Latest Move In British Exchange Control Act Said To Have Placed State Premium On Private Spying

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27232, 8 November 1949, Page 7

Latest Move In British Exchange Control Act Said To Have Placed State Premium On Private Spying

New Zealand Press Association Special Correspondent

Rec. 9 p.m. LONDON, Nov. 7. In a note of the week headed “ Back to Titus Oates,” the Economist says: “To many people the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s annovincement—it came out quite casually in a written answer to a parliamentary question—that # ‘in suitable cases ’ rewards will be paid to persons who. give information to the authorities which leads to convictions under the Exchange Control Act must seem like the last straw’. “ When Mr Churchill in the course of the last general election predicted that the principles of Labour-Socialism must inevitably lead to the creation of a British Gestapo, he was very widely derided. It could not happen here It begins to look as if the country owes Mr Churchill an apology: It is happening here.”

“ Exchange control is one of those departments of law for which the public may—or may not—be prepared to concede a justification in expediency. It has no moral basis. How' could it—since it prohibits transactions which w’ere perfectly legal only 10 years ago and still in most people's minds honest (though illegal) to-day? Yet this new branch of the law interferes at countless points with the ordinary life of the ordinary citizen. It prohibits him from going abroad when he wants to. It prohibits her (if the ordinary citizen is a woman) from taking her normal jewellery with her. It involves such absurdities as the prohibition of the sending of stamp collections to schoolboys abroad. “To enforce this collection or irritating restrictions, the secrecy of the mails can be and is violated in peacetime. And now there are to be rewards to informers and relators. The State is deliberately to put a premium upon private spying and grudgebearing, not among the criminal classes but. throughout the whole population. No form of economic control is worth this price. Away with it! ”