White Paper Lacks Guts

The White Paper, a manpower budget, underlines the seriousness of the position. Yet most observers agree that it is not nearly drastic enough. It makes verbal appeals for effort, hut does not provide a basis of imaginative and far reaching plans to direct that effort, nor any concrete idea of how long and to what goal we are to strive. There is a curious refusal to demand real sacrifices, as if the Government with its huge majority, were unsure of its position. If American films cost twenty millions (and we import only sixty millions in machinery from America) they can go; if tobacco were less, we, should grumble and queue and black-market, but not die; if the 100,000 workers in the gambling industry were put to productive work, we might be much better fed. Churchill showed during the war that putting a difficult situation squarely before the people and saying: "This is going to hurt you, but it must be done," was not a way to become unpopular.

Nor is the importation of displaced persons a solution. Mr. Arthur Horner, Secretary of the Mine Workers, put the position very clearly when he said: "If these people are fit to work, it is because they were fed by the Nazis; if they are Anti-Nazis they will not be fit to work after years in concentration camp." Europe is no less short of labour than Britain, and if these displaced persons have not been reabsorbed by their own countries it is precisely because they are the elements who welcomed the Fascists and were driven out at the liberation. The argument that Britain has always welcomed refugees scarcely holds water after our refusal to admit and use genuine anti-Fascist refugees from Spain and Germany. That the presence of these people will cause trouble is evidenced by the Poles, who have caused riots and are deeply hated in several northern towns near which they are stationed.

The fact is that the British miners are traditionally the lowest paid and hardest worked section of industry, and they refuse to have their legitimate demands for improved conditions and waged which alone can attract new manpower, fobbed off by the introduction of what is effectively slave labour. By a curious anomaly, the White Paper allows for 400,000 unemployed, when the normal turnover rate is around a quarter of a million. Privileges of pay, better working conditions, and income-tax rebates would be the surest and fairest means of getting the surplus into the mines.