Must Act Before 12th Hour Strikes

Northern Advocate, 9 July 1947, Page 5

Must Act Before 12th Hour Strikes

MORRISON TELLS HOUSE OF COMMONS THAT BRITAIN..

(Received 1.30 p.m.) LONDON, July 8. THE Lord President of the Council (Mr Herbert Morrison) told the House of Commons: “Britain cannot hope for a fully comprehensive agreement between the nations before the twelfth hour strikes. “We must therefore go for the best agreement we can get before the clock strikes, as it will strike this autumn.”

Mr Morrison was replying to the debate on the imports programme. He declared that the only remedy pending restoration of British and European agriculture and industry lay in devising means whereby billions ot dollars worth of North and South American production could be transferred across the Atlantic without the necessity for immediate payment in the form of an equal and opposite How of European goods.

Mr Morrison said: “Whether the wartime analogy of ‘mutual aid’ is applicable in the present situation, or whether some more appropriate method can be found of maintaining the life-giving flow of goods and services. I do not know. “But it must be remembered that mutual aid was accompanied by something r-esembling overall planning of

military and economic resources and would have been impossible if countries which gave more than they received had not been confident that other countries were pulling their full weight.” Mr Morrison maintained that criticisms of the Government’s balance of payments policy boiled down to an assertion that the American loan was a mistake and Britain should have done without it.

“Considering the difficulty we have had of keeping going, even by drawing on the loan, it is hard to see how adequate alternative supplies could have been found in time. “Bretton Woods and the International Bank monetary fund might have made valuable contributions, but could not, by themselves, have met the emergency needs of the reconstruction period,” he said.