WIDE OUTLOOK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 March 1943, Page 2

WIDE OUTLOOK

IN BRITISH FOREIGN SERVICE REFLECTED IN RECRUITING OF PERSONNEL debate in the house OF COMMONS. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, March 18. Opening the debate in the House of Commons on the Government proposals for reform of the Foreign Service, the Foreign Under-Secretary, Mr. R. K. Law, said the reason for the proposed reforms was not inefficiency. It was simply that the conditions had changed in two vital respects. First, the disappearance of what one might call the governing class, which till relatively recently in every western country, was a small restricted class responsible for government and policy in that country. In every country that class had much the same outlook, the same standard of education and values. In those circumstances it was necessary that our diplomats should be members of that class, otherwisse they were likely to have very little influence in the country where they represented us. But those times were past, and more recently the net for Foreign Service officials had been cast very wide. These tendencies, already well mark-, ed before the war, would certainly become even more definite in the postwar period, when it would be nec.es sary for every member of the Foreign Service to be in the fullest possible sense 'a representative of every class and section of the community: Secondly and thirdly was an even greater change, there had been a fusion of politics and economics in foreign affairs. The Foreign Service of the future would have to give all possible help to our exporters and to the revival and increase in export trade.. Provision was being made that in future no young man of ability, personality and character was to be prevented from entering the Foreign Service from lack of means, and that every recruit should receive the fullest possible training not only in foreign languages, but in commercial practice, economic practice, and trade union law. The House approved the proposals by 153 votes to six.