Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 1947 THAT TEN MILLION GIFT!

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 2, 7 March 1947, Page 4

Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 1947 THAT TEN MILLION GIFT!

WITH all due respect to the financial authorities who have advised the Government of the Dominion to make over the loan of £10,000,000 to starving Britain, the very plain man-in-the-stfeet, is apt to wonder just how far a pin prick of this nature will go in relieving the Mother Country of her thousands of millions indebtedness. The most pressing need in the Old Country we are assured is foodstuffs, and plenty of them. Fats are all-important. From a primary producing country such as our own it would seem wiser to have either stepped up our own production to the extent of the loan, or to have imposed a new basis of rationing which would have yielded approximately the same thing. We don’t anticipate that the people in Great Britain will be able to eat the money nor do we suppose that it will relieve their in-

debtedness to any great degree. Yet, we understand and dutifully applaud the generous gestures apparently being made-by all the colonies, in cash. Canada and Australia are in the forefront with gifts running into tens and hundreds of millions. Perhaps the money is merely held as a media of exchange whereby our own produce may be purchased on behalf of the British public! We confess to an absolute lack of appreciation of the intricacies of high finance (a weakness we hold in common with most other mortals apart from the internationl money-jugglers) and though not necessarily Douglasites are honestly puzzled as to just where the money will come in. Great Britain, we are told is on shorter rations than during any part of the war —starving herself, we understand in order that her vanquished enemies on the mainland may not waste away. ‘Good old. Britain’ is the cry which we re-echo, and respond manfully in our efforts to build up her larders by way of Gift Parcels, fat collections and excessive export drives. When the hardest winter of all strikes her countryside—we, the dairy-farm of Empire, send over £10,000,000 in cash. Not understanding the laws of international economics, we wonder, and will probably be left to wonder for a long long time.