The Press TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1947. Attlee and Churchill

Press, Volume LXXXIIi, Issue 25302, 30 September 1947, Page 6

The Press TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1947. Attlee and Churchill

Mr Attlee’s duel with Mr Churchill is lamentable. Neither does himself any credit, or gives the British people any help, by imitating on a more exalted level the battle of Pott and Slurk. Mr Churchill’s role as Leader of the Opposition has been a difficult one. He has sometimes risen magnanimously to its highest demands, as when he praised Lord Mountbatten and with him Mr Attlee, who had personally insisted on the Viceroy’s appointment, for bringing about the virtual miracle of a settlement in India. He has sometimes been so headstrong in criticism as to forget, or seem to forget, that Mr Attlee’s Government (as in Burma) was simply fulfilling pledges given by the Churchill Government, or to divide himself from the party he leads. (Very few Conservatives, for example, answered his call to vote against the American loan.) In his August broadcast on the Government’s crisis policy he exemplified Mr Attlee’s present charge, that Labour’s opponents “have no policy'’; for what he said boiled down to an offer of his own leadership, which is not'a substitute for a balance-of-payments policy; a furious attack on direction of labour, in which (as “ The Times ” said, and as events show) the Government is more likely to do too little than too much; and the proposition, as an alternative, that “ selective supply of raw materials ” would give “far more fruitful re- “ suits ”. But, in the first place, Mr Churchill could not consistently propose such a measure and sweepingly damn controls, as he did; and in the second, it was a little careless to propose as an alternative to the Government’s policy- a measure which the Government itself proposed. But in his Landon rally speech, reported yesterday, Mr Churchill exceeded any previous unfairness or partisanship when he attributed present distresses, without qualifying the statement in any way, to the “incom- “ petence and arrogance ” of the Socialists. In view of all the facts, this will not do at all. It is as wrong and harmful a statement as Mr Attlee’s, which directly contradicted it. “Mr Churchill knows perfectly “ well ”, Mr Attlee said in his Leicester rally speech, also reported yesterday, “ that our difficulties are “ not due to the Labour Govern- “ ment ”. The British people deserve better of their present and of their previous leader than to hear these unwise, partisan charges and unwise, partisan excuses from thenr. They deserve the real truth. Especially they need to hear from the Government that part of it which is necessarily confessional. They will not work as they must, for salvation, if they are persuaded that it is as malignant as it is stupid, and could in neither respect be more so. They will not work, if they are persuaded that all their misfortunes have been brought upon them by blind or malign forces against which the Government has striven nobly but in vain. The people of Britain will not rescue themselves unless they understand that their distress is primarily due to a complex of causes originating in the six-years war and the necessary conduct of it but has been brought to a crisis by errors for which the Government is certainly responsible and which must now be retrieved. It is a fact, for example, that Britain’s ' advance towards stability was at first marked. If Germany, Palestine, and other oversea areas had not drained away resources, the year 1946 would have carried Britain nearer to a trade balance than before the war; and this progress would have continued this year, but that the Government had permitted capital commitments at home to mount inordinately. The Government’s prime post-war error has been to launch into long-range schemes of capital development and reconstruction, when the first need was to re-energise the export industries and correct the adverse trade balance. The Government attributed the 1947 check to the bitter winter and the fuel crisis; but the fuel crisis did not explain why manufacturers were telling their oversea customers that orders could not be filled for 18 months or two years. Second, it was the Government’s policy and the Government’s policy only which allowed the American loan to be so badly used that not half of the dollars were used for the intended and essential purposes. Policy and resources were thrown hideously out of adjustment in the scope and character of the Government’s capital programme, and the maladjustment was worsened by misuse of the loan required to supplement domestic savings for the purpose. The inflationary budgeting that paralleled the process need only be glanced at in passing. Finally,- though it is true that sterling convertibility was a condition (though not an absolute condition) of the American loan and true also that it was a condition which it was in Britain’s interest to fulfil, if possible, it is a much more important truth that Mr Dalton advanced to convertibility with a confidence which the facts did not justify, and which Washington did not share. Britain could and would have been released from the condition, if the request had been made. It was not made. Mr Dalton was, till the last moment, cockahoop about the impregnability of his convertibility arrangements; and they failed within a month. Now Britain may have been, and was, badly treated by sterling-holders; but that is irrelevant. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is there to say that a thing can be done, and that he has made sure of doing it safely; and Mr Dalton said so, said so triumphantly, and was disastrously mistaken. If that is not blundering, it is impossible to convict any statesman and I any government of blundering.