TEE TABLET, September 8th, 1951

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A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 198, No. 5807

LONDON, SEPTEMBER 8th, 1951

SIXPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1840

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE MEANING OF SAN FRANCISCO

The American Alliance with Japan THE FAMILY IN BRITAIN

Disquieting Trends in the Registrar General’s Report. By John Fitzsimons SUMMER IN GERMANY

ON SHAKESPEARE’S POLITICS

By Donald Nichotì

By Robert Speaight

WEAKNESSES OF THE SOVIET UNION

Some Recent Indications. By Wilfred Ryder

SOME HOME TRUTHS AT BLACKPOOL B EFORE he entered Labour politics Mr. Gaitskeli was a university lecturer in economics. What he had to say at Blackpool was quite elementary economics ; and it is a commentary on the Congress that is should be considered an act calling for courage to restate those simple and unavoidable truths. It is a more pregnant commentary that while he was warmly applauded, and enhanced his personal reputation as a man of intellectual clarity with the courage of his convictions, there was at the end of his speech no expectation that the demands for wage increases would be withdrawn. Every Union approves of restraint in general but makes an exception for itself. What the speech has done is to strengthen the bargaining position of the authorities, primarily the Coal Board and the British Railways Executive who will have to deal with and seek to moderate these demands. The extra money, if it were made available, would be immediately spent on consumption either of imports—meat, tobacco, films are three great categories—or on home manufactures which ought to be exported. The nation is doubly prejudiced by such consumption, for it forces up prices at home and increases costs all round, and it makes it harder to pay for the essential imports. Mr. Gaitskell’s speech was useful in its demonstration that contrary to so much propaganda, there is now no solution in continually increasing subsidies and now no significant margin left for taxation that does not fall on everybody. But when income is so heavily taxed in steep graduation, and death duties are already so high, with effects never foreseen or intended ten years ago when money had a much higher value, we are surprised Mr. Gaitskeli, even as a sop to the Left Wing, should have given his blessing to the devising of further schemes for a predatory egalitarianism, designed to secure the result that all the well-to-do people in England will be foreigners.

and it is one which Mr. Gaitskell left out, is the intimate connection between increased productivity and the ordinary shareholder. Mr. Gaitskell repeated -the truism that all hopes of a higher general standard—even of the same standard —depend on greater productivity. But this is not simply a matter of each individual worker doing more. That is true in some places, meaningless in others. The coal face miner can produce more, but the signalman cannot, however public spirited, signal twice as many trains. More trains can only run if there is more traffic, more activity somewhere else first, and when we follow the argument through, it ends with the investor, that someone must be found who will forgo current consumption to invest in a business to make and sell some new thing, or some old thing in a new and better way, preferably to markets abroad. No one will do this readily unless he has a margin in excess of his ordinary expenditure, and most investment has come from people so situated, now growing very few. Nor will anyone do it if there is more risk of loss than hope of reward, or if the prizes are all removed while all the risks remain. Labour policy threatens to make Britain a country in which it is more sensible to gamble, because gamblers if they win keep their winnings, than to invest in ordinary shares. The ordinary shareholder is of all lenders the one least tainted by usury, and most in accordance with Christian social teaching. He carries the main burden of risk, and if he loses, his loss is final and irremediable where those who have lost their employment can betake themselves elsewhere. But the political fashion is now all in favour of the debenture holder and the mortgagee, who take no risk and accept a fixed return. These forms of lending are useful and necessary, but they have little connection with expansion and increased productivity, which needs the capital that is adventurous and staked upon the uncertain future. An Out-of-date Psychology

In a guarded passing sentence he spoke of the possibility of undistributed profits being turned into workers’ shares. We wonder how far his hearers took in that such profits must continue to be undistributed, and the share will not increase its holder’s power to consume except to the extent of future taxed dividends. There is no novelty in these projects, •they have been experimented with for the last eighty years. Two great facts have emerged. The first is that they will lose their psychological value if they are made compulsory by law, and cease to be a voluntary gesture of goodwill by the owners of a business. The second is that most of these schemes have been discontinued and exchanged for a straightforward bonus to workers when the year has been a good one. The trouble with shares is that those who hold them expect dividends which are not always forthcoming, and then easily pass from disappointment to criticism, very partially instructed,’ about the management and policy. Instead of greater harmony there is greater disharmony. But the main point,

When Miss Alice Bacon, Chairman of the Labour Party, told the delegates “we are all rebels,” she was not perhaps aware how true this is and how psychologically important. The notion of the rebel is meaningless unless there is an authority against which to rebel ; just as the notion of Liberal is meaningless unless there is some settled order, some political and social pattern for the Liberal impetus to work against, to work upon, and to modify.

The Labour movement grew up as a movement of rebels against the strong powers that were. Increasingly the whole conception of a rebel has now become meaningless, as a way for people, themselves in charge of the nation’s affairs, to go on regarding themselves. Unfortunately so many of them do. And it is particularly unfortunate when they take rebel psychology or under-dog mentality to their contemplation of Asiatic or African affairs. They approach Asia and Africa