Provincial Tour. (1907)

Party News from the August 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

D.V., W.P., etc., F. E. Dawkins, J. Kent and R. H. Kent will hold meetings as follows: August 18, Oxford; 19, Coventry; 20, Rugby; 21, Leicester; 22, Burton; 23, Derby; 24, Nottingham; 25, Manchester. Other comrades are invited to join.

Party News Briefs (1950)

Party News from the June 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Provincial Propaganda was a matter of concern to the delegates at our Annual Conference last Easter. They recommended the Executive Committee to find two or more part-time propagandists who would be prepared to speak in the Provinces for a period of three months during the 1950 summer propaganda season. Acting upon this recommendation the Executive Committee has appointed Comrades D. Verity and D. Moss to make a propaganda tour of selected provincial centres. On May 8th these two speakers left London for Manchester where they will operate for approximately one month. Whilst they are in the Manchester area a programme of activity will be drawn up by the Executive Committee for these Comrades to follow during the remainder of their tour. Bradford and Sheffield are two of the towns that have been suggested as possible centres for their future activities.

Propaganda Research was another matter that received Conference consideration. The Executive Committee has now issued a report on this matter. Subject to the necessary office equipment being available, the material already in the hands of the Propaganda Research Bureau is to be made available. It will comprise 8 to 10 pages of duplicated notes arranged from the material supplied to the Bureau during the Autumn of 1949. The report points out that many speakers do considerable research in preparation for their lectures and the results of this research should be made available to all Party propagandists. Future issues of these research notes could, in addition to those covering general information, be devoted to special subjects. An instance is given of such a special issue dealing entirely with “China” and compiled largely from the material collected by a Party speaker who has specialised in this subject. The report concludes:

“What has to be remembered is that the best results can be achieved only with the full co-operation of those in the Party who read, write and speak. The Propaganda Research Bureau must come largely from outside the bureau itself.”

Members for Full-Time Posts are to receive special training. The Examination Committee has reported to the Executive Committee presenting a list of subjects on which they propose to examine the members whose names have been submitted for training. The list, which has been approved as a basis for the Examination Committee’s work is as follows:—Communistic Society, Slave Society (Greek, Roman and Egyptian) and Feudal Society; migrations of culture. The English Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolt for Independence, the Peasant Rebellions (English, French and German), the Industrial Revolution, the Corn Law Movement, the 1848 movements. History of Working Class Movements, the Utopians, the Materialist Conception of History, Trade Unionism (old and new). Development of Parliaments, the American Civil War, Reformism and Reform Movements, Geography—its effect upon History, Evolution, Progress, etc.. Trusts and Nationalisation, Party History (S.P.G.B.), Currency (Credit) Malthus, Henry George, Crises, and Economics (General).

The secretary of Ealing Branch informs us that seaside propaganda trips to Southsea are being organised for Sunday 2 July, Sunday 13 August and Sunday 24 September. Southsea is a good spot for propaganda. Seats are 12s. for each trip and can be booked by writing to W. Critchfield at 48, Balfour Road, West Ealing, W.13. Comrades who are interested and want further information are urged to make early application.

Members of the Swansea Discussion and Study Group report on their efforts to get the Party case stated in the local Press.

A correspondent to the South Wales Evening Post recently mentioned that he was mystified as to the meaning of Socialism. He drew attention to the fact that the Labour Party, I.L.P., Communist Party, S.P.G.B. and others, contested the Election as Socialists, yet were all in opposition to one another.

In reply to this, a Swansea member of the S.P.G.B. wrote to the South Wales Evening Post stating that the S.P.G.B. was, in fact, the only party that contested the Election with a mandate for Socialism. The Editor added a footnote to this quoting the Concise Oxford Dictionary meaning of Socialism: i.e.

“Principle that individual freedom should be completely subordinated to interests of community with any deductions that may be correctly or incorrectly drawn from it: e.g. substitution of co-operation for competitive production, national ownership of land and capital, state distribution of produce, free education and feeding of children and abolition of inheritance.”

Our member replied to this giving our full objective: i.e.

“The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community."

This letter was published by the South Wales Evening Post. In reply, another reader wrote agreeing that the S.P.G.B. is the only Socialist Party, and challenged members of the other so called “Socialist” parties to state their case in opposition to the S.P.G.B.

