LIBERTY UNDER PLANNING

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 90, Issue 8, 10 January 1946, Page 6

LIBERTY UNDER PLANNING

BRITISH GOVERNMENT AIMS DISCUSSED SPEECH BY 3IR. HERBERT MORRISON London, Dec. 20 Mr. Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council, addressing students of the Working Men’s College, St. Pancras, spoke on Government, policy and the cost of liberty. He said:—

‘•During the last few weeks I have been accused of many sins and cartooned in many original situations because I believe that true freedom can only flourish where there is economic safety, though not without, high adventure. I believe that security of living will only come if we all take tne trouble to organise it.

■‘lf we are content to leave all the machinery of importing and exporting and production and distribution to get on as best it. may—that does not lead Lo liberty. Both the liberty to starve

and the liberty to grow rich and fat interfere with the liberty to think. As a nation we have got to study and measure our resources and capabilities, and we have got lo plan them so that we make ourselves well off enough to provide 1 security and decency of living.

“We may find in planning, and. in fact we have already, that the cost of liberty will be the sacrifice of some personal freedoms. We can’t have it both ways with an economy such as we have got and iff the condition it Is in.

“‘We are engaged upon a great political and economic experiment, the creation of design for corporate living, informed by a conscious philosophy. We are trying to achieve a reasonable expectation of economic security for our people, to bring back, if it is not already too late, some order and planning into our urban civilisation, and to expand the opportunities of full education to lhe rising generation.

“Now clearly such an attempt means, at the beginning, the exercise of some control upon the externals of the corporate life of the country. But that does not mean that we want to force our people into some single pattern of thought or of their daily life. On the contrary, we wish to give the widest chance of development to the infinite richness and variety of the British personality.’’