It is a great pity that the Stationery Office does
not make its publi- cations more generally available. The necessity of writing to Kings- way and enclosing a postal order, I am quite certain, deters fifty per cent. of purchasers of blue-books from purchasing them at all. For that reason one of the most important and absorbingly interesting of such publications, published since this column last appeared, will not get half the publicity it deserves. Its title is fantastically long and technical but its number is 170-I, it costs 2S. 6d., and it consists of a verbatim report of the evidence taken by members of the House of Commons Select Committee on Expenditure who went to Ger- many earlier this year to look into the £8o,000,000 which the occupa- tion is costing the British taxpayer. When I mention that the first witness was General Sir Brian Robertson, in some ways the most important personality in the British Zone, and that his evidence, in the form of question and answer, runs to over forty columns, the value of the report needs little further demonstration. And through other witnesses an immense amount of information and explanation about the present situation in Germany was elicited. There are few more illuminating and authoritative compilations on the subject.
Previous page
