EAST-WEST TENSION “INCREASED BY U.N. DEBATES”

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22824, 20 December 1948, Page 5

EAST-WEST TENSION “INCREASED BY U.N. DEBATES”

LONDON, Dec. 17.

The United Nations’ debates have increased, not diminished the tension between East and West, said the AttorneyGeneral. Sir Hartley Shawcross, speaking at Torquay. “It is a black picture,” he said. “I won't be a party to deceiving the public by pretending that in its main function of acting as a centre for harmonising differences, the United Nations is a going concern or one in which useful business is being transacted. Each session has been more discouraging than the last.”

Sir Hartley Shawcross said that in the session just ended the agenda was grossly overloaded. Speeches were excessively long, stridently provacative and violent and tediously repetitive. ‘‘But allowing for all those criticisms and all those disadvantages, I am convinced that while conflicting interests and clashing ideologies exist, it is all the more important to maintain the United Nations as one organisation, faulty or weak though it may be, in which two worlds—if two worlds there must be —can learn to live together in peace.”

Sir A. Duff Cooper, commenting on the United Nations’ work, said: “If it is too much to demand the riddance of this expensive, useless and dangerous luxury, might we not suggest that it should be put into temporary cold storage. It has certainly exercised a malign influence on foreign relations."