Is Vt ar Production Behindhand ?
In asking for patience from those who wonder why we are not yet taking the offensive against the enemy Mr. Churchill reminded them hit Saturday that whilst the Germans have long been preparing for war British production in munitions is now only in the early part of its second year. But what about the future? Are our plans of production so laid that within a reasonable space of time our production will equal and surpass that of the enemy? In an article in a Bulletin of the Oxford Institute of Statistics Mr. Balogh maintains that we are still lagging seriously behind. He estimates that German war expenditure rose between June, 1939, and July, 1940 from a little over L2,000,000,000 per annum to nearly bb000,000,000 ; the total is probably £5,000,000,000 if we include the whole war effort of Axis Powers and the occupied countries. He maintains that our present expendi- ture on the fighting services and their equipment is at a rate of less than £3,000,000,000 (excluding the war effort of the Dominions), and that we shall never draw level without further curtailment of civilian consumption and a substantial increase of general productivity. Perhaps he does not make sufficient allowance for the fact that Germany has an even larger task than we have—she has to watch the Russian frontier, to keep down subject peoples, to guard thousands of miles of coastline, maintain a land army on a scale which for some time we cannot expect to equal, and make good the defects of her main ally. None the less the conclusion that our production IS still inadequate, that we are not yet even catching up on all the arrears of production, seems to be justified.
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