END OF TARIFF TRUCE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 108, 9 May 1931, Page 13 (Supplement)

END OF TARIFF TRUCE

“At long last the delegates to the Conference for Concerted Economic Action have reorganised that the commercial convention—the so-called tariff truce —which was brought into the world 12 months ago has no chance of coming to life. They decided to give the still-born infant decent interment in a formal protocol setting out that the Governments which had signed the convention could not agree upon the date when it should come into force. It never lived or deserved to live, and in common decency it should have been quietly buried long ago,” the Times observed recently. “It is clear —indeed it was clear all along—that the advocates of tariff disarmament had set the wrong way to work. What more than anything encourages high tariffism in Europe—what indeed alone makes it workable —is the existence of a great open market in Britain, on which the countries which shut out competing imports from other countries —including, of course, Britain —can dump their own exports when they in turn Are shut out from other highly protected markets. This not only concentrates foreign exports upon Great Britain to the detriment of British industry and the increase of unemployment among British workers, it provides a safety valve without which the ultra-protectionism of the other industrial countries would cause such intolerable congestion that it could no longer be maintained. The protectionist countries will, however, discover excellent and compelling reasons to seek an all-round agreement for the limitation of tariff armaments as soon as there is a British Government determined to protect British industries and British workers in the British roar