NEW COMMONWEALTH WILL MAKE HISTORY

Grey River Argus, 12 November 1948, Page 6

NEW COMMONWEALTH WILL MAKE HISTORY

LONDON, Nov. 7 The Commonwealth Relations Secretary, Rt. Hon. P. J. Noel-Baker, speaking at the Cambridge Union, said he believed that historians would rank the recent meeting of Commonwealth Prime Ministers with the meeting which drew up the Balfour Report leading to the Statute of Westminister 20 years ago. “The more people talk about the meeting the more its sjreat significance in the evolution of the Commonwealth will appear, because for the first time the Governments considered the developments of the Commonwealth’s economic resources for the benefit of their own nations and the benefit of mankind,” he said. NO TRUST IN SOVIET “We are confident,” he added, “that we can so organise world opinion that aggression in the early future cannot happen, even if anybody is planning it —and I don’t say anybody is. Britain is willing to disarm and abolish the atom bomb, provided Russia accepts the proposed system of control, but until the plan is accepted we will not trust the Soviet Union to play the game in the work of collective security. We are not without hope, but we are without illusions, and we are not into anything unreal and sham. It has to be real business.”