No Jam Today, Little Tomorrow

Cloth-capped, grey-skinned Barnsley coal miners tumbled eagerly out of their special train for the long ride through Bradford's grey streets to '"t Coop" (the football Cup Final). Bradford textile workers watched the football fans, shouted angrily: "Wheer's 't coal? Slacking again?" The miners replied: '"T coal's in Barnsley. Go and help thysen."

All over Britain, miners returning from the war were refusing to go back to the mines. Men already there were too old (average age: over 50) and too hungry for efficient production. They worked while solid rations lasted; on Thursdays and Fridays, when there was very little to eat, they played hookey. In the last quarter of 1945, 10% of them were persistent absentees. That was equivalent to a loss of 20 million tons of coal a year; and in a world starving for coal 20 million tons would go a long way towards achieving the huge expansion of export trade (goal: 150% of prewar figures) which was needed to restore Britain's standard of living.

At home, the coal industry was not meeting the demand either. Some British industries (rayon, chemicals, pottery and toys) were booming. But their output was restricted by lack of coal. Last week 500 of Britain's industrial plants had only one week's fuel supply. By Easter the coal-burning British railroads would have to reduce traffic or else some industrial plants would have to close down altogether.

"Stop Hollering." Looking at this poor advertisement for the nationalization program which had swept them into office, some British Labor Ministers began to rant at the "selfish minority" of miners who were holding up British recovery. Not all their followers went with them. In a radio broadcast last month, black-haired, black-eyed, hyperenergetic Xenia Field (prewar playwright and golf champion, now Deputy Director of Britain's Supply Ministry) told her fellow Laborites to stop hollering at the miners and give them more to eat. In Holland, where miners got 5,248 calories a day (British miner's ration: 2,750 to 3,000 calories) and all sorts of extras, coal production was growing. The Dutch incentive system, said Xenia Field, was "a carrot, but a highly desirable carrot."

Speaking from the other side of the political fence, hard-hitting Oliver Lyttelton, Minister of Production in Winston Churchill's Government, proposed extending the carrot system to everyone. His remedy for declining production was to stimulate all British workers by releasing automobiles, gasoline, luxuries for home consumption instead of exporting them.

But Britain's Labor Government knew it could not take carrots out of its hat. They had to be bought on the open market, with the coal and motorcars and luxuries the British people wanted. Sadly, with the air of the family doctor trying to break the news gently, Prime Minister Clement Attlee rose to speak on this point in the House of Commons. He was sympathetic with his old patient; he knew the British people were hungry and tired. But he was firm: if there was to be jam tomorrow, there could be no jam today. There would not even be jam tomorrow unless they all, women and old men included, worked more today. The U.S. loan (if Congress approved it) would help to revive British trade, but it would not permit Britain "to relax, only to work all the harder."

This time, however, Britain's pill would at least have a nice new saccharine coating. The campaign for more and harder work would be called, not austerity but a "prosperity drive"; if the drive went well, Attlee thought that by year's end the British people might expect the supply of consumer goods to be "halfway back" to prewar standards.

Peterborough, columnist of the London Daily Telegraph, quoted Hamlet: "I eat the air, promise-crammed."

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