if necessary out of the taxpayers' pockets), were frankly furious. The vote which followed was the most important since the MacDonald Cabinet took office...
Thus the Government won by a humiliating majority of eight. The 14 Clydesiders, who are supposed to be Laborites (i. e. Socialists), showed their Communist colors by abstaining. All but two Liberals turned against Mr. MacDonald. And the only thing that saved his government from falling was the abstention of 32 of his avowed enemies, the Conservatives, who are afraid to risk a general election now while Scot MacDonald is in the heyday of his Hoover prestige...
Pacified and intrigued by such unanswerable "American arguments," the Deputies next day gave the Tardieu Government a vote of confidence, 331 to 167. Paradoxically, Tardieu the pseudo-American proclaimed later in the week a policy in regard to the Hoover-MacDonald Five Power Naval Conference which might prove obnoxious to many U. S. patriots. Quizzed at a joint session of the Chamber's Naval and Foreign Affairs Committees, the squarejawed, pugnacious Prime Minister rapped: "No final decision will be taken at the London Conference. It is merely preliminary to the Disarmament Conference of the League of Nations at Geneva...