Signor Mussolini's Relationship With Italy Essay

In Chamberlain’s eyes, the relationship with Italy was already bearing fruit and needed to be made permanent with the ratification of the agreement. On November 2nd, he brought the motion before Parliament, and claimed that Italy had fulfilled their obligations in Spain by withdrawing 10,000 troops. Arthur Greenwood argued for the opposition that the 10,000 troops were inconsequential and that it was a, “trick to play for time and to prolong the war.” A Conservative critique of the opposition beliefs was that they exhibited “suspicion, intolerance and distrust which, if it is allowed to go on, will bring another crises similar to the one through which we have just passed.” World War One loomed large in the minds of Europeans and the Conservatives would do anything they could to prevent it, even if all they did was push a larger war further down the road. Viscount Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, laid out the Foreign Office’s reasons behind their support for the deal, stating “If we fail to take what is probably our last chance of bringing the agreement into force and resuming our former relations with Italy, Signor Mussolini will be likely finally to …show more content…
In what must have been a line meant particularly for Neville Chamberlain, in the same speech he announced that, “in my view, the rape of Albania is to the Anglo-Italian agreement what the destruction of Czechoslovakia was to the Munich agreement.” Attlee and the Labour party viewed the invasion of Albania and Czechoslovakia as “the end of the attempt to make peace by disregarding moral issues.” Labour party rhetoric was as pointed as ever, attacking Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and presenting Mussolini as a man that could not be trusted, running a country that could be counted on only to be an enemy in the coming