Petrol Freed
The Government has done what it said could not be done, the number of cars on the road during the Whitsun week-end con- stituted a record, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, having providently increased the tax on petrol by 9d. a gallon a month or so in advance, will find his Budget balance substantially increased and is not likely to suffer seriously from lack of advice as to how the windfall should be expended. When a Government, having been urged continuously by the Opposition to do something, finally does it, should emphasis be laid on its earlier recalcitrance or its subsequent surrender ? The answer, in this case at any - rate, is that surrender is not the appropriate word, for it looks - as though Mr. Noel-Baker had been able to secure a -universally desired result at a substantially less considerable expenditure of dollars than earlier negotiations had suggested would be possible. Whether his success is to be attributed partly to good luck (in the changed attitude of the American oil companies) or wholly to good management, he is to be congratulated on \sq quickly signalising his occupancy of his new post by a decision so popular and beneficial. But for one recent manifestation there is no excuse. When Mr. Churchill during the General Election suggested in a perfectly reasonable and temperate way that the end of petrol rationing should be possible he was assailed from every conceivable Labour quarter, not merely as trying to score an election point but as ignoring all realities and proposing the palpably impossible. ,That was in February. Petrol-rationing was abolished in May. What Mr. Churchill declared possible was proved possible. He never suggested that it should be done without previous negotiation and by a stroke of the pen. Would it have been done at all if the Government had retained its 200 majority ?
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