Black & White

A black week and a White Paper deepened Britain's gloom. The Crisis was bad enough; the future as outlined by the Government's report was described by the London Times as the "most disturbing statement ever made by a British government." The New York Times's Michael L. Hoffman went further. He wrote:

"Nothing but an early and profound change in the attitude of the British people toward the problem of national survival can prevent the present crisis from becoming a steady slide into conditions of poverty unknown in the Western world in modern times."

Doubtless this view was extreme. The British economic position still contained many heartening factors, and even The Crisis had been "exaggerated," according to the Board of Trade's usually pessimistic Sir Stafford Cripps.

The Fate of the Nation. With dark forebodings of continued fuel cuts, rationing and scarcity of consumer goods, the White Paper said: "We may never restore the foundations of our national life" if 1947's production and export goals were not met.

Many economists saw little chance that they could be met. They included: exports at 140% of 1938's volume (before The Crisis they were running at less than 115%); increasing the labor force by at least 100,000 (to be drawn principally from Poles in Britain and from Europe's displaced people); increasing coal output to 200,000,000 tons (last year it was 189,000,000 tons). The Government itself had no hope of expanding exports before July 1.

Again, the Labor Government, which is powerless against the unions whence spring its votes, failed to implement its pleas for greater production with hard measures to achieve them. The White Paper inveighed against "restrictive practices" by both labor and capital. It urged more output per worker. But the truth was that the British worker was not working very hard, and neither the British capitalist nor the Government was taking measures likely to supply either the incentive or the compulsion for greater effort. Nearly all British industries, for example, still worked only one shift, because workers were reluctant to change their accustomed hours. Said London's Times: "The trade unions hold the fate of this country in their hands as the R.A.F. held it seven years ago."

Endurance. The weather was as somber as the darkest economic forecasts. This week the sun came out brightly for a few hours--for the first time in 22 days. In the 66 years London's Kew Observatory had been keeping tabs, there had never been such a long sunless period. Snow, icy gales and subfreezing temperatures were also out for endurance records. All week long there was frost, without a break. Reported the weatherman: "It's very rare to have continuous frost for more than three days; this sort of thing doesn't happen more than half a dozen times in a century."

Drifting snow isolated towns, and blocked roads and rails from the Yorkshire mines to the industrial Midlands, where factories had been given the signal to resume operations this week. Great ice floes, some of them four to six miles long and dotted with thousands of gulls, swept into the Thames estuary. London, which had painfully built up coal stocks, was hard up against it again.

The Government hastily ordered Britain's 1,100 gas plants to cut coal consumption by 10%. It issued another chilling warning: restrictions on gas, similar to those in force on electricity consumption, might have to be imposed this week (about nine out of ten British homes rely on gas for cooking).

Britons had stopped joking about The Crisis. They were now bitterly cold and coldly bitter.

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