Clothes Without Coupons
A Minister who has to announce the end of .a rationing scheme can hardly go wrong. the public's sense of relief is likely to blanket any mistakes. That is just- as well, for Mr. Harold Wilson's announcement on Monday of the end of clothes rationing was often inept, occasionally threatening and in one case glaringly wrong. Possibly the President of the Board of Trade was so anxious to avoid the suspicion that his decision was timed to coincide with the Sowerby by-election that he felt obliged to mix his good news with bad arguments. Anyway, it was most inept to lay so ranch stress on the caution •with which the Government withdrew the rationing scheme bit by bit, when what was needed, as the trade always said and as subsequent events have proved, was more boldness and enter- prise. Again, the threat to freeze prices if there was an upward movement was a gratuitous piece of officiousness which is all too typical of the bureaucratic mind. And as to Mr. Wilson's assertion that there could be no reduction in the prices of finished goods until there was a fall in the price of raw materials, it is difficult to say who is most disgraced by such a dangerously nonsensical statement— Mr. Wilson the President of the Board of Trade or Mr. Wilson the ex-economist. Are there no possible economies in production which could lead to a reduction in prices ? Are goods to be left unsold in the shops if public demand is slack ? Has the last British clearance sale been held ? It is pathetic that, with all these questions crying out for an answer, the Conservative Opposition should waste their time in gibes about the coincidence of rationing reliefs with by- elections. The real point—and it stood out as plainly as possible in Mr. Wilson's statement—is that at the very time when he is belatedly and over-cautiously removing controls he is continually revealing the mentality which prefers controls to freedom.
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