Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] TUESDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1931. BRITISH INTERESTS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 29 December 1931, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] TUESDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1931. BRITISH INTERESTS.

The most important of the questions which the Government of Great Britain has to face are those which affect British interests in the vary widest sense — that is, the interests of the Empire. If the world is one, then the Empire is even more compactly a unit. Conscious of this, its various parts watched with peculiar attention the results of last October’s appeal to public opinion in the mother country, and are still keenly observant of main political tendencies. Only the sneering malcontent and the simpleton who expects miracles to be wrought in a night can maintain the pretence that the National Government has accomplished nothing in its short tenure of office —so short that the post-election comment of English newspapers is only just beginning to come to hand. What has impressed, and in thousands of eases benefited, the man-in-the-street has been the steady reduction in the volume of British unemployment. One or two theorists have endeavoured to show that this is unreal and illusionary. But those who have been enabled to get back to work will be hard to convince that they are not the gainers. The first of all objects is to keep them employed and to add many others to their number. Foreign opinion regarding the means adopted need not be considered too weightily. Other countries have not in the past paid the slightest heed to any interests save their own —viewed often in the narrowest sense conceivable. Britain’s legitimate aim—the restoration of her own prosperity—may well be aided by the right direction of Empire consultation on economic relations. Mr Thomas’s tour having been abandoned, or in a large measure curtailed, the projected conference is likely to be held at an earlier rather than a later date. It seems almost certain, in view of the election results and the consequent composition of the new House of Commons, even within the Ministerial party itself, that Britain will move some distance at least i.i the direction of a protective tariff. To agree with those who are urging that everything will depend on securing what Sir Hugo Hirst has called “the proper kind of protection” does not mean the acceptance of that extreme form

which is usually in the minds of such publicists. Britain admittedly has the same right as that which the dominions have always exercised to consider first the welfare of her own inhabitants — her own farmers, for example, whose position to-day is far from satisfactory, either to themselves or to the nation. But here comes in an Empire problem of the very first importance. Primary producers in the dominions have already realised that some of the steps proposed might easily lead, not to their advantage, but to their loss —a loss which they still believe could easily be avoided without in any way injuring Britain herself. The devising of some cpiota system which would benefit in reasonable degree all the contributing partners should surely not be impossible.