Steel Twilight
It is a devastating comment on the Government's attitude to the rearmament programme, in which steel must inevitably be the key material, that nobody knows what is going to happen to the higher organisation of the iron and steel industry in the next few vital months. That is the case with the British Iron and Steel Federation, the new Iron and Steel Corporation of Great Britain, Parliament and the public, in ascending order of ignorance. Even the shareholders of the eighty companies whose assets were transferred to the Corporation at midnight on Wednesday have to take account of the promise of the Conservatives that if the Government falls and the Socialists are defeated at the next election their shares will come back to them. The Government has never been able to put any con- viction into its assertions that it knows what it is doing with steel. The Federation at least knows what the organisation of the industry has been in the past and that any future changes will involve specific transfers or modifications of its own func- tions. To that extent it has a better grasp of the situation than anyone else. But as to the Corporation, the official head of -the nationalised industry, its plight is almost pitiable. It is easy to understand the evident desire of its chairman, Mr. S. J. L. Hardie, to keep his public life private. If the Govern- ment cannot, or will not, say what the Corporation is supposed rm to do, how can its chairman? In the matter of or tion everything depends on the conversations now in progress between the Corporation and the Federation, in which the latter —for all its caution and the almost over-scrupulous correctness of its behaviour to date—must inevitably be partly concerned with keeping the door to de-nationalisation open. But what reduces all this groping in the dark to the sheerest idiocy is that all the time steel must be produced, the needs of the rearmament policy must be met, and the capital development of the industry must go on. That is what the steel industry is there for. So when they are asked by Mr. Hardie to "forget politics," how are the former owners of the industry, who for five years have had to watch the forcible subjection of effective practice to Socialist theory, to think of a polite reply ?
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