THE TABLET May 3rd, 195b’. VOL. 211, No. 6154

THE TABLE'

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

» Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

Published as a Newspaper

FOUNDED IN 1840

MAY 3rd, 1958

N1NEPENCE

Precepts and Practices: British and French Conservatives Impressions of Formosa: Preparing for the Great Return. By William Tecling, M.P.

World Shortage of Priests i : If. North and South America. By J. P. Forrestall I elevision tor Children : A Code for Catholics published in Fribourg

SPRING BOOK SUPPLEMENT Reviews by T. S. Gregory, D.W., Christopher Hollis, J. J. Dwyer, René Hague, John Beekwith, A. C. F. Beales,

Godfrey Licnhardt, Thomas Gilby, O.P., Edward Hutton, Isabel Quigly, J. J. Curie and Janet Bruce

THE POUND AT HOME

TF the London ’bus strike is not averted, and begins on

Monday, it will be a strike against an award of the Industrial Court, and one in which the strikers will not be striking either for any large concession or fo r any essential principle. The issue has been narrowed to whether the extra £ lm . which the Transport Commission is to find is all to go, as the Court has decreed, to those working in inner London, or whether some p a r t of it should go at the expense of the inner London busmen to those working in the outer London area. This would be an alteration of the Court’s award, and Mr. McLeod, the Minister of Labour, has again refused to be a party to courses which could have far-reaching bad results. The authority of the Industrial Court needs to be strengthened and upheld as the best machinery for dealing with the perpetual conflicts over differential wages between one occupation and another. If the strike happens, those who oppose it and resolve to bear its in convenience will be conscious th a t a great deal is a t stake —perhaps the whole success of the battle against inflation. It is a much smaller shadow than th a t over the railways.

The engineers and the miners, as well as the railway unions, are all busy with demands for increases, sometimes accompanied with demands for shorter hours, which mean in practice more overtime rates. What is being asked for is very much ahead of the best th a t can be claimed to have been achieved in greater productivity. That increase is not more than three per cent— it is arguable whether it is there at all—but the engineers talk of a ten or fifteen per cent rise. The bodies that control nationalised industries, like the railways and coal mines, have not the funds to pay with, even if they wanted to do so. and it is really the Government that is thought of by those making these demands as the source from which the money is expected to come. It was indeed always one of the attractions of nationalisation, that the Government could much more easily be led to subsidise its own industries, and without public outcry, where it would not give money to coal-owners or railway shareholders. This calculation has not proved baseless, and where a nationalised industry is also a monopoly it can make the consumer pay what it fixes, and if he will not pay it can reach him in his other capacity as a tax-payer.

All this has been accepted, and would still be accepted, but for the effect of wage-increases in sending up prices, and it is this knowledge which compels the Government to set its face against the easy courses of Sir Winston Churchill’s second term.

The demands come up from the branches, and are an embarrassment to the union leaders. They are framed in the first instance by men who know very well from their personal experience that their weekly money does not go far enough, and is inadequate for what they want to do with it, but who know very much less about the other factors which determine whether increases can be granted or not. To economise by slowing-down investment in the railways, or the mines, and give the money so saved to be spent over the shop counters in immediate consumption by miners and their families, is to sacrifice the future to the present in a way th a t could have most grave effects on British exports, since the cost of coal enters into the cost of everything manufactured and moved. Those who are pressing every year for some increase are in fact making a comfortable assumption, that the wealth of the country will go forward, whereas so much of it has not only to be created but sold competitively, in exchange for the imported things — tea. films, tobacco—which the wage earners want to consume.