The Sun MONDAY, APRIL 2, 1928. HATS OFF TO MR. CHURCHILL!

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 319, 2 April 1928, Page 8

The Sun MONDAY, APRIL 2, 1928. HATS OFF TO MR. CHURCHILL!

ALWAYS at midnight of March 31 the last item is added to the British Budget which is released forthwith to the nation

either for better or for worse, for its delight or despondency. The document covers financial business aggregating over £840,000,000, but its colossal scope does not cause delay in final computation.

It is to be noted with the liveliest satisfaction that Mr. Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, has had no reason to fear being hailed as an April fool. His Budget is a financial triumph, proving once again that the third time is lucky, also that fortune favours the adventurous. The agile adventurer, an irrepressible optimist, looked for a surplus of £1,440,000 and got £4,239,000 as a golden gift Easter egg. One can now see him in imagination, marching along the Embankment to Westminister, a new silk hat glistening in the spring sunshine, his expansive smile the happiest symbol of British financial recovery in the Empire. Even New Zealand’s depressed economists and the most despondent leading members of the Farmers’ Union might be pardoned for singing wistfully: “Oh! to be in England now that Churchill’s there!”

Last year when Mr. Churchill was called upon to escape from unprecedented financial difficulties English commentators, noting the plight of the man in an extraordinary situation, observed that he was a perfect political Houdini; “he was not only bound hand and foot, but was in a box, with the lid securely fastened, at the bottom of the river. Yet in a very short time he was climbing out of the box, bland and eloquent and with no trace of his bonds.” That was as good a picture as any of the Chancellor’s predicament and the legerdemain which extricated him. It is to Mr. Churchill’s outstanding credit as an ingenious financier that he achieved what seemed to be impossible without imposing additional irksome burdens on the taxpayer — or increased duties on necessary articles of consumption. The new taxation was limited to luxuries while all the other sources of additional revenue were in the nature of unique expedients, most of which can never be repeated. For example, he arranged to collect the landlord’s property tax in a single instalment instead of in two half-yearly parts, thus collecting £15,000,000 with one drag of his net, and leaving final adjustment between Exchequer and taxpayer to “the end of the world, if that day should fall between December and July.” In other directions Heaven smiled upon his nimble optimism. It was a bad year for millionaires and those with great possessions. Death duties yielded £77,000,000. Behind the Chancellor of the Exchequer, however, is the sturdy pith of British trade. The nation has made a splendid recovery, and the revival of its business, generally has aided an adroit collector of national revenue. Details do not matter much, nor need one look too closely at the shadows in the picture. Enough to know that it is a brighter picture than even the most hopeful people expected to see at the end of last financial year. Since everybody admires a successful adventurer the nation will smile with Mr. Churchill. It is a pity that New Zealand cannot get him on loan for three parliamentary sessions.