BROADCAST BY MR ATTLEE

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27151, 22 September 1953, Page 9

BROADCAST BY MR ATTLEE

PRESS CRITICISM IN BRITAIN (Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, September 21. The "Daily Mail,” in its leading article today, refers to Mr Clement Attlee’s broadcast over the 8.8. C. on Saturday night as “a slight noise of scratching on the surface of politics.” “If his followers looked for a war cry for their forthcoming conference —well, they ought to have known what to expect. But there was one phrase he used to which we take exception. “Talking on the need to help backward nations he said: ‘We are not entitled to enjoy a high standard of living at their expense.’ "There it is again,” says the “Daily Mail.” "You always get it sooner or later. Most of the grandiose plans to relieve Asia or Africa are based on the assumption or the accusation that their dismal plight is the fault of the West.

"The teeming millions of nonwhltes are, in this mythology, always presented as innocent little baa-lambs who have, for centuries, been the oppressed victims of the predatory Western peoples,” the “Daily Mail” says.

The “Daily Telegraph” says in a leading article that Mr Attlee in his broadcast claimed that British reconstruction under socialism had evoked the admiration of impartial observers. “It is to be hoped that this finding will not be widely printed in the United States, where admiration for the achievements of British socialism runs at rather less than the fever point of enthusiasm,” says the article. “In plain fact no government was ever luckier than Mr Attlee’s own. A tottering economy was supported by huge prices for colonial produce. “The Government was able to make immense trading profits through no constructive effort of its own. It fell to the succeeding Conservative Government to take the minimum measures to avert approaching insolvency. “The whole of the socialist planning was illusion, and the end of socialist rule came only just in time to avert the rudest of awakenings,” says tlie “Daily Telegraph.”