If any reply was given, it was not published. Are these parties so confused that they do not feel qualified to reply?

The Socialist Party of New Zealand writes that, “Our pamphlet, (Introducing the S.P.N.Z.) did not bring a rush of inquirers into the Party and its activities. It did bring forth a statement per medium of the official organ of the Communists, the 'Peoples Voice.’ Needless to say the article contained the usual Communist distortions, stupid assertions and, if they are as well informed as they claim to be, deliberate lies. However, we wrote the manager of the ‘Peoples Voice’ pointing out the errors and distortions. At the same time we challenged them to debate. Which Party should the Workers support, the C.P. of N.Z. or the S.P. of N.Z. Our answer to this letter has not been received up to the time of writing.”

Our Belfast Comrades are anxious to receive visits from S.P.G.B. speakers. They extol the virtues of Northern Ireland as a holiday venue as an inducement to get some of our members across the dividing channel. Arrangements for accommodation in Belfast will be made for any intending visitor, particularly if he or she will speak on the S.P.I. platform. If there are any Party speakers who are intrigued by the idea, early contact with the Overseas Secretary, S.P.G.B. is urged.

Newport Branch has been in difficulties for some time. It has now been decided to dissolve the branch and transfer its members to Central Branch.

Lewisham Branch sought to renew permission to hold meetings in Greenwich Park but has been refused. It is, in consequence, intended to re-open the propaganda station at Romer Avenue on Saturday evenings.

W. Waters.

Coventry 

Members and sympathisers in Coventry and district who are interested in forming a Discussion and Study Group are asked to get in touch with F. Morton, 64, Gretna Road, Coventry.

On Working Yourself Out of Your Job (1956)

From the April 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the companies that put its workers on short-time is the Standard Motor Co. at its Coventry factories; where, out of 11,000 men, 250 a day were stood off on a rota system. The men did not like this and Mr. W, Warman, chairman of the Joint Shop Stewards' Committee suggested a different solution:

“We do not accept short-time working. Production should be cut by a shorter working week and reduced efficiency for the same pay. We increased production by working harder and now we should just not work so hard. We have been advocating a 36-hour week at Standards." (Manchester Guardian 5/3/56).

Mr. Warman’s few, well-chosen words, had quite a lively reception, as doubtless he knew they would. For he not only suggested unreduced pay for reduced hours but, what was far more provocative, he spoke against efficiency and in favour of not working so hard. And that simply isn't done.

As the immediate cause of short-time working is that there are tens of thousands of motor cars that have been made to be sold but are unsold, the idea of making fewer of them would seem to be sensible. And if the world were organised in a rational sort of way, who could quarrel with Mr. Warman's idea of the workers working fewer hours? And in such a world the last thing that could possibly occur would be a lowered standard of living. It is only in the world of today, this complicated bedlam, that people think it quite natural that workers who have produced more should be punished by consuming less.

But as we do live in this mad world of Capitalism Mr. Warman's proposal was not accepted. As a matter of fact it was not really timely advice.

For obviously the time to act on such lines would be before output bad been pushed up, not after the employers had found that they could not sell cars and wanted to stand men off. As a correspondent in the Daily Herald, Mr. Maurice Fagence, pointed out, with more than 80,000 unsold cars in the stockpiles (of the manufacturers as a whole) “a strike at the present time cannot help the workers.” (Daily Herald, 5/3/56.)

But during recent years too many workers have been thinking more about getting overtime pay for excess hours of work than of trying to get higher pay for the normal hours of work. It is true that since 1939 there has been a fairly general reduction of normal hours from 47 or 48 hours a week to 44 hours. But instead of putting in fewer hours the average time actually worked each week is longer now than it was before the war. For men workers the average has gone up from 47.7 hours in 1938 to 48.9 hours in 1955. This chasing after overtime cannot be regarded as a sound policy for workers to adopt. But even if policy had been more far-sighted it would not have kept the workers out of trouble. Whatever the workers do under Capitalism difficulties face them and troubles arise. If they back productivity schemes, work hard and produce more they may find themselves sooner or later on short-time or out of work. But if they reduce efficiency and work less hard they may find themselves in the same fix because the firm they work for will dismiss them or may find itself bankrupt if other, more efficient, firms have been able to capture the market

And' if they choose the middle way and work at a moderate pace, neither too fast nor too slow, they may still find themselves out of work. In 1952, when a textile slump hit producers in most parts of the world, over 150,000 textile workers in this country suddenly found themselves out-of-work and forced to live on unemployment pay. Many had to find jobs in other industries. Nobody suggested that they had increased their productivity unduly, in fact they were still being preached at for not having done so. And the wave of unemployment that hit them likewise hit textile industries of varying degrees of efficiency in U.S.A., Japan, and elsewhere.

