Delegates Assemble For Marshall Plan'Conference

Northern Advocate, 15 March 1948, Page 3

Delegates Assemble For Marshall Plan'Conference

PARIS, Sun. (10 a.m.). —Delegates of 16 nations are now arriving for the Marshall Plan conference, which opens tomorrow. The French Foreign Minister (M. 'Bidault) today received the Greek Foreign Minister (M. Tsaldaris) and the Turkish Foreign Ministry (M. Sadak). The Italian Foreign Minister (Count Sforza) said on the Paris express: "It is high time to realise that our major duty is to organise Europe.”

Mr Ernest Bevin is due in Paris tomorrow morning in time for the opening session in the Quai d'Orsay. The 16 nations’ experts will afterwards meet at the luxurious Royal Monceau Hotel. The International Chamber of Commerce, representing the businessmen of * 10 countries, will submit to the conference a programme for European recovery. It declares that “existing resources and capital equipment must be fully utilised before any country has a moral right to claim aid.” The programme advocates the temporary reversal of the tendency towards shorter working hours, balanced Budgets, making nationalised industries pay, and reductions in the numbers of Government servants. The Western European representatives today welcomed the passing of the European Recovery Programme Bill in the United States Senate. M. Bidault said it was a “great encouragement” to the efforts of Europeans to become united. Count Sforza said it constituted a

The conference will devote the first two days primarily to policy statements.

The next two or three days’ work will be at a high official level, when the conference will set up and frame the terms of reference for the working party which will draft the constitution for a continuing organisation of the participating powers. The working party will also draw up a multilateral agreement pledging continued economic cooperation.

It is expected that the party’s work will take three or four weeks. The conference will discuss the extent and method of German representation at future meetings of the cooperation committees.

The U.S. Senate, after a session which lasted more than 11 hours, passed the European Recovery Programme Bill by 69 votes to 17.

It marked the first approval by either House of the plan outlined by the Secretary of State (Mr Marshall) at Harvard last June.

At the previous session the Senate defeated a proposal by Senator R. Taft (Republican—Ohio) to cut the first year’s outlay to $4,000,000,000. The bill, which provides for the expenditure of $5,300,000,000 in the first year of the programme beginning on April 1, will now go to the House of Representatives.

moral event of the utmost importance. The British Labour Party secretary (Mr Phillips) announced in Rome that

moderate Italian Socialists would send delegates to the London Socialist conference on the Marshall Plan on March 21.