MARSHALL PLAN DEFENDED

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25739, 26 February 1949, Page 7

MARSHALL PLAN DEFENDED

DEBATE IN ECONOMIC COUNCIL OF U.N.

BRITISH RESPONSE TO SOVIET CHARGES (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 9 p.m.) NEW YORK, Feb, 24. Mr Christopher Mayhew, the British Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs to-day vigorously denied the Soviet accusation that the Marshall Plan was hampering Europe’s economy. Mr Mayhew, speaking in the United Nations Economic and Social Council, said: “Marshall aid has been and continues to be vital to the economic recovery of Western Europe. My country could not do without it.” Earlier the Soviet delegate (Mr Semyon Tsarapkin) had attacked the Marshall Plan, which he said was not only hampering the recovery of Western Europe, but was also an attempt to boycott Eastern Europe. He claimed that the conditions of workers in capitalist countries were getting worse, whereas in the Soviet they were constantly improving. Mr Mayhew, in reply, asked why, if the Soviet was so eager to show that it was a workers’ paradise, it did not publish any figures to support its claim. Why were there no statistics from Russia about living standards there? he asked. The reason for this secrecy was clear, he said. “It is because the Soviet wants to keep alive the Communist propaganda myth that the Soviet is ahead in democratic and progressive advances, the myth that the country with the lowest working standards in Europe actually has the highest, the myth that the Soviet, the most totalitarian country in Europe, is really the most democratic.” Mr Mayhew said that the reality of Western European recovery and the success of the Marshall Plan were making the Soviet hypotheses more and more wildly extravagant. Dealing with the repeated Soviet accusation about American “economic imperialism,” Mr Mayhew asked the Council to consider the fate of Jugoslavia which, because it did not submit to certain political conditions, had seen its trade with the Soviet cut to one-eighth as a reprisal. “This is Soviet economic imperialism, and no country m Western Europe would tolerate one small part of the economic domination suffered by Jugoslavia at the hands of the Soviet,” said Mr Mayhew.