Perpetual Crisis
The .coal industry is like a weak man on a slippery slope who takes one step up and slides down two. Any hint of improvement is only too quickly followed by news of deterioration. There have been nearly ten thousand new recruits to the collieries since last year, and miners' conditions of employment are better than they have ever been; and yet the industry is tottering once again on the edge of that ruin into which it could so easily drag all other industries, and the country as a whole, after it. When the executive com- mittee of the National Union of Mineworkers published its annual report last week it told of a meeting with the Coal Board on January 9th, at which the chairman of the Board gave warning that " the position was in fact so serious that nationalisation could be destroyed, and the industry could be so affected that it might never recover." If the position was serious in January, it is deplorable in July. If man-power has been higher in the first few months of this year than in the corresponding period in 1952, so has consumption; while production and stocks are lower. If the miners do not help Britain by increased efforts in the next few months, heaven alone can do so should the weather be severe for any length of time next winter. In fact, the industry exists now in a state of perpetual crisis, and it has reached such a pass that an extra day's holiday, for the Coronation, was almost enough to wreck it. What is going to happen as a result of the extra week's holiday which the miners are to have for the first time this year ? In this industry nationalisation is clearly seen to be on trial. What is wanted is harder work, a new attitude to work, a more widely diffused sense of responsibility. But improved material conditions and a wealth of exhortations from above are obviously not enough to bring them about.
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