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In the King's Speech the Government of the day may state their program, but they need not state it in detail, and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin saw no reason to divulge anything to the Empire last week. It was already known that the main business of His Majesty's Government, following their victory in the general election, is to push British Rearmament, and this the King's Speech announced as "urgently necessary."
Pendulum v. River. Lest Britain's ruling class be lulled into false security by the National Government's election victory, good for another five years, The Illustrated London News made graphically the point that since 1900 the Labor or Socialist vote has grown in the United Kingdom from a trickle to a stream to a great river. This illustration (see cut) was meant to correct the comfortable error of many Britons who are wont to speak of "the pendulum" of votes swinging alternately to Right and Left but always tending to subside in the Middle. This error is fostered by the British polling system which traditionally operates to keep the distribution of M. P.'s in the House of Commons grossly disproportionate to the distribution of the popular vote. Example: in 1931 Conservatives won 472 seats in the House of Commons by winning some 11,900,000 votes but the 6,600,000 votes won by Labor returned only 52 Labor M. P.'s. In the general election just held Labor won 8,700,000 votes to Conservatism's 10,400,000 but Labor Leader Major Clement Attlee now leads a House of Commons group of only 154 while 385 Conservatives sit with the industrial squire who was full-paged by The Illustrated London News with this resounding caption: THE TRUSTED HEAD OF A SOUND GOVERNMENT: THE RT. HON. STANLEY BALDWIN, THE PRIME MINISTER.
In addition to picturing Labor's river winding its slow but ever broadening way toward Socialism-in-our-Time, The Illustrated London News mapped for swank Mayfair the evolution of London mentality which now makes the spread of Labor over the capital look like the efforts of a moppet playing with an inkdropper. Between 1931 and 1935 the municipal Government of London has passed into the control of Socialists led by Herbert Morrison. Since these Socialists are as British in their way as Conservative Stanley Baldwin they see no reason why at the same meeting there should not be both playing of God sane the King! and singing of Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
With such British idiosyncrasies well to the fore, clanny Britons were all set for the new Parliament's Week (see below).