The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. "Luceo Non Uro.” TUESDAY, JULY 23, 1935. MR LLOYD GEORGE ANSWERED

Southland Times, Issue 25343, 23 July 1935, Page 6

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. "Luceo Non Uro.” TUESDAY, JULY 23, 1935. MR LLOYD GEORGE ANSWERED

The Baldwin Government’s reply to Mr Lloyd George’s “new deal,” published under the title “Organizing Prosperity,” meets all the major proposals in the plan, disposing of the spectacular £ 250,000,000 prosperity loan which is the bads of the plan. This answer to Mr Lloyd George was published after the Government had examined his project, and it is effective. Some years ago Mr Lloyd George advocated a monster loan for public works and to finance various measures devised to assist agriculture, but the British Labour Party had already made proposals which, if only slightly less sensational in their financial needs, were similar in character, and when it was in office the Labour Party discovered that these measures would not provide the hoped-for solution of the country’s problems. The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr Snowden he was then) held the country to the hard way, and keeping on the taxation screw sought to bring the two sides of the public accounts closer. The National Government eschewed anything of a spectacular nature, but it has been working steadily and now it is able to say: In every field Mr Lloyd George explores the Government has already taken action which has produced results wider and more comprehensive and more beneficial than any his programme can effect. Mr Lloyd George apparently believes the people can be shaken out of their black pessimism, not by concrete measures but by the establishment of spectacular new machinery of government which is vaguely expected to evolve the whole new programme of national regeneration in twelve months. His proposal to raise a big loan in advance of the time when it is required to be spent would involve financial dislocation and be deflationary in effect.

It would be deflationary in effect because if it were raised in advance of the time for disbursement a large sum of money would be withdrawn from activity to idleness. The Government has seized on the point that if British agriculture is expanded too rapidly by the use of Government money the dominions will be injured and their purchases of British manufactures will diminish. This direct reference to the influence of domestic politics on Imperial affairs shows that the Government is conscious of the importance of co-operation within the Empire, and that economic relations of the"dominions and the Mother Country are entering a new phase. As a manufacturing country Britain must not lose sight of her overseas markets, and the hasty expansion of her own agricultural production by an artificial stimulus would dislocate her trade, aggravating instead of settling the problems which are already difficult enough. Mr Lloyd George is too ardent a politician to drop his “new deal” at this stage, but the Government’s answer is so direct and pertinent that public interest in it will wane very quickly.