Here and there
Freedom to Emigrate
It is typical of Russia and all her satellite countries that workers are not allowed to emigrate. Every effort is made, by Berlin walls and savage penalties, to keep the workers inside the frontiers. Quite a long while ago there were laws prohibiting English workers emigrating, particularly to foreign countries. The purpose was to prevent workers’ skill and training acquired here from going to help rival manufacturers, and doubtless much the same motive is behind the similar prohibition imposed in Russia.
In 1824 a House of Commons committee reported on the impossibility of preventing emigration and the Act was repealed. The Committee found :
“That, notwithstanding the laws enacted to prevent the seduction of artisans to go abroad, many able and intelligent artisans have gone abroad to reside and to exercise their respective arts, and that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, by law to prevent artisans who may be so determined from going out of the country.”
It is an interesting speculation how long it will take Russian capitalism to catch up with 1825.
Working like Whites
It has been noted before in these columns how the leaders of the new nations signal the great day of “liberation” by calling on their followers to work harder. It is all very fitting and inevitable. Like money, which “has no smell,” exploitation has no skin colour. But it remained for Jomo Kenyatta, leader of Kenya Africans, to hit upon the perfect form of words. He called on his workers to be prepared to work harder, “like white men!” (Daily Express, November 6th, 1961).
A Council House?
When the Birmingham Corporation decided to take a ballot among would-be buyers of 108 council houses it received 1,800 applications (Guardian, January 8th, 1962). But half of these were eliminated before the ballot took place; 500 because they already had a home, were not Birmingham-born, or were older than 30, and another 400 young couples “because they earn below £16 a week.”
The City’s housing manager reckons that those who are lucky to get a house will have monthly expenditure on mortgage repayments, rates and ground rent of nearly £16 a month for the next 30 years. He also reckons that unless the would-be occupier has a regular £16 a week (including regular overtime) he can’t afford to pay out £16 a month.
Birmingham is one’ of the highest wage areas in the country, yet nearly a quarter of would-be buyers of a council house can’t afford it.
Which brings us back to the current myth about the average wage in this country being £15 a week. That figure, which crops up so often, is not the average wage of all the 13 million men employed in the whole range of industries and services, but the average for fewer than 5 million of them employed in the relatively highly paid manufacturing industries. And it is not the average of their normal pay for a week’s work, but includes nearly six hours’ overtime. Without the overtime it would come down to little over £12 10s, and if the rest of the industrial, agricultural, distributive and clerical workers were included it would almost certainly be under £12.All of this relates to men aged 21 and over. Women will be lucky if their average wage is much above half the figure for men.
Moments of Truth
No Solution for Housing Problem:
“I have tried to indicate that, if we managed to hit and continue to hit 300,000 a year, we should be, broadly speaking, meeting the need. But of course there is a continuing problem. We will never solve the housing problem as such—never.” (Italics ours).
Statement by Earl Jellicoe—Parliamentary Secretary Ministry of Housing. House of Lords, November 28th, 1961.
Keeping quiet about Inflation:
“I do not believe that there is a long-term answer to the problem of inflation . . . That does not mean . . . that I believe that governments of the day ought to admit in public that they should not direct part of their policies to trying to restrain inflation. If they admitted publicly that inflation could not be restrained we should have run-away inflation overnight.”
Mr. David Price, M.P. for Eastleigh. Conservative, House of Commons, December 18th, 1961.
H.