CRITICISM BY MR CHURCHILL

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25301, 29 September 1947, Page 7

CRITICISM BY MR CHURCHILL

“Disaster” Achieved In Britain

“FALL FROM HIGH POSITION” (Rec. 9 p.m.) LONDON, September 27. Warning his hearers to be ready “should an election be sprung on us at any moment next year,” Mr Winston Churchill, in a speech to a Conservative Party rally in London, said that all the w°rld was staggered by the sudden fall of Britain from the high position won in the finest hour of her history. He recalled that he predicted the result of the General Election in 1945 would be a national disaster. He had not believed that this would have proved true so quickly. “Our misguided fellow countrymen” had achieved disaster through their incompetence and arrogance, their hordes of officials, thousands of regulations and gross misrnanagement of affairs, large and small. ‘‘What has happened to Britain so far is only the foretaste of what is to come,” said Mr Churchill. “Under Socialism, with all its malice, class jealousy and crippling of diligence, initiative and enterprise, it will not be possible for more than twothirds of the present population to live in this isle. That is why there is all this talk of emigration and why young men are turning their eyes overseas, hoping to find the chance to make their way which is denied them here. The Government is trying to fill their places with displaced persons; I will not speak of these people without sympathy, but how terrible is our situation when so many of our best and most active people wish to leave Britain, and we become the repository of Europe’s unhappy wreckage.” Mr Churchill said that the Socialists were trying to spread the false impression that the period between the wars had been dark and miserable for Britain. He claimed that, apart from the first Socialist Administration, it had been a period of almost unequalled expansion in the life of wage-earners. The Government boasted of the many bills passed by this Parliament, but none of these conferred any benefit on wage-earners except those which were prepared by the National Coalition “and proclaimed by me in the four-year plan of 1943.”