EMPIRE TRADE

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 127, 31 May 1928, Page 4

EMPIRE TRADE

♦ DEBATED BY COMMONS CHANGING SITUATION , SPEECH BY ME. AMEEY ""(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 21st March. In the House of Commons, Mr. BarclayHarvey (Unionist member for Kincardine called attention to the importance o£ Empire trade, and moved "That the pursuit o£ a vigorous policy furthering Imperial trade and developing Imperial resources is desirable in the interests of the industries of this country and of the Empire." He said that Europe, which was full of modern national feeling created by the subdivision of the Continent after the'war, and where several small nations were trying to develop their own trade behind tariff barriers, no longer presented the easy field which it presented for British trade in the past. The Empire, one quarter of the world in area and population, had more than filled the gap by taking British goods to the value of £80,000,000 more than in 1923. The resulting bigger British .production facilitated a lower price, and therefore a re-entry into foreign markets. He begged that this loophole to prosperity should be widened by large capital expenditure in the colonies, by the cheapening of transport on land and sea, and by the organisation of research. All Government action, however, jaust be futile unless British manufacturers studied local demand abroad and organised production at Home. Captain Anthony Eden was equally restrained in his demands for State action, adding only a plea for the extension of fiscal preference to tinned fruits and the development of voluntary preference through the marketing and research work of the Empire Marketing Board. Mr. Wheatley challenged not" the principle, but the method, of Empire development. If the State spent money, the State should reap the benefit. It was useless for Parliament to talk about Empire trade and tolerate .middlemen who rigged the market against it. It would be more encouraged by subsidising the slum consumer at Home than the squatter producer abroad, An economic Empire must be founded upon an Imperial Economic Parliament, able to conduct reciprocal State trading, and not upon pious resolutions. MR. AMERY'S REPLY. Mr. Amery said the general case for Empire trade stood entirely outside party politics. It might be that when it came to taking action, members of one party might advocate some methods to which members of another party would object; but there was a middle field upon which they could all unite. There had been immense development of industrial power in Europe, the United States, Japan, and other countries, and, partly due to that and partly to other causes, British 'trade with those countries was becoming less and less a complementary trade, sustaining our industrial fabric and more and more a purely competitive trade. Op the other hand, the trade with the British Empire was still essentially a complementary one and was calculated to remain so, at any rate for a period as far distant as one could possibly look ahead. In the Empire there was a changing situation. Ja the Dominions there had been immense progress, and they stood as producers on an entirely different plane from that of twenty or thirty years ago. The whole scheme and method of their production, whether in wheat or meat, dairy produce or fruit, had advanced to an extent which it would be difficult for anyone to realise who had been <- there twenty-five years ago, and had not been there since. They had not advanced only in primary production; in every Dominion, especially in Canada, there had been a great step forward in industrial manufacture. He did not believe that that development or the legislative measures taken in the Dominions to accelerate it diminished in any way the case for Imperial economic co-operation. It was true that the incidence of a Dominion tariff, aimed at protecting this or that industry, might hit ii corresponding industry in our country; but it was also true that, so long as the Dominions adhered to their policy of giving preference to our imports, what we lost in one direction we gained in another, and everything that we could do to strengthen their development and to help them with, the growth of their population would come back to us in the form of greater trade. Whatever criticisms might be directed against rearrangements in Dominion tariffs, we had reached a point at which there could be few dis- ■ asters greater for British trade than if the Dominions became free trade countries, and, while giving no protection to their own industries, gave Great Britain no protecton against foreign competitors. TRIANGULAR TRADE. In the colonies, especially in Africa, there was a situation where trade development was essentially complementer}'— he did not mean that the trade with the Dominions was not essentially complementary. The colonies produced tropical raw materials which could not be produced in this country nor to a large extent in the Dominions, and in return they took our manufactures. Britain's trade with the colonies had been developing very remarkably in recent years. We sent every year something like £80,000,000 worth of British goods, almost entirely manufactured, to the colonial market. Though the industrialdevelopment of the Dominions might to some extent put a check on the direct trade in manufactured goods from here to those Dominions, it might very well, under a system of general Empire co-operation, bo accompanied by a great enhancement of the triangular trade. To a large extent the means for development were in the bands of the Governments concerned. There had never been a time in which the promotion of the all-round development of our tropical Empire had taken place so rapidly and so effectively as to-day. It was a development based on the development of the natives themselves, together with development in scientific agriculture, transport, and so on,-and that was having a direct effect on the trade of this country. Such preferences as we had been able to give had been of immense value, and there was also the question of learning more about the course of Empire trade and acting in the directions of improved marketing, research, and publicity, which would give a greater voluntary preference. The issue was not one of free trade or protection as such. In the development of a great area like the British Empire, with

unlimited resources, neither of these arguments came in directly. What they were - concerned with was a heritage of immense value, and the practical ways and means of developing it. ' ' .The motion was agreed to.