Foreign News: Caviar & Machinery

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Sir Hartley Shawcross, President of the Board of Trade, went down last week to seagirt Cornwall, where he often goes sailing. There, in a luncheon speech, Socialist Shawcross made a defiant announcement: Britain has no intention of tossing overboard her small but growing trade with Iron Curtain countries, regardless of what the U.S. Congress says or does.

"We are fully alive," he said, "to the need to control the export of strategic goods . . . Our embargo list covers this field . . . Why, our American friends sometimes ask, do we not prohibit all ... exports? The answer is clear enough . . .

"America had not and did not need to have any significant trade with the Soviet ; it means little or nothing to her to discontinue the imports of furs, caviar and crab. With us, things are quite different. We obtain from the Soviet bloc essential foods and raw materials [timber and grain]—and we believe that in these trade exchanges we get as good as we give, economically and strategically."

Shawcross minimized the chief point of U.S. criticism: while Britain embargoes such obvious war goods as aircraft engines and arms, its chief exports to Iron Curtain countries are machinery and machine tools (60% of its $197 million Iron Curtain traffic last year) and raw rubber (7,000 tons in the first five months of 1951).