I do not know if you are aware of what this Bill is designed to do. It is to incorporate us anew in the Sterling Area for the purpose of the control of resources for international trade. That is what I am talking about. I am asking the Minister for Finance if we in the Sterling Area, plus the Dollar Area, are to be held up to ransom by a country which was on the flat of its back and could not pay six-pence for its own salvation 20 short years ago, simply because it has continued this fantastic operation through which it took from the United States hundreds of billions of dollars as a free gift with which it proceeded to buy gold and because it used the free gift it got from the United States to generate the power within France to buy gold out of the cellars of Fort Knox.
We are running in circles, tying ourselves in tighter knots. The Minister will confirm this. He was warned in Washington that we were approaching a critical situation arising not from what any one of us was doing but from the growing lack of liquidity in the means of international exchange. We are in the astonishing situation that we are drifting back to precisely the same problems as brought the whole world crashing around our ears in 1929 when we had one man standing at one end of a road hungry for meat and another man standing 100 yards away in his bare feet with a surplus of cattle. The hungry man had thousands of pairs of boots and there were no means of bringing the man with the cattle and without a boot to his foot in contact with the man starving for meat with thousands of boots. There was no medium of exchange.
I am simplifying it because when illiquidity grows people start raising barriers to defend their own particular enclaves and the whole system grinds to a standstill. What appals me is that there is nothing mysterious about it. If it were purely a question of economics it could be resolved overnight by agreement between the ten executives to whom the Minister referred. However, it is a purely political situation which coerces the ten to say: "We cannot find a solution because one member vetoes the requisite proposal to provide the solution."
People may say we have no business in international affairs, that we are not big enough, powerful enough and do not dispose of big battalions. Maybe we do not but there are certain areas of international affairs to which we do dispose of what can be substantial power and that is the gift of which we are told in the immortal fable about the Chinese Emperor. He was told by his tailors that they would clothe him in a suit of raiment so exquisite that none but angels could perceive it and they sent him out into the streets naked. No one dare say "I see no clothes on the emperor" for fear they would be termed less than angels, until a small child perched on his mother's shoulder said: "Mammy, I see no clothes on the emperor" and the emperor fled in his nakedness from the streets.
We have the power to say: "At this moment we are beginning to feel the pinch. The European Economic Community are beginning to raise barriers in order to protect their domestic market and one of the barriers is a tax of £30 per head on cattle". That has thrown our whole livestock industry into wild confusion. It constitutes a threat to the stability of our whole society. Do not doubt that very similar problems are arising in a vast variety of other countries for the want of liquidity.
This is the classic case of hunger and abundance being perpetuated by a barrier of gold. Is it unreasonable that, if there is any Government in this world so reckless as to raise a wall of gold between the hungry and the means to feed them, a small country such as this is should say: "There is nothing very much we want except to cross this wall of gold, to build a ladder to enable those of us who are prepared to make the effort to climb and meet one another for no more desperate purpose than to exchange the labour of our hands with our neighbours for the labour of theirs." That is the kind of question this House ought to ask itself. That is the kind of question an Irish Minister for Finance might, with propriety, ask some of the pundits of international finance in Washington.
I am old enough to remember 1928 and 1929 when the Viennese Bank went burst, when the Credit Anstalt Verein of Vienna suspended payments. Very few people realised the significance of what had happened. It is perfectly true that it is foolish to be always thinking of the past but it is equally foolish to forget its lessons. I was standing on the steps of Amiens Street Station when I heard the news that the Archduke of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo. Nobody knew what that signalled. I think I was in Killiney when the Viennese Bank went burst. Nobody dreamt of the disaster of which that was the signal. I do not know what the collapse of the bank in Beirut means, and I do not know where it is going to end, but it certainly means that some people in the Middle East have got it into their heads that if de Gaulle is buying gold, they also would do well to get their money out of banks and into gold. Unless we are all mad are we going to sit here and allow a great man who has stayed on too long in a position of great responsibility in the French Republic to combine with a group of illiterate sheiks of the Persian Gulf and involve us all in an uncontrollable catastrophe?
I remember the days of 1929, and I think the late Sir Montagu Norman was Governor of the Bank of England. He was preceded by an old gentleman by the name of Lord Cunliffe. Does the Minister for Finance know that in 1914 the then Chancellor of the Exchequer sent for Lord Cunliffe to ask him what were the gold reserves of the Bank of England and where were they, and that Lord Cunliffe replied he would not tell him what they were or where they were? Lord Cunliffe secretly shipped those gold reserves to Canada without the knowledge of the British Exchequer. The attitude in those days was that politicians had no business to inquire, that that was the business of the Bank of England. To his eternal credit, the late Neville Chamberlain or his uncle, one of the Chamberlains anyway, sacked him and established the authority of the Government.
I do not know if there are any Sir Montagu Normans strutting around today. This I know, that I lived to see Keynes declared a prophet and the so-called orthodox men who went before him treated as half imbeciles. We are going to see in our time, perhaps, not in mine but certainly in the Minister's, a great many of Professor Keynes' theories go up the spout. He believed in the grand illusion of controlled inflation, the theory that you can give people nice small doses of heroin and that if they only keep the dosage in control they will have pleasant dreams, the snag being, of course, they never do. Controlled inflation is much the same, a grand illusion.
I want to say to the Minister for Finance that, in so far as bankers are available to be used as trained servants of us who represent the people, in so far as economists are there to be used as trained servants of us who represent the people, they are very useful, but when they begin to labour under the illusion that they know more about governing the country than those of us who devote our lives to it for very much less reward than they are in the habit of accepting, it is time to put them in their place and to tell them that, in our judgment —and we are people who count— people are more important than things. That is the lesson we have learned, and very few of them have learned it. Let us keep the maxim constantly before our minds, that people are more important than things. Most of the bankers, national and international, and financiers, whether they be practical or theoretical, never knew that simple maxim and those who have heard of it have forgotten or misunderstood it. They need to be reminded that in a free democratic country it is we, the elected representatives of the people, who must take the final decisions, that they are technicians who are to carry out our orders and if they ever fail, for the want of the will or the capacity, they should be sacked and others found to do it.
I would be interested to hear from the Minister for Finance whether that was the line he took at the International Monetary Fund Meeting and, if it was, what answer did he get.