FIVE-YEAR PLAN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 115, 18 May 1931, Page 11

FIVE-YEAR PLAN

EFFECT ON BRITAIN DUMPING WHEAT, OIL & TIMBER A special correspondent of the North Eastern Daily Gazette sends that paper a remarkable contribution. His story, reprinted by Public Opinion, speaks for itself. He writes: — “Wherever you go in Sweden, Finland and Germany, from which countries 1 have just returned, you come up against the Soviet’s Five Years Plan. I met it every day. “In the train from Abo were an American and a German. We talked of tne weather, of the help the heavy snow would, be to the lumbering industry —a bad winter, paradoxically, means a saving in transport costs —and of the Five Years Plan. “They arc nearer to Russia than wo are, these Northern lands, and they are seeing its first effects. In time, too —let us hope it will be in time—wc, even wc in Great Britain, shall waken up to its importance. “Let me give an example from the coal trade. For long British coal has found a ready market in Sweden. We sent coal to Stockholm; wo took timber in return. Our ships had a cargo each way. “While I was in Helsingfors I could have booked an order for 65,000 tons of British coal, hut -thanks to the Five Years Plan that order is going to Germany and Poland. Russian timber, sold there at prices no other country can touch, has knocked the bottom out of the Swedish timber market, and the Swedes cannot afford to buy British coal. “There, in a nutshell, is the story of a market lost to Great Britain owing to the Five Years Plan. “So far, Russia is concentrating on three main exports —wheat, oil, and timber. It has the raw material at hand, and it has unlimited labour to work it at merely nominal wages. Obviously, therefore, it can put the finished products on the market at any price it likes. Competition it rules out. It fixes its own price. Costly Cheapness. “At first sight it all looks most attractive. Cheap wheat, cheap oil and petrol, cheap timber. Yet, but at what cost of our exports to other countries which previously supplied us and consequent unemployment, with the dange ■ of sharply raised prices later on when competition is finally destroyed. “The Russians, I said, have started on wheat, oil, and timber. But already they are making motor cars. Soon taoy may be producing cotton goods. “What will happen then? A ‘Lenin Seven’ at £5O, and a ‘Trotski Fourteen’ at £lOO are not figments of an overheated imagination. Nor is a shipload of cotton goods to Manchester or of coals to Newcastle. “There is the problem as I see it after a visit to the countries already affected by the operation of the Five Years Plan. “America, it appears, is already alive to it. Un pressure from her labour unions, the United States, in the case of timber, demands proof that it is not produced under conditions of slavery before allowing it in. “But the wider problem remains for us as for the United States. Are we going to subsidise—by the credits we give her by buying her goods—a system which wc definitely oppose, * a system which at its best means the dragooning of the individual to the Juggernaut of State necessity, and at its worst means almost literally slave labour? On the answer to that question depends the whole future of the Anglo-Russian relations. “As I sco it, one o2 live things must happen, for obviously the present position cannot last. EiQtPi wc must, in association with America, say definitely to Russia that we refuse to tako anything from her at all, because everything we do take is directly reducing the standard of the life of our people, and so endangering our national economy, or wo must persuade her to let her people enjoy a reasonable standard of life before we allow trade to continue and increase. “Russia, in a word, must come into the world economy, of which it is an important part, or it must stay out. To allow it to have a foot in both camps, her own and ou«‘s, is simply to make the wgiH of both possible worlds and. to play into the hands of the revolutionary. ”