Burning Issue

The darkest blot on Britain's wartime industrial effort is easy to spot: though Great Britain is one of the world's mammoth coal producers, Great Britain is short of coal.

Coal production has actually slumped its war demand increased. Since most Britons fear they may go cold next winter, the coal problem is the livest issue in Britain today.

Last week the Churchill Government told the country what it was going to do about it.

No one felt very pleased except the owners and their arch-Tory super-lobby, the 1922 Committee.

The general charge made against British coal operators is that they will not do anything now to jeopardize their possible post-war profits. Now they cannot keep excess profits. So they tend to work the worst seams, on which they are able to cover costs, rather than open up rich, new seams which look good for a competitive future.

Those British mine workers who are paid by the amount of coal dug often cannot earn county minimum wages while working bad seams. With the war, thousands of Britain's 700,000 coal miners have left their noxious slums and dismal wages for better-paying defense jobs or the fighting services (the draft and volunteer rate has been 25,000 a year). Among those who remain, strikes have been constant, the Mineworkers' Federation (union) demanding a national minimum weekly wage of $17, an average increase of 80-c-.

Such conditions, and the growing shortage, aggravated the long-standing demands of the Labor Party and other leftist groups for the nationalization* of coal. The Mineworkers' Federation urged that, at the very least, the industry be directed by a national control board (including Government, ownership and labor), empowered, among other things, to fix minimum wages. There was also agitation for coal rationing.

When the Government finally spoke out last week, it set up, for the duration only, a new Ministry of Fuel, Light & Power under stocky, liberal Major Gwilym Lloyd George, 48 (son of onetime Prime Minister L. G.), who has been an M.P. for 15 of the last 20 years. Major Lloyd George got no more power than the Government already had under defense regulations, not even power to regulate wages. He will be advised by a new National Coal Board (miners, managers, owners, consumers). The coalpits will still be run by the existing private managements. But with everybody giving everybody else advice, the Government hopes matters will improve. Meanwhile:

> The Government added coal mining to the list of priority industries which draftees may choose instead of the fighting services. But for the present no former miners will be returned from the services to the pits.

> Coal rationing was postponed until the Government could test the effect of a publicity campaign for voluntary rationing.

> The miners were promised a medical consultative service. Many Britons felt that Major Lloyd George could do no more than make the best of an inconclusive setup, that Britain could not possibly have enough coal next winter.

* Not to be confused with the "rationalization" of coal under a long-prepared scheme for unifying and ultimately amortizing coal royalties paid by non-landowning coal operators to coal-landowners. On July 1 a Coal Commission, under the Coal Act of 1938, will begin collecting all royalties and using them to pay off royalty claims. It is planned that eventually all royalties will be extinguished.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.