The Press Tuesday, September 9, 1930. Economic Opportunism.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20028, 9 September 1930, Page 10

The Press Tuesday, September 9, 1930. Economic Opportunism.

One of the compensations of periods of stress is that they bring about an overhaul of principles. Even when re-exami-nation does not get as far as principles there is merit in the overhaul of policies, as we have seen during the last few weeks in Australia. In New Zealand we have not yet suffered enough to have been compelled to make drastic changes, but in the United Kingdom the feature of the political situation for many months has been the assault, under stress, on the ancient tiadition of Free Trade. "Empire" Free Trade is of course a noise by itself, kept going very largely by people who do not know what it means. But orthodox Free Trade, as Avell as, if there is such a thing, orthodox Protection, is being reconsidered under the pressure of economic distress by people who for thirty years have assumed that there is no tariff problem to consider. It is not yet true that there have been any serious discoveries or secessions—first because the tariff has never been a clearly defined Party issue in Britain, and in the second place because everybody is glad to leave it to the Imperial Conference to suggest how far change should go. The Imperial Conference will of course know no more than the delegates who compose it, and the delegates no more than the Governments whose opinions they will present. Our own delegate, certainly, has no mandate, and it is no doubt the policy of other Dominions as well as our own to send their representative off with a "free hand"; but 110 one will suspect Mr Forbes of any intention to drop an economio bomb, and what the cables tell us about them suggests that there is no more reason to be afraid of the Australian and Canadian delegates. Changes, if they come at all, will be initiated in the United Kingdom, and it is the attitude of the present Government of the United Kingdom which therefore means most at the present time. But what is that attitude? The president of the Trades Union Congress" said the other day that Labour will riot bind itself in advance to any policy, or adopt any set of principles but those calculated to help the working man. Mr Ramsay Mac Donald has said that his Party will "enter the "Dominion Conference in September " to do everything that can be done by "a British Government to come to "arrangements that will benefit the "working classes of Great Britain." Mr G. D. H. Cole, one of Labour's economio experts, has said that "the "Labour movement is concerned with ''the workers' standard of life, and " (that) if this cannot be preserved "under Free Trade the Labour move- " ment will try any economic expedient "by which it may be preserved." The Labour Magazine has recently laid it down that " economic theories, those of "respectable antiquity equally with " those of recent and' dubious origin, " are on their trial," and that although it would be "moral treason" to abandon Free Trade without a frank public acknowledgment of the ethical- objections to Protection, Labour "plainly "must, to some extent, for the time " being, set Free Trade aside." Finally, we discussed only the other day. Labour's plan for controlling the flow of imports by license as an alternative to checking it by the adoption of Protection. Labour knows, and openly acknowledges, that wherever a tariff artificially enables some article to be produced expensively in one country which can be produced cheaply in another a "needless burden has been "added to the total labours of man- " kind." It has condemned " national "tariff-mongering" as "a stupid and ? wasteful way of frustrating an inter- " national division of labour." But its followers insist on retaining their wages in a country which under Free Trade can buy more cheaply from Germany. They know that the best | Continental workmen are now as well equipped as they are technically, that they work longer and work more cheaply, and that the alternative to Protection, open or disguised, is a drop, at least temporarily, in their standard of living. Finally they know that the Liberal Party, by whose favour their Government has so far held office, is irrevocably opposed to Protection, and they s no doubt hope—politics makes such strange bedfellows —that for every Liberal who deserts them if they adopt Protection they will find a Conserva tive giving them a vote as Imperialists in spite of themselves.