THE TABLET September 7th. 1957. VOL 2in. No. 6120
TH E TABLET
Published as a Newspapot
A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW
Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria
FOUNDED IN 1840
SEPTEMBER 7th, 1957
NINEPENCE
Christianity Without Colonialism : A New Chapter of Opportunity Conversations in Moscow; III: The Orthodox Church. By Katherine Hunter Blair
Konrad Adenauer : a Study of the West German Chancellor. By Roland Hill
Before the Depression l The Responsibilities of Lord Norman. By Colin Clark
Cricket in Ireland l The Ideological Aspect. By Christopher Hollis
Our Lady of Candelaria l Patroness of Tenerife. By Charles Stonor
Critics’ Columns ; Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters ; Chess
THE T.U.C. AND EUROPE
'C'ROM the proceedings of the Trade Union Congress it emerges that there is still a good deal of sentiment for nationalisation, among those who are more interested in keeping alive the mystique of Socialism than in claiming practical advantages from State ownership and control. There is a refusal to be content with the device of State ownership of shares in big enterprises, because such ownership will not create a different psychology in the country, such as genuine Socialists consider of the utmost value and importance. They not only want the State to be everywhere; they want people to be conscious of it everywhere, thinking of it rather as “ the community ” than the State, and hoping that its omnipresence will make it easier for people to feel and think in terms of the common good, as against individual or family advancement. From this fundamental point of view, the present party leadership is disappointing.
But it also became clear that to the trade union leadership the whole subject of nationalisation is a side issue, distracting attention from the urgent decisions which both the trade union movement and the Labour Party have to face. They are how far to accept inflation as inevitable, and how far to accept the policy, of trying to create a, free trade area with Western Europe. The two policies very much affect each other, for while inflation is not a phenomenon limited to this country, but is a general characteristic of societies with full employment in which there is a keen competition for labour, there are many signs that productivity here is not growing as it ought to grow if our costs are not to rise and injure our ability to trade competitively in a free trade area.
The Labour Party grew up as a free trade party. Tts first generation of ministers had men like Philip Snowden, as passionate for free trade as any old fashioned Liberal. But the party has become very much more protectionist in the last twenty-five years, because a planned economy involves the use of controls which interfere more severely than any tariff with foreign trade. Planning involves allocation and priorities of imported raw materials, and close exchange control.
The planners of a Welfare State, when, for example, they are building expensive schools, want to be sure that they are building them in the right places and in the right proportions. Schools cost a great deal, and the money would be wasted if they were built in places which then lost their industries in the resulting competition inside a free trade area. The natural temptation is to try to protect the prosperous industry in the prosperous town. The old conception of the mobility of labour becomes increasingly a figment of the academic imagination, an abstract idea of labour as a commodity, when the reality is a man with a wife and family and a house that he is buying over twenty years, because it is near the place where he works for a good wage. Such a man is not really mobile, even if he could learn another trade, and if the individuals are not very mobile, whole communities of them are not mobile at all. It is no doubt because Mr. Bevan comes from such a community, of Welsh miners, that he has come out in Tribune against the dangers inherent in membership of a free trade area.
There is a great deal of illusion in this country about the lower standards, both in wages and social services, which are believed to be the portion of continental artisans, whereas in reality there is no such gap either in real wages or in social provision. Political and Economic Planning has issued a useful pamphlet giving the facts and figures on this. All the member countries who are making their way towards a Common Market face the same problem, that the main thing their electorates expect from their politicians is that nothing shall be done which could cause unemployment. Yet the advantages of the Common Market can only be gathered through economies in production made possible by the existence of a very large market. It will never be a standardised market, with everybody wanting the same things as people want the same things from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of America. But there will be a greater sale for the cheaper standardised product, very often at the expense of a dearer local product, whose makers will then have to turn to something else.
The advantage is plainly going to lie with the large businesses which can best afford to adapt themselves, and