OVER-PREPARED

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 49, Issue 2888, 31 January 1940, Page 6

OVER-PREPARED

POSITION IN ENGLAND DE-CONTROLLER WANTED AN ECONOMIST’S VIEWPOINT “ At the beginning of the war Parliament passed a number of Bills, almost without discussion, giving the Government extraordinary powers to control almost every phase of life and business. Few of the members realised what they were doing. I remarked afterwards to one of them: ‘You have abolished everything except Parliament. Even the petition of Right has gone by the board,” stated Mr Francis Hirst, the English economist, recently. “Almost instantaneously the whole face of the country was blacked out and covered with controllers and de-puty-controllers. It had all been prearranged and planned; but it was soon found that preparedness had been overdone, that immense sums were being wasted, that the home trade was being stifled, that exports were being strangled, and that the suppression of markets, like Billingsgate, was an unendurable calamity.

“Then the value of Parliament was manifested. The fish control has been abolished, and the growing volume of complaints against coal-restrictions, timber-restrictions, wool-restrictions, etc., is compelling Ministers to attend to the grievances for which their underlings and decrees are responsible. “But the remedy is not mending, but ending; not tightening, but relaxing; not extending, but suspending. We want a decontroller. “Lord Stamp has a great opportunity. I hope he will use it. As supreme Economic Adviser to the Government he should be able to deal drastically, with the delays and futile restrictions that hamper our exports and curtail the legitimate business on which the productive incomes of our citizens, and ultimately the revenues of the State, depend.”