IS THERE A GESTAPO RAISING AN UGLY HEAD IN BRITAIN?

Wanganui Chronicle, 8 November 1949, Page 5

IS THERE A GESTAPO RAISING AN UGLY HEAD IN BRITAIN?

Comment On Offer Of State To Reward Informers

LONDON, Nov. 7 (Rec. fi pm).—ln a “Note of the Week” headed “Back to Titus Oates,” “The Economist” says: “To many people the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s announcement—it came

out quite casually in a written answer to a Parliamentary question—that ‘in suitable cases’ rewards will bq paid to persons who give information to the authorities which leads to the convictions under the Exchange Control Act, must seem like the last straw.

“When Mr. Churchill, in the course of the last general election, predicted that the principles of Labour, Socialism, must inevitably lead to the creation of a British ‘Gestapo,’ he was very widely derided. It couldn’t happen here! It begins to look as if the country owes Mr. Churchill an apology; it is happening here! “Exchange control is one of those departments of law for which the public may—or may not —be prepared to concede a justification in expediency. It has no moral basis. “How could it—since it prohibits transactions which were perfectly legal only ten years ago, and still, in most people’s minds, honest (though

illegal) today? Yet this new branch of law interferes at countless points with the ordinary life of the ordinary citizen. It prohibits him from going abroad when he wants t 0;... ’it prohibits her (if the ordinary citizen is a woman) from taking her normal jewellery with her; it involves such absurdities as prohibition of sending of stamp collections to schoolboys abroad. To enforce this collection of irritating restrictions, the secrecy of the mails can be, and is, violated in peace time. i “And now there are to be rewards to informers and relators. The State is deliberately to put a premium upon private spying and grudge-bearing, not among the criminal classes, but throughout the whole population. No form of economic control is worth this price. Away with it!”