By real working class unity, of all workers, in all trades, in all countries, some effective restraint could be imposed on the efforts of employers everywhere to increase the intensity of work. But with the outlook of the workers as it is at present this is not going to happen either. Unfortunately what most workers in most countries are now doing is backing up their employers and their governments to capture trade from the Capitalists in other countries. This short-sighted policy is encouraged by most of the workers’ industrial and political leaders, though it should be obvious that the workers of all countries would be in a stronger position against their employers if they all stood together and refused to be drawn into work harder campaigns designed to capture markets from other countries.

When all is said and done, even if all the workers stood unitedly together to get as much as they can out of Capitalism, what a very foolish thing they would still be doing. The only sensible thing for workers to do is to get together for something much more worth while, the establishment of Socialism. Then there would be no problem of working yourself out of a job, only the problem of producing as much of everything as people wanted.

Edgar Hardcastle

Socialism in Coventry. (1904)

From the December 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism in this city is of the sort one would naturally expect to find where its professors fail to recognise its basic principle. To this fact we may attribute the lack of proper enthusiasm, and want of adequate financial support which were conspicuous features of the Clarion Sunday lectures held last winter.

All the alleged labour and so-called Socialist parties here have identified themselves, time and again with one of the capitalist parties—the Liberals.

Some two years ago when Dr. Clifford brought his nonconformist conscience to Coventry, and spoke in the Corn Exchange to the kind-hearted Liberals on the monstrosities of the wicked-hearted Tories, the Independent Labour Party had its representative on the platform. Is Dr. Clifford in favour of, or will the Liberal Party grant, that Secular Education which the I.L.P. and other professedly Socialist bodies demand ? We know they will not. Then why this coquetting ? Is such a policy calculated to make converts to the Cause from amongst Conservatives who see professedly independent Socialists hobnobbing with their natural enemies, the Liberals?

The Liberal element was much in evidence during the Clarion Lectures referred to. Liberal members of the Town Council took the chair on more than one occasion, and I heard Mr. H. K. Farren express the hope that the Mayor (a Liberal) would see his way to preside at some future date. Yet only a few weeks ago this same mayor bluntly informed a deputation convened by the Trades Council on behalf of the unemployed, that “the general feeling of the Council was antagonistic to the Trades Council, and communications sent by the latter body “were invariably treated with contempt.”

As a result of this unemployed conference, work was found by the Town Council for 90 men of the thousands standing idle. Val victis !

“See yonder poor o’erlabour’d wight,

So abject, mean, and vile,

Who begs a brother of the earth

To give him leave to toil ;

And see his lordly fellow worm

The poor petition spurn,

Unmindful tho’ a weeping wife

And helpless offspring mourn.”

So the capitalist-class flouts the claims of the worker and the only way for Socialists to checkmate them and effectually combat the evil tendencies which are the natural outcome of Bourgeois domination is by the maintenance of complete independence and of uncompromising opposition to both wings of the capitalist party. Complete independence must be the watchword of all Socialists, otherwise we cannot wonder at Conservatives regarding us as little more than a wing of the Liberal Party.

James Hutcheson 

From the “Socialist Standard,” Sept. and Oct. 1904 (1941)

From the October 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Standard is now in its 38th year of publication, the first issue being published in September, 1904. That is a long time in the history of the Socialist movement, long enough for many popular and instructive movements and events to have been forgotten. For the information of our readers and in order to encourage an interest in these forgotten events it is proposed each month to publish brief extracts from early issues of the Socialist Standard. The extracts below are taken from the two issues, September, 1904, and October, 1904: —

1. From our first editorial: —

“In dealing with all questions affecting the welfare of the working-class our standpoint will be frankly revolutionary. We shall show that the misery, the poverty, and the degradation caused by capitalism grows far more rapidly than does the enacting of palliative legislation for its removal. The adequate alleviation of these ills can be brought about only by a political party having Socialism for its object. So long as the powers of administration are controlled by the capitalist class so long can that class render nugatory any legislation they consider to unduly favour the workers.”—(S.S., September, 1904.)

