TH E TABLET, A p r i l 26th, 1982

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

VOL. 199, No. 5840

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, APRIL 26th, 1952

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE NEWER OPPRESSION Sir Stafford Cripps and the Cult of the State JAPAN REGAINS SOVEREIGNTY Prospects at the Ratification of the Peace Treaty. By William Teeling, M .P .

THE UNITED STATES IN AN ELECTION YEAR

Reflections after a Recent Tour : II. By Douglas Jerrold A LETTER FROM LECCE MUSIC IN CHURCH

A Glass Half Full

By Anthony Milner

THE MOODS OF SOUTHEY “Letters from England.” By Alfred Noyes

DEARER FOOD

I N Great Britain there are 550 people to the square mile. Only Belgium and the Netherlands, among the industrial nations, are as densely populated as are most parts of this country ; and in the United States, with only fifty people to the square mile, there is eleven times as much space for the population as there is here. Britain remains the second largest, supplier of the world’s needs, and about half the world’s trade is still conducted in sterling. But

“it is possible for so many people, on so small and relatively poor an island, to live so well and exert so great an influence only so long as they produce enough of what the rest of the world wants to keep the British people and their machines fed and working.” Where We Stand This Year, the popular presentation o f the Economic Survey, begins with these basic statements. But they describe not only how we stand this year but how we shall stand next year and the year after, and indefinitely into the future. An increasingly large volume of manufactures will have to be exported to pay not only for raw materials but for food, of which the world prices are rising and will continue to rise. They are often, moreover, the kind of manufactures which people can if necessary do without, or which they increasingly want to manufacture for themselves. Mr. Acheson may tell the owners of American factories that the recovery of Britain’s economy is a vital American interest for economic as well as security reasons ; that a creditor country with a huge and permanent export surplus must be prepared to accept imports if it is not to injure its own exporting interests. But the State Department may not always be able to prevent the duties which Congress wants paid on British, bicycles and other goods for which markets have been patiently built up in the last few years—duties which led to the British Note published last week in Washington.

The pattern of the future is that it will be necessary for Britain constantly to scale down imports, and in particular to diminish the dependence on imported food. One-third of our soil is under the plough, and a fifth or more is grassland ; yet more than half our food still has to be imported. The volume of home agricultural production is more than 40 per cent greater than it was before the war ; the White Paper explains why it has not increased very much since 1949-50 ; but there remain many ways in which it can be increased still further.

The results of the Government’s protracted negotiations with the farmers, expected since the end of February, may have been foreshadowed by the Minister of Food on Tuesday, although he was speaking mainly about the costs of imported food. He forecast that food prices will have to be increased

“over a fairly wide range,” and that will be the case if the farmers get even half the prices which they need and have been asking for. It remains to be seen what the effect of these increases will be on the trade unions. The miners, the railwaymen, the engineers and the shop-workers, members of four of the largest unions in the country, have all asked for increased rates of pay since the Budget. But the real hardships for them will not come if they fail to get the rates they want. The real hardships would come, and on a massive scale, if there should not be a realistic view of the position the country is in. “By the middle of 1951,” says the Economic Survey, “ . . . it was absolutely vital to put things right without delay” :

“Otherwise we should soon have found ourselves deprived of essential imports of food and raw materials through inability to pay for them. This would have meant millions going hungry and out o f work, and the country would have been enveloped in a downward spiral of reduced production, exports, and therefore imports, and consumption. Herein lies by far the most serious danger of large-scale unemployment and destitution facing the country, and it must be averted, at whatever immediate sacrifice.” Germany and E.D.C.

There is a curious naïveté in the optimistic belief that the danger of war in Europe is now small because the danger of a Russian attack in the West is small. There was indeed a certain risk that the Russians would take up the mere suggestion of German rearmament as a threat and make it a casus belli. This they now clearly do not intend to do. Instead, they show by their Note that they accept German rearmament as a fact but hope through neutralization to win over a rearmed Germany to their side. It would be idle to pretend that their propaganda has not had its effect in Germany, and a few mistakes by the Western Powers might well be sufficient to unseat Dr. Adenauer. At such a time it is probably a pity that a misplaced delicacy forbids a frank statement of what German policy hopes will be the outcome of the present moves. It is idle to expect any German not to wish for a revision of the Oder-Neisse frontier ; nor can any German' be so foolish as to believe that Russia will ever willingly accept that revision. But there is reason to hope, the Germans think, that Russia will make concessions to avoid war, if faced at the proper time with the demands of an armed Germany backed by an armed free world. But, if she makes concessions to Germany, she may also make them to the satellite States ; and the free world, while it is glad to rescue Germans who are under