GREAT BRITAIN: Empire Free Trade”

Death in the House of Commons came last week to the pet project of the twin “Hearsts of England,” the Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere.

Together they own the largest and what should be the most potent pair of newspapers in Great Britain. They can and they do shout every day not with a mere million tongues but with six millions. Viscount Rothermere’s blatant Daily Mail has the largest circulation of any newspaper whatsoever.* Allied in policy, and partially interlocked with the Rothermere interests by stock holdings, are the scarcely less potent papers of Baron Beaverbrook, often called “bounder” by British aristocrats, born and christened William Maxwell Aitken in Canada.

“Max,” fertile of brain, thought up the scheme which he and Viscount Rother mere lay on British breakfast tables every morning as the sole panacea which can save the Empire from fiscal ruin (TIME, Dec. 2). Ingeniously they call it “Empire Free Trade” or “E. F. T.,” because Englishmen are free traders by tradition. But their E. F. T. consists of two inseparable projects: first abolish tariffs among the lands of the British Empire; second, put a high tariff on anything entering the Empire from anywhere else. Plainly the scheme should be labeled “Empire Free Trade plus Imperial Tariffs.”

Commons after Lords. The House of Lords decisively rejected E. F. T. last fall. Last week it came up friendless in the Commons. Out of the House before the debate began slipped solid Stanley Bald win, leader of the Conservative Party, to which Viscount Rothermere has now strangely switched his support after furiously championing the Liberals in the last election with little or no success.

Smart Winston Churchill, most trenchant Conservative speaker, did not sneak out after Leader Baldwin, but he stayed only to grin in silence while E. F. T. was ripped to tatters by a Welsh terrier and a Yorkshire bulldog, respectively the Right Honorable David Lloyd George (Liberal) and Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden (Labor). From the peers gallery scowled Baron Beaverbrook. Viscount Rothermere was on the Atlantic, en route home from the U. S.

“I can see only two real objections to this magnificent scheme,” said Mr. Lloyd George with concentrated sarcasm. “One is that the Dominions will never grant free trade to each other or to England; and the other is that Englishmen will never undertake the erection of a tariff wall against the rest of the world. Otherwise I think the scheme is all right.” Two days later in Canberra, Australia, the Dominion Prime Minister, blunt Laborite James Henry Scullin practically echoed the Welshman. “There is no hope,” said he, “of getting Australia to agree to allow the goods of every other part of the Empire to enter our ports duty free.”

Speaking for the Government, pallid Philip Snowden said with a decisive double-thump of his rubber-tipped canes:

“We will have nothing to do with this crackbrained scheme . . . nebulous and ambiguous except for its clear implications that it would mean a tax and therefore higher prices on food and raw materials. … It is regrettable that the most vocal member of the Opposition is so remarkably addicted to silence today.” (Broad grin from Churchill.)

Howls of Laborite and Liberal derision drowned young Gerald Balfour when he rose to utter feeble conservative praise of E. F. T. Blushing he relapsed onto his bench, and Baron Beaverbrook’s great financial issue was deemed so dead it was not even put to vote.

“Unpleasant Shock.” Straightway public interest shifted to a tempest which had begun to brew in the teapot of the “Old Lady of Threadneedle Street”—the Bank of England.

The Beaverbrook high tariff scheme had been essentially “American,” and was now dead—in Parliament at least—but a new “American” menace threatened. Harvard’s bland Professor Oliver Sprague had been invited, was coming to advise the Bank of England! Since when did this bulwark of the nation need to be propped with “American advice”—especially after the Wall Street crash?

“An unpleasant shock,” said the conservative Evening News. “We cannot feel that our Old Lady needs pepping up!” Then, ironically: “The selection seems to argue that there is a dearth of sound British economists and statisticians. That dearth probably exists. We are not a mass-producing nation and the effort of producing John Maynard Keynes, G. D. H. Cole and Sir Josiah Stamp probably exhausted the nation’s capacity.”

Straightway, as if to show that he was not exhausted, up spoke Economist J. M. Keynes (the long-headed man who married Russian Danseuse Lydia Lapokova). Addressing the National Mutual Life Assurance Society, said he cheerily: “In my judgment the next economic storm will center, nay, it is already centering, neither in Britain nor the United States, but among the great producers of raw materials overseas. For significant signs of recovery from further deterioration it may not be so important to consider New York and London as to watch Australia, South America, Asia and Central Europe areas, which are being reduced to grievous distress by the combined circumstances of a fall in prices for their products and the difficulty of obtaining funds in the international market.”

Apart from the “grievously shocked” Evening News, other London papers took a wait-and-watch-him line toward Advisor Sprague from Harvard. The Conservative Daily Telegram even managed this cheerful note: “The announcement concerning Professor Sprague indicates not merely a continuity of the policy of cooperation between the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve, but that the experiment has been a success.”

* 1,945,635 average daily net sale in 1929, sworn by certified public accountants.