SOCIAL ADVANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 November 1942, Page 4

SOCIAL ADVANCE

, AFTER WAR ! ANTICIPATIONS of minister TO U.S.A. NEITHER COMMUNISM NOR PRIVILEGED RULE. NEW YORK, July 3. Britain will tread the middle way after the Avar, becoming neither Communist nor a nation ruled by “a privileged class of aristocrats, but rather a country of full employment and social security for all, according to Mr Harold Beresford Butler, new British Minister to the United States. Mr Butler, in his first public address since arriving in the United States on June 21, declared in a broadcast address that the sense of common peril and national purpose had “lit a fire of resolve which has melted class differences and party rivalries” in Britain.

“The country is now one family as it has never been in my lifetime, fighting together, working together, praying,” he said. “The rule of equality of service runs from top to bottom, and it has all been done by democratic methods —no Gestapo, very little use of compulsory powers, just the tapping of the spontaneous desire to serve of a whole people and its effective organisation into' a mighty national effort. “And what will Britain be like when it is over? I am told that some Americans still picture it as it was in bygone days—a country ruled by a privileged class of land aristocrats. Well, that old England was disappearing fast before the last World War; it had almost entirely disappeared by 1939.” After the war, Britons want social advance to continue at a higher tempo, Mi’ Butler declared. Full employment and social security for all are aims which the country will expect its Government to achieve, "whatever sacrifices are entailed,” he added.

“But don’t imagine,” he continued, “that Britain .is going Communist or anything of that sort. Englishmen and Scotsmen and Welshmen are not made that way. They are stout individualists who want to manage their own lives and not have them managed for them. But they also think that freedom can be combined with a social purpose, with greater all-round happiness and more general prosperity." Recalling that 44,009 civilians had been killed in air raids over .Britain, Mr Buller said his country was ready to fight invasion more fiercely now that even in 1940, since it had seen what the Nazis had done to. Greece, Poland, Yugoslavia and Russia. He asserted that Britain had beaten the German output of aircraft and possibly surpassed German production in other weapons by mobilising the whole nation. “The power of evil cannot prevail against the united wills and the growing might of those four great peonies, the Uniled Slates, the. British Commonwealth, Soviet Union and China, backed by all the other United Nalions,” he added. “We shall not fail to achieve victory in war together. When it is won, we must not fail to achieve a peace together which will bring a'happier world to the generations that come after us.”