The Northern Advocate "NORTHLAND FIRST" Registered for transmission through the Post as a Newspaper. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1945. SHOULDERING THE LOAN

Northern Advocate, 20 December 1945, Page 4

The Northern Advocate "NORTHLAND FIRST" Registered for transmission through the Post as a Newspaper. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1945. SHOULDERING THE LOAN

HALF a century of annual repayments to America, beginning in Britain in 1951, carries up to the year 2000 A.D. Measured in time the very thought is a bit startling, so it is not surprising that opposition to tne Anglo-American agreement, overcome jn the House of Commons, flared up again in the House of Lords. It needed something astronomical in scope, such as a stepping out from the 20th to the 21st century, to restore the ancient House of Peers to something of its prestine vigour, and give it once again some part of that place-on-the-map which was taken from it by the Parliament Act passed early in the century. The sense of the unknown future, and of the terrible audacity of beginning the ominous atomic age with a long-term agreement expressed in presumptuous dollars and embroidered with half-a-century of hope, seems to ha\e fully possessed the Peers; yet they did not succeed in accomplishing the main task of the opposing forces—the task of finding an alternative to the agreement. But. they did not fail for lack of trying. Lord Woolton hinted at an alternative when he declared that the pound’s surrender to the dollar had occurred “because those responsible for the affairs of this country did not dare to retreat on the economic fastnesses of the Empire.” Lord Woolton thus sees the Empire as an economic Gibraltar. But what of the sterling bloc as a whole? Is it equally rock-like? The editor of “The Times” throws some doubt on that prospect when he writes that, if the dollar loan had been declined, there would have been no guarantee that “sterling area countries who, like Britain, need American goods, could have resisted separate overtures from the United States.”

The sterling bloc would have to be a Gibraltar, or even a Malta, to stand the test of the future; and, in fact, the sterling bloc’s behaviour in the event of the pound trying to stand alone—as Britain herself did in 1940-41 is as unpredictable as was the heroism of Malta before the enemy’s guns started. The whole issue today is, indeed, dominated by unknown factors. Being unable to see any farther than anyone else into the brick wall of the future, some of the Peers used figures of speech to condemn what they called dollar dictation.. Lord Croft was picturesque, if not convincing, when he saw in the loan and other parts of the,agreement “the Boston Tea Party in reverse.” Briefly, the story of the. Boston tea party is that the American resistance movement in the 18th Century, threw imported tea into Boston harbour as a protest against duties levied on the American colonies’ trade by Britain. If vice-versa, the latter day American was dumping not tea but the preferential duties of the British Empire—if he were dictating the removal of preferential duties as the price of the dollar loan—then Lord Croft might claim to discover some kind of parallel between American action in the 18th century and today. But, as Lord Keynes was able to tell the’ Lords that the “United States Government fully understood that there could be no one-sided surrender of Empire preferences,” any suggestion of highhandedness disappears.

The simple issue as seen by Lord Samuel is that Britain must either “accept the scheme and thus accept the possibilities of grave future troubles,” or “refuse the scheme, with certainty of immediate disaster,” with emphasis on the word immediate. America, said Lord Balfour of Burleigh, “must learn to import.” Of all the unknown factors, this is perhaps, the chief. Unless America can buy as well as sell, it is presumption to plan for the year 2000.

Having accepted the terms, which none can contemplate with equanimity, Britain will cheerfully set about making the best of it. Repayment to the United States of £35,000,000 a year is a formidable undertaking, but other aspects of the agreement, including the adoption of the Bretton Woods plan, are of far greater import. If Bretton Woods confers the blessings its advocates claim for it, Britain may make light of the annual repayments. It will be noted that Dr Hugh Dalton for the Government, and Sir John Anderson for the Opposition, both with Exchequer experience, declare that the Bretton Woods plan does not mean a return to the gold standard, but it is still true that gold will have increased in influence in measuring credit.