Winter Coal
If facing the facts would keep us warm in the coming months we should have little reason to complain. In his speech in the House of Commons on -Wednesday Mr. Shinwell put all relevant facts and figures. before the House, and it will save confusion if his various other utterances are regarded as withdrawn from circulation and this substantive statement is taken as a new starting-point. There was still a gap of 5,000,000 tons between what was needed at the end of this month and what would be available. Production in September had begun to rise slightly after " the orgy of holidays " and it might be that the gap would be reduced, but at the best stocks in hand would always be well below safety-level. The result is that if we get through it will not be because production is what it ought to be, but because economies are what they ought not to have to be. The hard fact is that the men who are needed in the mines are not there, and the men who are there are not working as they should. -Justifying a figure he had recently quoted, the Minister said that with 700,000 men " with effective employment " he would get all the coal he wanted. But seeing that absenteeism stands at present at the rate of 15 per cent. there are never more than 600,000 men working at one time. What is most discouraging is the grossly selfish refusal of the National Union of Mineworkers to allow even 200 trained Polish miners to enter the industry ; while that spirit prevails there is little room for optimism about the future. It is no doubt true that the miners are doing less work because through the shortage of consumer goods they have little to spend their money on ; but that simply means that the fact that the whole prosperity of their country depends on their efforts counts with them for nothing at all. There is no question that the average miner of today is a different type from the miner of a genera- tion ago, and the country is greatly the poorer for it. Mechanisation may remedy some of the practical effects of that, but the psychological problem remains, and its solution is hard to foresee:
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