THE TABLET March 16th, 1957. VOL. 2U9, Nu. 6U95

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

MARCH 16th, 1957

NINE PENCE

The Beaverbrook Fallacy: Free Trade with Poorer Countries

Saving O n Defence : Statesmanship or Short-sightedness? By Eugene Hinterhoff Middle East Conversations : The Aftermath. By J. E. Alexander

Lusitania Inlelix : A Recent Article in the “ New Statesman.” By Denis Brass

Catholic Education 1oday : Surveyed in the “Dublin Review.” By Aelrcd Watkin

The Bible in Lent: 1I: The God of Abraham. By Leonard Johnston

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

INDUSTRIAL ACTION

A S we go to press, the industrial outlook is still black.

The prospect is one of an extensive and protracted strike, affecting millions of workers in industries on which the national prosperity and exports depend. To judge from the argument of the T.U.C. paper, the Daily Herald, these strikes are really against the Government rather than the employers. Although these industries are doing well, they need to rq-invest heavily all the time, and what they distribute in dividends, in so far as it goes to the well-to-do, is in very great measure then taken from the recipients to finance the various outlays of the modern State, including its welfare. It is not a question of taking for the artisans part of a profit margin which is being wastefully consumed, unless by the State. But the Daily Herald argues that Government policy has driven up living costs and reduced the buying power of the pound, and that therefore to refuse increases is parallel to cutting wages, and that the employers of the workers in these trades must step in to off-set the effects of Government policy. It is an industrial reply, not to anything the employers have done, but to things the Government has done, for very serious reasons which arise out of the state of the national economy. More fortunate than the two tramps who waited for Godot in vain, the people of this island may be described as waiting for industrial atomic power. Here is a development in which we lead the world—as we are fond of doing, according to Lord Mills, a man not given to vain-glorious national boasting. The scientists have advanced more rapidly than had been expected, and the Government is commendably keeping up with them in providing the equipment.

This prospect of abundant and very cheap power little more than a decade away is perhaps just what is needed to lift us out of the rut into which we have drifted. Our dilemma may be summed up by saying that the state of mind and feeling needed for industrial success in the world now taking shape is very much at variance with the state of mind and feeling which has been induced in the population. What is required economically is a readiness in all classes to forego consumption for the sake of investment; for Government to use its surpluses, and private people what surpluses taxation may allow them to accumulate, to invest in new and better plant with which to reach the world markets of tomorrow.

This is more important than tax reductions or wage increases. But it is very unwelcome hearing. The notion of saving for investment is being invoked with uncomfortable cogency as a new aspect of competition, just as foreign competition invoked against wage increases. There is not in this country the same attitude towards saving for investment for greater industrial efficiency that prevails in North America or in Germany. It can be said perhaps to be part of the civilised aristocratic tradition of this country that there is a higher value put on leisure, a tendency to judge well-being by it, as well as a tendency for men to fix in their minds the standard of living to which they judge themselves entitled, and to insist upon it. The Conservative Government is in trouble with its own supporters for not seeming to have at heart the resolve to do something for them, or to realise how drastically their whole way of life has been altered for the worse through money losing its value and taxation being so steeply graduated.

The dilemma is real and painful for any Government faced with the need to collect a revenue which is some forty per cent of the national income. Many of its most contested measures, like the Rent Act, are attempts to return to a true system of costs, after so many years in which so many costs have been masked, as by rent restriction, by food subsidies or medical benefits. All these things have left the artisan with a bigger margin for less essential consumption week by week. Much of his margin he hands back in the thousand million pounds that he gives to the Government each year as the price of being allowed the pleasures of smoking and drinking. If he could not afford to provide that revenue, any Government would be hard put to it to find any alternative way half so painless and accepted of collecting so much from the weekly wage-earner.