A DIPLOMATIC BLUNDER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17064, 24 July 1917, Page 6

A DIPLOMATIC BLUNDER

LORD DEVONPORTS RETIREMENT.

THE SEEDS OF DISCONTENT. CFbom Oub Own Corhkspohdewt.) LONDON, Juno 1. _ It almost seems as if Mr Liovd George, m regard to tho food control, * had 'made one 6t those great mistakes of diplomacy which wo have been, taught to think are only made by the German Government. As a matter of fact Mr Lloyd George was rather rattled when he took office by the advice and the shouldering this way and' that of tho Northcliiie press. A little later ho was more vigorously rattled by the clamour of the Northcliffe press for tho specific appointment of Lord Devonport to be Food Controller. And he agreed to the. appointment without noticing, possibly, that it contained one fatal objection of the very kind wtuch lie himself a few months earlier would have been most down upon. Lord Devonport, to put it plainly, as other people are now- putting it, was an interested party. It was wrong to ask the guiding spirit of the International Tea Comwith its mult ; ;>lo shops and its quite conceivable interest in opposition to food control, to have charge of the rationing of the people. The British public is longsuffering and does not ask questions very readily, but steadily soaring prices were bound sooner or later to make a clamour— which is possibly quite unjust—against the private interests of the Food Controller. It was unfortunate, too, that the Food Control Department should have committed itself to tho definite statement, that whatever happened to other prices there was no need for tea prices to rise. , In face of that statement tea prices have r.sen 8d a pound within a few months, and'4d of that within the week or two since tho Budget which did not touch tea.

The Daily Mail was so full of its propaganda that perhaps it did not know that the appointment was loaded and would go off at an awkward moment. Lord Devonport has now resigned, and the Daily Mail is as silent as possible and pretending it never heard of him. But Mr Lloyd George should have seen the explosive elements in the appointment His close touch with the wage-earners should have, prompted him to look at this aspect, just as previous Governments should have questioned the decency of appointing to the official control, of shipping .the heir of the firm which had undertaken great shipping enterprises for the Government, Someone was bound to find it out-sooner or later, and such discoveries were bound to lend sting to the discontent of the wage-earners when prices persisted in rising, for reasons, possibly, quito unconnected with them. The first whisper of attack on Lord Devonport that reached publicity was the complaint of the secretary of the Boilermakers' Society, who said quite pointedly that the Food Controller had not done what he should have done. Unfortunately, the disparity between wholesale prices and the retail prices of commodities continued to increase, gjving an added sting to the complaints. For instance, at a moment when frozen mutton was being sold wholesale for a pound householders were being charged 2s. Various kinds of beans had been recommended- to the unsophisticated public as good substitutes for bread and potatoes, and the unsophisticated public asked for them in a childlike manner. About four people got them at normal pnees. The remaining 40,0C0,0C0 odd had to come m after the beans had passed through the hands of sometimes a dozen middlemen—men belonging to the motor trade, the carrying industry, and a hundred other occupations quite foreign to beans. So that 4d beans, like 8d mutton, reached the consumers at something like three times their normal price. These things were bound to bring trouble, and Lord Devonport was blamed for not stepping in and assuming control of them as the Government had done with sugar and one or two other things.

In point of fact it is announced, simultaneously with Lord Devonport's retirement, that tea and beans are now under control. There is a fine of £100 waiting for the grocer who tries to charge more than lOd per lb for butter beans during June 9d in July, and 8d in August. Haricot beans must glide down from 8d to 6d m the same period, and lentils must remain stationary at Bd. AGITATION IN PARLIAMENT. The first breath of criticism against Lord Devonport in Parliament, was last week when Mr Pemberton Billing, the ex-airman who floated in under the a?gis of the Daily Mail, which has since forgotten him, asked a veiled question about the Food* Controller's holding in the International Tea Company. The reception he got was not very encouraging. Captain Bathurst said he had been guilty of a libellous innuendo. \and challenged him to repeat it outside the house. Mr Billing asked querulously whether he was not entitled to ask such a question and get a civil answer without menace or insult, and the Speaker warned him that such questions were liable to do grave injustice to perfectly innocent people. "May I directly charge the department" he finally asked, "with the fact that the present Food Controller was the holder of 275,000 shares in the International Tea Company?" The Speaker: The hon. member has already made that charge. Let him make it outside. MR THORNE AND THE KING. It is, nevertheless, unlikely that tho Government will make another appointment open to such objection. Mr Will Thome M.P who has just returned from telling the Russian democracy of England's sympathy, had a long interview with the Kintr on Tuesday, and he has departed from procedure so far as to give out a statement of what took place. "I told his Majesty some solid homely truths. I told his Majesty plainly and . frankly what was the popular opinion of high food\prices and the profiteering which is notoriously going on, and said that rows must be expected so lon<r as tho prices of foodstuffs remain uncontrolled for the working people and controlled in the interests of the traders." THE OTHER SIDE.

There is, however, a good deal to be said for Lord Devonport's administration as will be seen from the following extract from the Daily Telegraph:-" Lord Devonport lias been one of the most hard-worked and also ono of the most unsparingly criticised of public men. The food trades can never have shared the impression that the controller was not doing his utmost, and it is only justice to say that, when all mistakes have been allowed for, Lord Devonport has left the food situation immeasurably safer than he found '\ The sweeping bread order of three months ago was a strong measure of conservation, unpopular though the war bread ' was witß the unthinking Lord Devonport's action in the direction of nxmg maximum prices has not met with unmixed success, and has onlv been entirely effective m those cases in which the control ot the supply was taken over. But it is safe to say that the prices now rulin" for most articles of food, high as they an? are nothing comparable to what they Would have been had no authority existed to check the excesses of 'profiteering.' But the outstanding achievement of Lord Devonport's TTi, ° °, ffice r undoubtedly the firing of the scale of voluntary rations in reeard to bread meat, and sugar. This has been the foundation of all food economy practice and .precept s:nee the scale was laid dmvn by the controller at the beginning of Feb ruary 'In substance the Devonport scale of rations is that aimed at in all patriotic households to-dav." pamoiic