INTERNATIONAL ACTION

Taranaki Daily News, 8 June 1932, Page 5

INTERNATIONAL ACTION

THE COMING CONFERENCE madness of tariff walls NIGHTMARE OF WAR DEBTS BRITAIN'S FISCAL POLICY By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright. Rugby, June 6. Arrangements for the Lausanne reparations conference, which is to open next week, will engage the close attention of the Prime Minister during the next few days. Other Ministers will also be devoting increased attention to the work of the Disarmament conference at Geneva and the Lausanne and Ottawa conferences., Meanwhile reports from the Governments whose views have been sought regarding, the proposed world economic conference arc awaited. Some days will probably elapse before any further advance can be made in regard to it.

References to the work of some of the approaching conferences was made during the week-end in speeches by Mr. J. IL Thomas and Lord Haikham. Mr. Thomas said no country was so fundamentally financially sound as Britain, and no nation was better prepared or more ready to give a real lead io the ultimate restoration of world prosperity. Confidence must be restored, and their first job was to get rid for all time of the war debts and reparations that were hanging like a nightmare over the world.

Regarding Ottawa he expressed the hope that they would succeed in laying the foundations for permanent machinery enabling all members of the Empire to contribute to the solution of their common problems. Fresh tariff barriers were not going to solve the world problems. War debts, reparations and suspensions were all contributing difficulties, but so was the blind, mad folly of each nation building, tariff walls one against the other. Britain had changed her fiscal policy, not because she wanted high tariff walls but because she was going to use the tariff, not as a menace to the rest of the world, but as a lever to reduce the tariffs of the world.

In regard to disarmament Lord Hailsham said that Britain had already set an example by reducing its armed forces to a mere fraction of what they were before the war, and the army had become little more than an Imperial police force.