THE BEAVERBROOK CRUSADE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 902, 20 February 1930, Page 10

THE BEAVERBROOK CRUSADE

I ORD BEAVERBROOK is a man of intense and sometimes L transient enthusiasms. His Empire Free Trade campaign may be as transient a passion as some of the other political toys which he has played with and discarded. But at the moment this crusade, now finding its way into the headlines of the British Press as a movement sponsoring a new political party, is a powerful agency backed by the resources of millionaires and supported by the greatest circulations of the London Press. The London “Daily Herald,” official organ of the Government, jibes mercilessly at the Beaverbrook movement, yet in Britain itself the United Empire Party may attract unexpected numbers to its standard. If the campagin does not succeed in Great Britain, it will not succeed anywhere. British manufacturers and their operatives are the people who have everything to gain and not much to lose by the creation of an Empire tariff wall and the reduction of internal barriers. Across tlie Atlantic they have the example of the United States, with its startling prosperity, its economic domination of the whole world, and its corresponding advantages for both capital and labour. The prosperity of the United States has been achieved by remarkable natural endowments and insistence on the principle of Protection. Within the British Empire are equal, if not superior, natural endowments, perhaps not so compactly grouped, but on the other hand wider in their range and extent. All that the Empire wants then, to elevate her to the same position as the United States, and give a fair chance for the capitalisation of Imperial resources, is the one innovation, Protection. This is the kernel of the Beaverbrook argument, and it will be surprising if, when the breadth of the ideal is realised, harassed British industrialists, and many of the working classes as well, do not grasp at it as the talisman of a new era of opportunity.

But more than a triumph in Britain will be needed to guarantee the success of the scheme. After converting Britain, Lord Beaverbrook has to convert the Dominions, and this is where his plan must wreck itself. Progressive Dominions aspiring to the development of national industries, and the exploitation of their own resources with their own factories and their own labour, will not tolerate an arrangement which will make them subservient to powerful manufacturing interests in Great, Britain. Even New Zealand, the most unselfish of the Dominions in its Imperial outlook, cannot afford to risk the security of her growing industries by casting them into direct competition with overseas organisations. Lord Beaverbrook may win passing success in Britain, but lie will never persuade the Dominions to sacrifice their economic independence, and until he does so he will have squandered his millions in vain.