High Prices.

Part of Civil Services and Revenue Departments Estimates. 1920–21 [Vote on Account]. – in the House of Commons at on 15 March 1920.

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Photo of Mr Herbert Asquith Mr Herbert Asquith , Paisley

I would like, if I may, to congratulate my hon. Friend who has just sat down on the admirably lucid and temperate statement which he has just made on the main aspects of this case. He has offered a friendly challenge to me in regard to something which I said during a recent election about trusts and combines. On a fitting occasion I shall be quite prepared to develop what I mean by illegitimate combinations. The particular case which he has selected, I do not know whether as an illustration of a legitimate or an illegitimate combination, is one which is still sub judice in the Court of public opinion; I have no prejudice in the matter. I have read the report of the Committee and I have read the reply of Messrs. Coats, and I think, without pronouncing any opinion which I may have formed, that it is a matter which is hardly ripe for a conclusive judgment of this House. My hon. Friend has spoken with great force and great acuteness as to the cause of the rise in prices, and, if I may trespass for a moment on the attention of the Committee, I would like to survey that matter from perhaps a wider and more general point of view. I am able to do so without, what some people would have probably have thought would be the case, making that survey in any acutely polemical spirit. The situation is really too grave for us to spend time and trouble upon recrimination as to the past when we ought to be concentrating our attention upon the present and upon the immediate future.

Further, some criticism and some suggestions which I have developed in the course of the campaign to which my hon. Friend referred, and which a week ago I should have been disposed to press strongly upon the Committee, have been largely anticipated and met in the admirable Memorandum—for such I believe it to be—which has been circulated to the world in the course of the last few days on the economic aspects of Europe by the Supreme Council of the Allies, That is, in my judgment, an admirable document. It contains a full statement of many relevant facts, an excellent body of edifying and profitable doctrine and some practical proposals of great importance, which are none the less welcome because they have been, in my judgment, too long delayed. The Memorandum or Manifesto or whatever it is to be called—