A TEN-YEAR PLAN

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXVI, 29 July 1932, Page 7

A TEN-YEAR PLAN

MR AMERY’S YIEWS In the debate in the House of Commons on the Ottawa Conference, Mr L. S. Amery said that their representatives at Ottawa should endeavour to secure in the fiscal domain such an extension of Empire preference as would definitely encourage the main volume of Empire trade to flow into Empire channels and „ Jo. .concentrate creative power for their several markets on mutual and common development-. Whether that was to be done by raising Dominion , duties against foreign trade or lowering them to British trade was an entirely secondary and relatively unimportant question. Their immediate interest lay much more in securing the maximum amount of preference against foreign competitors, who, in a normal year, would be selling something like £300,000,000 worth of manufactures to the rest of the Empire, than in over-persuading the Dominions, against. their own conception of their own interests, to reduce their duties. It was important . also that any arrange-' ments arrived at should be for a sub-, stant-ial period, so as to enable capital and enterprise to concentrate with confidence on their task and to go ahead on a 10-year plan for reconstruction. Why should we leave all the .big ideas to Russia? Whatever preferences were agreed on should not be susceptible to being whittled away by either side in negotiations with foreign countries. To permit that would be to wreck the whole spirit of thfc conference. At Ottawa they should so. frame their different agreements as to leave each party tlie absolute unfettered freedom -to extend the privileges of those' agreements to any other part of the Empire, but with no obligation to do so; freedom to extend preferences to all the other members of the Empire who were substantially co-operating in a common Empire policy, but to withhold those advantages Lorn' those who were not fully playing the game. (Cheers.) • -