“THERE WILL BE NO FUNERAL”

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25134, 15 March 1947, Page 9

“THERE WILL BE NO FUNERAL”

BRITAIN’S ECONOMIC FUTURE COMMENT ON COMMONS DEBATE (Rec. 7 p.m.) LONDON, March 13. Reviewing the three-day House of Commons economic debate, “The Times,” in a leading article, says: “There is no foundation for the suggestion that the British standard of,life is doomed to decline and that this great nation must now go down to poverty and impotence. “Overseas friends, whose sympathy has been ready, can rest quiet. There will be no funeral. “The Government’s task is to provide the circumstances and furnish the assistance required for the swift refashioning of British industry by the skill and enterprise of British men and women, and their prime responsibility, as Mr Churchill insisted, is to liberate the popular energies which can be as powerful in peace as in war. “Tight belts are unavoidable, and restrictions there must be, but the patient citizens who accept them will look for far more proof than the Government has yet given, either by deed or word, that these deprivations form part of a plan of action capable of reasserting their countrys vtealth and greatness. It is that plan of action, that programme for prosperity, that the people look for and must now be given precisely. “The Government’s responsibility for the past is vastly more limited than their most ebullient critics allow, but their responsibility for the future has no limits. -They have to demonstrate by their foresight and leadership their worthiness to govern the people of Britain.”