18 JANUARY 1946, Page 2

The Board of Trade Pother

Mr. Ellis Smith in his address to his constituents on Sunday seems a little to have overdramatised his resignation from the Parliamentary Secretaryship of the Board of Trade, a step which has not in fact produced a political cataclysm. But the reasons by which he explains his action have their interest. His differences with Sir Stafford Cripps may have been partly personal, but they were also partly political, and they have the odd effect of displaying the President of the Board of Trade as a reactionary champion of private enter- prise, and very often subsidised private enterprise at that. So far Sir Stafford is not gravely compromised ; what he loses on the swings he can count on gaining on the roundabouts. And outside the extreme Left Mr. Smith will find few supporters for his conten- tion that the cotton industry in particular ought to have been nationalised rather than reconditioned. On the question of the degree of austerity to be imposed on the home population in the interests of the export trade there is room for some difference of opinion, and in this case the difference was unconcealed, Mr. Ellis Smith standing for relaxations which his chief refused. On such matters again as the method of disposal of surplus stocks and the number of factories that should be allocated to the Co-operative Wholesale Society Sir Stafford might reasonably take one view and his second-in-command another. On the whole, judging from Mr. Smith's references to his self-sacrificing toil and the treatment (at present unspecified, but some day to be disclosed) he had suffered. the affair would appear to have been more personal than political That being so, all that remains to be added is that his successor, Mr. J. W. Belcher, is like Mr., Smith a trade union official, but a man with much wider than merely trade union interests. Plenty of abler men could have been found for the post, but not from the ranks of trade unionists