THE TABLET October 31st, 1959. VOL. 213. No. 6232

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 184 0

OCTOBER 31st, 19 59

NINEPENCE

The Queen s Speech: Reflections on the New Session

Irish Emigration: I. The Economic Problem. By G a rre t FitzG erald The Church in India: All Assessment of Progress. By the Archbishop of Bangalore

East German Journey: The Dull Kind of Communism Basildon in Essex: A New Town in the Country. By Rosemary Rendel

Doctrine and Knowledge: An Address to Undergraduates. By the Bishop of Salford Marcel Proust: Two New Biographies reviewed by Robert Speaight

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

MR. MAUDLING’S PROBLEM

"THE most difficult task in the new Government is that of Mr. Maudling, at the Board of Trade, where his great aim has to be to minimise the extent to which Britain will suffer both by exclusion from the European Common Market and from the powerful competition that that market will generate as the age of automation conies in Europe. We believe that ten years from now it will be fashionable to condemn severely the Attlee and Churchill Governments for continually invoking the pretext of their economic obligations to the Commonwealth as a reason for standing aside through the preparatory stages of the great movement which is Europe’s response to the changed conditions of the post-war world. Europe had been for centuries the home of selfsufficient nationalism, and was made up of peoples with a long tradition of fighting each other and trying to dominate each other. The great figures in its history for four hundred years were men who aggrandised their own nations—Louis XIV or Napoleon, Frederick the Great or Bismarck. The power of historical tradition is still immensely strong, particularly with the French. But there were overriding and compelling reasons for breaking with the past. A sufficient measure of unity, economic and then political, was seen to be the condition both of independence and of prosperity ; the only way to avoid life as a client of the United States, the only wily to make a sufficiently large market for the age of automation and atomic power.

The British were betrayed by their own insularity, by their contentment with their political institutions, by their sense of being the centre and head of an Empire or Commonwealth, into allowing Europe to unite without them in a Common Market where they will be on the wrong side of the tariff wall surrounding a hundred and sixty million people. It is a fortunate thing for Europe that the British are outside, for there would be no movement towards political unity if they were there. But it is a dangerous thing for Britain, and the danger will only be lessened in proportion as the tide of opinion in the world runs against protection, and sees tariffs and quotas as measures to be kept in reserve for special circumstances, the tariffs to be as low and the quotas as big as possible. The ideal of all the non-Communist world should be completely free trade, as the best way of bringing cheap consumer goods to the great majority of the world’s population, which is still in urgent need of more to consume.

We doubt whether Mr. Maudling will get very far if he continues the policies of the last eighteen months, which have consisted in asking for a free trade area for manufactures while being unwilling to face the fact that for four of the Outer Seven, the Scandinavian countries and Portugal, a bigger market for their manufactured exports means very little, when their primary exports are things they grow, food or wood or wine. It is rather incongruous company that we find ourselves in when we alone of the Seven are immense exporters of manufactured goods.

Mr. Maudling would probably do far better to take a different starting-point in his new office ; to ponder the new agreement which the Australians have just signed with the Germans, and to see in it one more sign that the famous Imperial Preferences brought in in 1932 are rapidly losing their importance. They represented the British variant of a general movement in every country that was suddenly afflicted with heavy unemployment after 1929. They were an attempt, largely successful in the ’thirties, to secure some settled