2. “Coventry Cycle Trade: Female Wage-Slaves Oust Males.”

“More men are out of work in Coventry at present than for many years past, having been displaced by female employees, who have even been set to work upon small capstan lathes and wheel building. . . . The amount of unskilled male labour in the cycle trade has been reduced to a few hands. The skilled mechanics are now feeling the pinch, many having been out of work all this year. . . Girl’s average wage is 15s., and as the watch and silk trades have greatly fallen off, girls are plentiful.” (From a newspaper, August 31st, 1904, reproduced in S.S., September, 1904.)

3. “The Bogey of the Taxes.”

“Whether he is living in a country whose fiscal policy is based on Free Trade or in one in which it is based on Protection; whether the country is highly taxed or otherwise; whether the district he lives in is highly rated or the reverse, makes little difference; the worker finds that whatever of the above conditions he may be under, a subsistence is all that upon an average he obtains.” (S.S., October, 1904.)

4. “The Futility of Reform.”

“We have, therefore, to recognise all the time that it is only possible to secure any real benefit for the people when the people themselves become class conscious, when behind the Socialists in Parliament and on other bodies there stands a solid phalanx of men clear in their knowledge of Socialism and clear in their knowledge that the only way to secure the Socialist Commonwealth of the future is to depend only upon the efforts of themselves and those who have the same class conscious opinions. Therefore we have no palliative programme. The only palliative we shall ever secure is the Socialist society of the future gained by fighting uncompromisingly at all times and in every season.”—(S.S., October, 1904.)

5. The Increase of Lunacy.

“According to the Daily Express, it is an unpleasant and appalling fact that lunacy is steadily increasing in England and Wales, and it is startling to find that whereas one person in every 327 was certified as insane in 1894, the figures for 1904 are one in 288. But to the Socialist there is nothing startling in the fact. As the struggle for existence becomes more intense, as we speed up, as the raging, tearing, hurrying and scurrying possess us, and as the position of the worker becomes more precarious, we must expect that the mental equilibrium will be disturbed.”—(S.S., October, 1904.)

(The position appears to have worsened since 1904. According to the Statistical Abstract, 1939, the number of persons registered as insane in England and Wales in 1938 was 157,353, equivalent to one person in every 263. Expressing the figures in another way, out of every 10,000 of the population the number registered as insane was 33 in 1894, 35 in 1905, 37 in 1914. In 1920 it had declined to 31, but since then it has steadily risen until in 1938 it was 38 in every 10,000 of the population.)

Ruff And Ready (2021)

Theatre Review from the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency (Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, October 2021)

The squatting movement has a long history of searching for creative, practical ways to get around capitalism’s failure to satisfy needs as basic as housing. One story among many has been turned into an entertaining musical by Cardboard Citizens (a theatre group composed of people who have been homeless), playwright Sarah Woods and Boff Whalley, Chumbawamba’s guitarist. The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency is set in 1977, when there were an estimated 30,000 people living in squats among 100,000 empty houses in London alone. By this time, the eponymous estate agency had been running for three years, one of several services set up by and for squatters in the city, and the only one which ran as an estate agency, matching vacant buildings to people who needed housing. In an average day, it would be approached by 15 to 20 people made homeless through eviction, poverty or escaping violence who couldn’t or wouldn’t be supported by mainstream organisations. The police and social services even sent people there occasionally.

The play presents the agency as welcoming and open, and the enthusiasm of its members is warmly realised by an energetic cast. The properties they found or heard about were advertised in their bulletin with descriptions like ‘36 St Luke’s Road. Empty two years. Entry through rear. No roof. Suit astronomer’. The agency’s workers would break into the buildings, meaning that those who subsequently moved in weren’t committing an offence. The legislation in England and Wales has since changed, though, and squatting in a residential building was made illegal in 2012 (having been against the law in Scotland since 1865). This doesn’t mean that squatters in 1970s London were left alone by the authorities, though. The musical features undercover police monitoring the estate agency and officious landlords and council staff, all ridiculed by being played as deliberate caricatures.

