On 8 November 1927 Lord Birkenhead, Britain's Secretary of State for India, announced the appointment of a statutory commission under the chairmanship of the Liberal politician, Sir John Simon, to review the Indian constitution. No Indian was appointed to it. The Indian nationalist elite of all colours was outraged, and over the next two years there built up in India the potential for another major countrywide agitation of the kind that Gandhi had led in the early 1920s. In October 1929, in an attempt to preempt this, the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, formally declared that in the British view ‘the natural issue of India's constitutional progress … is the attainment of Dominion Status’, and announced the calling of a Round Table Conference in London on constitutional reform. This, however, served to assuage very few, and in March 1930 Gandhi launched the Indian National Congress upon a major Civil Disobedience campaign.