THE TABLET, September 6th, 1952

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

VOL. 200, No. 5859

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, SEPTEMBER 6th, 1952

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

RETIREMENT FROM WORK The Need to Revise Our Present Practice THE CLAIM OF THE ENGINEERS A Challenge to the Trade Union Leadership

RELIEF AND PROPAGANDA AMONG THE ARAB REFUGEES

Impressions o f a Visit to the Middle Eastern Camps. By James G. Murtagh CHRISTIANS AT LUND THE DEAN IN CHINA Trends in the (Ecumenical Movement A Reply to Dr. Hewlett Johnson APPROACH TO VICTORY MUSIC AT EDINBURGH

Mr. Churchill’s New Volume

By Peter Railing

FRANCIS THOMPSON AND CRICKET

A Lancashire Enthusiast. By Viola Meynell

THE BALANCE

T HINGS are better with the Government than they were when Parliament went into recess. A September crisis has since the war been almost one of the regular feasts on the calendar. This year, instead of a crisis, there is every prospect of a substantial improvement in the all-important foreign balances. The rise in prices is for the moment stopped. Whatever criticisms there may be of the financial arrangements, the fact remains that the Socialists said that houses could not be built more quickly, and they are being built more quickly. Indeed, so much more quickly are they being built that a new school of criticism is now threatening that our economy will be distorted by the calamity of too many houses. Serious as the international situation is, there is no apparent prospect of any immediate irruption over the next months. To what extent this improvement—particularly the improvement in the foreign balances and in prices—is due to the Government and to what extent it is due to other factors can be debated. It is clearly, as always, a bit of both. But what is quite clear is that the solution of these problems —in the way in which at any rate they are being solved—has very little indeed to do with Socialism or anti-Socialism. Rightly or wrongly, the Government has made no dramatic break with the policies of its predecessors. Its superiority over them, where it has shown itself superior, has been merely that it+ias shown itself more efficient.

form of mock-ownership, so hedged about with licence and control that it makes little practical difference whether the industry is nominally State-owned or nominally privately owned. The daily life of the industry can go on comparatively unaffected by the nominal change. This is clearly what is going to happen over steel. It may well happen even over transport, if the Government sets a sufficiently high reserve price and there are not many bidders to buy back at that price. The Conservatives can then say that they fulfilled their promises by offering the return of road transport to the public, and that they could not do more. It cannot be pretended that this is an ideally good .way of solving the problems of industry, nor will it be easy to maintain the prestige of the political parties as it becomes increasingly obvious that their promises do not correspond to any thing serious. But it looks as if this is the way that things are likely to go. “The main task of Socialism today,” writes Mr. Crossman, “ is to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of either industrial management or the State bureaucracy—in brief, to distribute responsibility and so enlarge freedom of choice.” There are plenty of Conservatives and plenty of Liberals who would say that this is also the main task of Conservatism and of Liberalism, and it has obviously nothing whatsoever to do with Socialism. The Unreliability of Forecasts

We are promised tremendous storms over the Transport Bill. It may be that such storms are yet to come. But what is interesting is that hardly a word has been said about it, one way or the other, in any of the reported speeches since Parliament’s recess, and it seems quite clear that the public is taking extremely little interest in the Bill. Even less has so far been said about the Steel Denationalization Bill ; but it may well prove that the Bill marks the pattern of the next stage in the nationalization controversy. It is obviously true and freely admitted by leaders on both sides that, whatever may be the best policy towards these great industries, the worst policy would be one of violent change of the fundamental structure of the industry every five years. Indeed, such violent changes must inevitably destroy our chances of recovery and survival. So long, therefore, as political necessity requires public gestures towards nationalization and denationalization from the two parties, the only solution seems to be to create a

Mr. Colin Clark has given it as his opinion that the failures in post-war policy in this and other countries have not been so much failures of planning authorities to say what should be done, as failures of politicians to do it. That may be generally true, but it does appear that the planners are much more adept at estimating supply than at estimating demand. Thus we have sought to comfort farmers by telling them that at least they have guaranteed markets and guaranteed prices at a time when there is little reason to think that they would have had any difficulty in selling their products whether there had been any guarantees or not. For political reasons we are distorting our whole economy to produce houses at all costs, and there is some reason to fear that we shall succeed in producing houses in excess of the real demand, and only do so at the expense of producing less food than we need. A short time ago we were told that Europe’s only problem in