Dollars or News ?
The debate which Mr. Clement Davies succeeded in forcing on the newsprint question elicited from the Government no sort of convincing defence of its latest attack on the Press. No one seriously believes that Ministers are deliberately out to stifle criticism, but the appointment of the totally unnecessary Royal Commission on the Press last autumn, followed by a total suppression of all weekly journals a few months later, followed by this new and quite indefen- sible cut in the raw material of newspapers, does at least argue a certain congenital hostility to the Press generally on the part of the present Government. A saving of even £2,000,000 out of a total trade deficit of over £400,000,000 might be worth while if no account were taken of the price to be paid. Possibly Sir Stafford Cripps himself does not realise what it means for daily papers whose average size before the war was over twenty pages to be reduced from the present six pages to four. The inevitable result is that information that the public ought to have, and has a Tight to demand, will be denied it by the fiat of the Board of Trade. That is a much more serious matter than has yet been fully realised ; the saving of £2,000,000 worth of dollars will be very dearly bought indeed. Equally serious, if not more so, is Sir Stafford Cripps's statement on another aspect of the cut. Asked whether the supply that was being reduced had not been contracted for on the basis of a definite Government statement that the necessary dollars would be available, the President of the Board of Trade replied, " There was a statement that dollars would be available, and had the circumstances been different they would have been." This unilateral variation of a firm contract is incredible. Dollars, of course, are available, hundreds of millions of them. But the Government prefers to use them for other purposes, such as films.
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