Broken Paper Promises
- The Newsprint Supply Company, Limited, which on Monday issued a statement setting out the miserable story of newsprint supplies in the past six months, is no doubt capable of looking after itself. And since one of its suggestions to the Board of Trade for remedying the latest shortage of newsprint for newspapers is the limitation of supplies to periodicals, it can hardly have expected those periodicals, of which the Spectator is one, to look after it. in suggesting to the Board of Trade that there should be (a) a renewal of newsprint imports from Canada, (b) a limit to exports of news- print and (c) a limit to consumption by the periodicals, it invited a reply from the Government—whose lack of sympathy for both newspapers and periodicals has been a fairly constant post-war factor—passing over the first two suggestions and accepting the third. t And that was precisely the reply it received from the President of the Board of Trade in the Commons on Tuesday. But such ineptitudes apart, it must be very plainly asserted that the Newsprint Supply Company knows what it wants and has been perfectly consistent in its attempts to get what it wants, whereas the Board of Trade, which is supposed to control newsprint supplies through its rationing of imports, exports and dollars, has hesitated, shirked long-term decisions, procrastinated and generally behaved in an insufferable mature% The result has been that contracts with the Canadian 'mills have been broken ; dollar supplies which were refused when newsprint could be readily obtained at a satisfactory price are now, after much shilly-shallying, to be granted on a small scale when supplies are tight owing to the revival of American demand ; and the British public is going to have to put up once more with smaller papers. Once again the emptiness of the Govern- ment's pretence of " planning " is exposed, unless bye planning is meant a species. of interference with the Press through the control of paper supplies, which would never be tolerated if it took the more open form of censorship.
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