HIGHER LIVING COSTS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27211, 14 October 1949, Page 11

HIGHER LIVING COSTS

Effect Of Devaluation HEAVY BURDEN ON MIDDLE CLASSES NZPA Special Correspondent LONDON, Oct. 7. Challenging the assertion at the Lord Mayor’s banquet earlier in the week by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir'Stafford Cripps, that the rise in the cost of living due to devaluation would fall most heavily upon the working classes, Mr Brendan Bracken, Conservative member of Parliament for Bournemouth, said in a speech at Lewisham that the chief sufferers would be the middle classes. “ Their cost of living has been doubled during the past decade,” said Mr Bracken. “Many of them live on very limited earnings or on small fixed incomes, which have been sharply reduced by savage taxation, by grossly unfair compensation terms forced on them by the Government when they nationalised the various industries, and by Mr Hugh Dalton’s notorious * cheap money policies.’ “The middle classes have no cost of living index to protect their incomes when the cost of living rises, and they have no trade unions to speak or strike for them. “This Government, consciously or not, is following policies that must inevitably lead to the extermination of the middle classes.” Mr Bracken strongly attacked Sir Stafford, whom he described as “ plentiful in words and palsied in action.” What was wanted m .Britain to-day, he claimed, was work and patriotism.