Orders of the Day — Budget Proposals and Economic Survey

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 12 April 1948.

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Photo of Major Donald Bruce Major Donald Bruce , Portsmouth North 12:00, 12 April 1948

The only conflict of any significance is that hon. Members on this side of the Committee consider that the Economic Survey for 1948 embodies a plan and hon. Members opposite consider that it does not. I therefore listened very carefully for some constructive alternative. Did we get an elaboration of the very carefully set out phrases in the Industrial Charter under the skilled editorship of the right hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Mr. R. A. Butler)? No. Did we get an elucidation of some of the more abstruse parts of that rather involved document? No. All we got was a statement that the solution of our problems could only be accomplished if there were a reversion to the price mechanism.

This has been the whole burden of the Opposition's contribution not only today but in the past two or three days of the Debate—leave everything to the price mechanism again and our troubles will right themselves. It is, therefore, very instructive to read what some prominent Members of the Conservative party have said about the days when the price mechanism operated. And it should be noted that there is one conrol with which the Opposition entirely agree. They grant the Government the right at any time to utilise the financial instrument at its disposal to provide the general background within which the economy can function. It is by the handling of finance and price mechanism, according to the Opposition, that our prosperity can be regained.

I observed in a publication "Design for Freedom" with which we understand the hon. Member for Monmouth (Mr. P. Thorneycroft), who made such a fluent and vitriolic speech the other night, is connected, says: Throughout the whole period 5958 to 1939 the average number of men out of work at any time in this country was one and a half million. To finish a job in those days was to run a grave risk of having no job at all. Deprived by successive Governments of any, or any effective, answer to the problem, workers' organisations endeavoured to deal with it themselves. I cannot honestly dissent from the verdict of the hon. Member, who is a Tory, or his colleagues on the National Liberal, or is it Liberal benches, and some other dissident members of the Conservative Party, because quite obviously that statement is true. But the right hon. Member for Woodford (Mr. Churchill) has endeavoured to induce the population to believe that all the stories about the bad old days of unemployment are so much moonshine. Therefore, I was very much interested to read the remarks of the hon. Member for Monmouth, whom we hope will not be on the third bench of the Opposition for very long.

Then we got from the right hon. Member for Aldershot that price mechanism was required. But we got more than that. We also had the statement that central planning would not work, that the Government could not plan centrally, and that the experience of the last two or three years had proved this. It is, therefore, instructive to read what the right hon. Gentleman himself said in the House on 10th March last: To suggest that we believe—and it is often suggested—that the Government should not have a central and overall plan for extricating the country from its present difficulties is manifestly absurd and insults our intelligence.