The Budget
Unintentionally, no doubt, the Daily Mail on the morning of Budget day told the truth about the Budget and about all the long line of Liberal. Tory, Labour budgets of the past and those yet to come. It read: “it looks like a ‘keep hoping’ Budget. It will be a hopeful Budget today hopeful of belter times. . .”
It is always the same programme in Budget week. The newspapers work up their readers’ interest in the undisclosed secrets—just like the Oxford and Cambridge boat race which takes place at about the same time, and is, from a working class point of view, about as important. Then the taxes “on,” and taxes “off,” are announced, along with the usual platitudes about the “national economy” and the never-omitted appeals from the spokesmen of the rich that the poor should work harder.
Not that the Budget is unimportant, far from it, but its importance is to the exploiters not the exploited. The working class are exploited where they work, in a process so familiar that its significance is missed, the process of producing wealth to be owned by someone else, their employers. What the working class receive is not the value of what they produce but a much smaller amount representing roughly what it costs them to live. The difference or surplus stays with the propertied class, but out of it has to come the very large cost of running the capitalist State, the taxes and rates.
The battle of the Budget each year is the struggle of sections of the propertied class, as far as possible, to get the tax burden off their own shoulders on to those of some other section.
Most workers fail to see this and wait hopefully for a Budget which will do some lasting good to them as a class. It is a vain hope. If Budgets or other government measures put up prices, workers have to fight to see that their “take-home pay” goes up too; but if prices come down the fight goes on just the same, against the employers’ moves to reduce wages.
Cotton’s Future
A few years ago when the cotton industry was in serious difficulties the government stepped in with financial aid to modernise and concentrate the industry. Firms were helped to scrap old plant and install new and it was supposed to have put Lancashire cotton in good shape again. But not for long. Colonel J. B. Whitehead, managing director of the Lancashire Cotton Corporation, speaking at Manchester on April 3rd, had this to say:
“The Lancashire cotton and man-made fibre spinning and doubling industries would be faced with ‘virtual extinction’ over the next few years if the Government in power did not take decisive action and make it known that it \vas doing so.” (Guardian 4.4.62.)
About 230 workers will lose their jobs when the Calico Printers Association print works at Whaley Bridge (Derbyshire) closes down in May, and another 90 have been given notice with the closing down of a weaving mill at Blackburn.
Mr. John Casson, local secretary of the Weavers” Association, is reported by the Daily Worker (7/4/62) as saying that about two-thirds of the workers in the cotton industry in Blackburn are on short time. He continued:
“The future of the cotton industry in the town, once the biggest cotton weaving centre in the world, is precarious. There seems little prospect of any improvement in the position in the foreseeable future.”
There must be cotton workers who turn from the gloomy future and recall what Mr. Herbert Morrison (now Lord Morrison) said in Manchester years ago when, as a Minister in the Labour Government, he was calling on the workers to turn out as much cotton as they could and not be afraid about the future:
“Mr. Morrison described as a ghost from the past Lancashire’s fear that slump must follow boom, the fear that the cotton people might ‘work themselves out of a job’.” (Sunday Despatch, 18.4.48.)
Even if the rest of the world was only half as hungry for Lancashire cotton goods as it is today you’d still be perfectly safe as an industry to go all out.”
Now half the industry is gone, incidentally, along with the newspaper in which the speech was reported. But Lord Morrison has come through unscathed.
White Collar Workers’ Jobs
Traditionally, office workers employed by the big firms have counted on a large measure of security. Things are looking black for them just now. Rolls-Royce, announcing the coming dismissal of 3,000 workers, include among them clerical and technical staffs.
The railways, parallel with the closing down of branch lines, are reported (Observer, 8/4/62) to be overhauling their 70,000 white collar jobs to see where economies can be achieved. Recruiting will be slowed clown and staffs no longer needed offered transfers to other regions.
And the City Press (9/3/62) had this to say about staff cuts made by Shell it Royal Dutch:
“This week’s report that the Royal Dutch Shell profit increase of £9,500.000 has been achieved largely by staff cuts of 20 per cent over the past two years is a real shaker … in the case of Shell even the lunch hour has been cut and the executives now have to fly about the world tourist instead of first class.”
A company official is quoted as saying that in the central offices in London and the Hague staff came down from 10,000 in 1959 to 8,000. And he told a meeting of the staff: “I am afraid that never again will there be any justification for the feeling that nobody is going to be fired from Shell.”
The City Press calls this “a healthy sign” and anticipates that more big companies can be expected to follow suit.
H.