ELECTORAL TRUCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 June 1943, Page 4

ELECTORAL TRUCE

BETWEEN BRITISH PARTIES

DEFENDED BY MR HERBERT MORRISON. DISCUSSION OF POST-WAR POLICY. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, June 27. “I believe that if we were to come out of this Government in the middle of this great war; if we were to break the electoral truce ourselves and proceed deliberately, almost with malice aforethought, to break up the political unity of our country, the young man in the Eighth Army would want to know why the politicians were squabbling at home while he was doing the fighting,” the Home Secretary, Mr Herbert Morrison, said when addressing a meeting of the London Labour Party. Mr Morrison said that while Labour could not cut,the dash it would like in the Coalition Government, it was not prevented from expressing its mind or from crusading and trying to get the country to see the troubles that were coming at the end of the war if steps were not taken to circumvent them. He appealed to Labour to devote much more time to securing the transformation of an imperfect social order into a better social order. There was need for more public ownership and public control of production, but the control must be constructive and helpful and not merely bureaucratic.

People must be made to understand that public ignorance could no longer be a shield for vested interests and a slothful government. “In our financial policy after the war there must be no financial irresponsibility,” he said. "We must draw up a scheme of priorities and decide how to spend our money, then spent it fruitfully and without waste. Our financial plan must be expansive, not restrictive. There must be no hidebound acceptance of the old idea that finance must dominate production. There must be no sharp changes in the value of money and no sharp inflation or manipulation of the people’s savings.” The war had shown what could be done under extraordinary conditions, he said, and if it was possible to pursue extreme expansionist policies in war they could certainly pursue moderate expansionist policies in peace. What had happened was that the Government had made the banking and financial system its servant and not its master as it had been in 1931. “Labour favours expansionist policies and proclaims that fact,” Mt Morrison concluded, “but with the example of wartime finance before it, Labour knows very well how to pursue expansionist policies while keeping the pound steady.”