Friends of Britain

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 425, 15 August 1947, Page 5

Friends of Britain

‘-E don’t know as we write what the British Govern. ment propdses to do to meet the thickening crisis, and we are not going to guess. We do know that these are Britain's darkest days since 1942, and that only her enemies think it permis- _ sible to do nothing. The question is, Who are her enemies? If they are men and women of other nations this is mot the time to talk about them. Britain has foreign enemies for good reasons and foreign enemies for bad reasons, and neither one group nor the other can be asked for sympathy now. But in Britain ‘itself, and throughout the whole British Commonwealth, everyone is an enemy this week who is not a friend. We are enemies when we eat too much,

waste too much, do too much idling, arguing, criticising, or complaining. The most hostile act of all is to say or suggest or. encourage others to say or suggest that all this trouble could have been avoided under a different government, that Britain is short of dollars and of food, of labour and of capital equipment, because her people voted one party out and another in at the last election. The search for scapegoats is one of the oldest, shabbiest, and _ shadiest tricks in history, and no political party has ever kept quite free of it. Mr. Churchill’s Blenheim Palace speech, for example, will one day seem as disgraceful to his supporters as the mud slinging of ingrates seems already to his worthier opponents. But that offence too is a symptom. It means that there is tension in the big /nouses of Britain as well as in the ‘smallest, that no one is comfortable or at peace, that tempers are wearing thin, and that whoever adds to the burden and the strain is a criminal if he is British and does it deliberately. ;