SIR PATRICK DUFF DISCUSSES BRITAIN’S POSITION

Grey River Argus, 24 March 1947, Page 2

SIR PATRICK DUFF DISCUSSES BRITAIN’S POSITION

WELLINGTON, March 19.

Sir Patrick Duff, K.C.8., K.C.V.0., High Commissioner for the United Kingdom, at the opening of the Lower Hutt Methodist Garden Party, said: Britain is having a hard time at present. Sympathetic and interested as people are in the spectacle, they are apt to display a curious detachment in their sympathy and aloofness in their interest as if they were only spectators watching a thrilling play from a comfortable seal. But, if they only knew it, they are watching something which most intimately and agitatingly concerns themselves. For Britain is the biggest single customer of no less than 31 other nations besides. If Britain, with her colossal potential market, is not in a strong purchasing position, all hope of “full employment” disappears for 31 nations as well as for herself. New Zealand’s economy, to take one example, is vitally interwoven with Britain’s. If you take a period of three years before the war, after deducting what you consume yourselves, Britain buys your entire mutton, lamb and cheese supplies, 97 per eent. of your butter supplies and 58 per cent, of your wool..

By the accident of geography, Britain was the outpost of freedom in the late war, and her whole population, with everything they possessed stood in the front line. And their cities and towns and countryside became a vast camp and jumping-off ground for the invasion of Europe. Britain carries many burdens to-day as a result of all she shouldered on behalf of other peoples. Take one instance only. The armed forces of the United Kingdom became the centre of what was practically an international army. The total forces under United Kingdom strategic direction was over ten millions of men. Only half of this number were from the United Kingdom. But the financial and supply responsibility for the lot rested on the United Kingdom alone. Those partners who could pay their way for their own troops did so; but the capitation and other payments they made only covered supplies received by their forces. They never took account of strategic reserves, construction of bases, and maintenance of pipe-lines in the field and many countries couldn’t pay their way even to the extent of their day to day supplies—countries like Poland and Greece, for instance, which had no financial resources. So Great Britain bore the financial overheads over a wide field of the common enterprise, and entirely carried financially those contributors of manpower to the enterprise who could not finance themselves at all. These sort of items alone, all for the common cause, totted up a bill for three thousand million pounds sterling and represent a part of the piled-up debt which has been left for John Bull to shoulder. And still to-day it is to Great Britain alone that all countries

of the Empire look to peg security for themselves. So one result is that, when Britain’s own need for manpower for the resuscitation of her industry is clamant, she has to face up to the added burden of conscription.

So, if you have time, you might sometimes think occasionally of those kinsmen overseas toiling so patiently and with so much sense of sacrifice and mission; of the vital part which they play in under-pin-ning the entire basis of your peace and of your prosperity; and of the direct benefits both of freedom and of security which their toil and their sacrifice helps to spread throughout the rest of the world.