The production could have lasted for longer, to go into more detail over what happened on Freston Road, then in Hammersmith. Supported by the estate agency, a community of 120 squatters were living there, and faced eviction when the Greater London Council planned to redevelop the area. The squatters responded by all adopting the surname of Bramley to support their application to be rehomed together as a family. Then they announced that Freston Road was now independent of the UK, and had become the ‘Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia’. The new self-declared country issued its own newspaper and stamps (accepted by the Post Office), ran its own art gallery and theatre and aimed to join both the UN and EEC. During the ’80s, Frestonia dropped its aspirations and morphed into an officially-recognised housing co-operative which still runs today.

As the musical depicts it, The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency lost momentum when its members had to focus on their own lives rather than their work. Trying to put free access into practice in capitalism would always be an uphill struggle, as it goes against how the economy and property laws operate. Although finding imaginative ways around the system isn’t the same as working to replace it, the determination of the agency’s staff meant that many people were helped into better situations, at least temporarily. The musical is an enjoyable celebration of them, as well as being an introduction to a lively aspect of working class history.

Clive Hendry

After This Crisis . . . ? (1976)

From the February 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world capitalist economic and political system is in crisis. The signs are so obvious that the mere statement of fact is almost superfluous. The system is beset by not one crisis but several crises. These are separate entities, but inter-related and from the same root cause.

The three major economic problems for all industrialized countries, and the primary producing countries of the so-called Third World, are: inflation, the five-fold increase in oil prices since 1973, and a recession. If the previous cycles of commerce ending in slumps could be referred to as capitalism’s “anarchy of production”, the present situation is chaos. A few press headlines from a single day, 7th September 1975, bear witness to this.

Japanese Bankruptcies at a Peak.

Inflation Rises in U.S.

French Reflation Scorned.

TUC Expecting Autumn Reflation to Cut Jobless.

The “French reflation” was the proposed use of £3,300 million by the French government to try to stimulate the economy, and the dissatisfaction was expressed by the trade union movement and others. M. Georges Seguy of the CGT, the Communist-dominated trade-union organization, said the plan did not alter “the disastrous situation in which our country finds itself”. The French "Socialist” Party said the plan "did not meet needs on employment and prices”.

The TUC’s hope was voiced at the recent conference in Blackpool where a majority had decided in favour of the Labour Government’s £6-a-week wage-restraint policy — a condition of acceptance being the expectation of measures to bring down unemployment. Len Murray, the TUC General Secretary, said that backing the wages policy would “make it easier for the Chancellor to start judicious and selective measures to reflate the economy . . . We shall be looking for action this Autumn to project jobs.” (His word was “project”, not “protect”!)

Trade-union leaders and politicians are, of course, whistling in the dark. The Labour government’s efforts to create jobs are as unrealistic as its other attempts to control capitalism. A sizeable proportion of the unemployed are young people who have been unable to find jobs since they left school last July. In a recent speech in Edinburgh, Edward Heath spoke of a danger that disillusioned youngsters might reject political democracy if the problem were not solved.

Laid Off

Earlier last year, in the writer’s experience, workmates and fellow trade-unionists were not over-concerned at the situation. Something was wrong, there were problems, but things would sort themselves out. The same attitude was found in the audiences at Socialist Party meetings. Now it is different. People up the road are being laid off, “shaken out”, and “surplus to requirements”. Examples in South London are the closure of Decca Radar at Battersea, due to the decline in the sales of colour TV, and the proposed shut-down of the Telephone Manufacturing Company at West Dulwich.

The latter is due chiefly to the cut-back in Post Office orders. The Company’s work is to be centralized at an existing factory in Wiltshire. Two larger companies are also affected by the Post Office cut-back: Plessey’s and the General Electric Company, with 20,000 predicted additions to the numbers of unemployed. In the case of TMC the redundancies include many West Indians and Asians from the Brixton, Herne Hill and Croydon areas. Some long-service employees are jobless: the writer knows one who has been with the Company since he left school in 1938.

The editorials and city columns are full of strident talk about “overmanning”, lack of “mobility of labour”, and “natural wastage”. The writers (employees themselves, of course, and presumably members of the National Union of Journalists) wish other workers to travel obediently at a moment’s notice. This insistence on a “Have tools, will travel” outlook appears only when it suits — or seems to suit — capitalism. Perhaps the ideal situation would be an “Unemployed Disposal Unit” into which workers and their dependants could be fed when not required.

