Paying for Imports Lord Nuffield's desire that British citizens should
buy British cars is intelligible enough, but when he goes on to say, as he did at Oxford on Saturday, that one man is thrown out of work for twelve months every time a foreign car is bought he is uttering one of those dangerous half-truths which make inevitably for sloppy political thinking. It may be quite true that the purchase of a foreign car reduces employment in the British motor industry, but it does not follow at all that it swells the general unemployment figure. A foreign car has to be paid for with British exports, and a British miner or a British weaver or a British boot-and-shoe hand reaps the benefit. In the one ease the effect of the transaction is visible, in the other invisible, but• it is none the less real. We should not be lamenting the contraction of international trade if international trade were really a disaster.
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