But the controls are being so vigorously attacked that they will have to go. Now the hunt is up after Mr. Geoffrey Lloyd, Minister of Mines. How can he justify the rationing of coal when there are practically unlimited supplies of coal in Britain and 70,000 unemployed miners. Why is petrol so limited that the motor industry is half dead—Sir John Simon certainly will not get the £104,000,000 for which he budgeted from motorists—when it is reported that tankers are lying in ports full of oil for which there is no place to put it in.
And although a drop in exports in the first month of the war was to be expected, manufacturers and shipping companies insist that it need not have been so much as the £16 million odd recorded, if they had not been hampered by so many forms to fill up in triplicate and by lack of liaison among;|the half-dozen different Ministries whom they have to consult over the movement of every package.
A group of M.P.s have set themselves steadily to fight the controls. Among them a leading figure is Sir John Wardlaw-Milne whose name is well known in the Far East. At every meeting of Parliament there is a string of pertinent questions which frequently bring absurd and damaging facts to light. These questions in the House are the great safeguard of popular freedom. Not only are Ministers obliged to answer. but sometimes the questions bring to their knowledge facts which their departments would much rather they did not know.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.