There have been numerous comparisons with the crisis of 1931. There are two economic phenomena from the past which haunt capitalism — the German inflation of 1923 and the “Wall Street Crash” of 1929. At the Durham Miners’ Rally last summer Harold Wilson said we were “facing the worst recession since the 1930s, because the world was in the midst of the most serious decline in trade for over forty years”. We have a slump — because we have a slump!

The President of Australian Council of Trade Unions, Bob Hawke, stated at the CTU Conference in Melbourne that Australia “faced an economic crisis unprecedented since the 1930s”; and “the entire Western world was in a state of economic crisis, and it was naive to blame the Labour government for Australia’s economic difficulties”. (Hawke is also the federal president of the Australian Labour Party.)

Comparison with the nineteen-thirties is interesting in more ways than one. It is not only that the scale of the present recession is the most widespread since that period, but that the proposed solutions are remarkably similar. At the TUC conference, what was most noticeable was the sheer poverty of ideas. The so-called “left”, arguing against the £6-a-week policy, said it would intensify the depression by further reducing workers’ purchasing power: bigger wage increases would increase the workers’ ability to buy goods and services and so make things better.

This is a variant of the simplistic theory that crises occur because the working class cannot buy back what it has produced. Of course it is true that the workers cannot buy the total product of their labour: not only during a depression, however, but at all other times, including periods of expansion and “recovery”. Marx dealt with this in Capital, Volume 2:

  [that the workers] receiving too small a portion of their own product, and the evil would be remedied by giving them a larger share of it, or raising their wages, we should reply that crises are precisely always preceded by a period in which wages rise generally, and the working class actually get a larger share of the annual product intended for consumption. From the point of view of simple commonsense, such a period should rather remove a crisis.

Once a slump is under way, things happen cumulatively. Workers are laid off, their purchasing power decreases, and a chain reaction sets in affecting other industries and other workers. Simultaneously, this helps promote the capitalists’ “loss of confidence” and their cut-back in investment. But the idea that the situation can be remedied by advancing wages is unrealistic. This is unpalatable for Socialists to state, and workers often resent it, but it cannot be ignored.

Searching for Answers

Equally dangerous, but more reactionary, are the continual calls for import controls. This type of economic nationalism in the nineteen-thirties produced restrictions and counter-restrictions, tariffs and further tariffs. The slump and attempted national solutions at the expense of other capitalist states was a contributory factor to dictatorship in countries particularly "hemmed in” by these policies.

There are still demands for further nationalization as the supposed cure for the problems produced by capitalism. This is happening in sections of the motorcar industry. Such is the magnitude of the recession that Coventry, a centre of car production, has been transformed within a couple of years from a high-employment and high-wage area into one with unemployment figures comparable with the depressed areas of Northern Ireland and North-east England. According to the Sunday Telegraph (10th September 1975) car production has fallen to 44 per cent. of its capacity, and studies conducted by McKinsey & Co. (American management consultants) estimate that a further cut of 25 per cent. is necessary ‘“to ensure a profitable future” for the industry.

Part of the objection to the government’s putting money into the Chrysler company was that it would prejudice the recovery of Leyland. The McKinsey report blames “overmanning” and low productivity for the problems of the car industry, and of course this is the cry with regard to British capitalism generally. The proposition is that if only British workers were as profitably employed as workers in other countries — “our competitors” — all would be well. The flaw in this analysis is the recession and high unemployment in those other countries: the Japanese bankruptcies mentioned earlier, the 8 million unemployed in the United States, the numbers in Germany and France.

Under the heading ‘“Shipyards fight undercutting” the Daily Telegraph (2nd October 1975) had a report:

  The desperate hunt for new orders is leading European shipbuilders being undercut by Far East yards that are trying to tempt British and other shipping companies to give them contracts.

It went on:

  The slump in international trade means there is vast over-capacity in shipbuilding, with the bulk of it in Japan and the emerging nations such as South Korea. Japanese yards fear they will be down to only 25 per cent capacity in about two years’ time, and have been pressing for Government help to retain their 50 per cent share of world shipbuilding.

  Now European shipbuilders are starting to urge the Common Market to draw up a shipbuilding policy that will thwart the Japanese ideas.

It must be obvious that neither low productivity nor high productivity in capitalist society is the answer.

Frank Simpkins