The F.B.I. Again
Of all the bodies qualified to pronounce on the economic situation the Federation of British Industries keeps most consistently to brass tacks. The recommendations in its latest report on the way to recovery are all strictly practical. That does not mean that they are exclusively concerned with the moves of the next few months. It retnains as practical to take a long view of economic organisation today as it would have been two years ago. The virtue of the F.B.I. since the war has been that while keeping its acquaintance with everyday problems—which, as an association of business men it was bound to do—it has never neglected those problems of the middle distance which are the proper study of Government and of business men in collective association. The insistence of the Federation on a cut of some £450,000,000 a year in the present impracticable pro- gramme of capital expenditure, on the necessity for forging closer links with the continent of Europe during the coming winter, and on the development of export sales through improvements in quality and constant attention to the reduction of costs, are all as.strictly realistic as its appeal for concentration by the coal-mining industry on coking coals and the washed grades, the co-ordination of coal deliveries with the availability of other materials, and the avoidance of interference with the steel industry at the time when it is con-
centratin.g on the strenuous but not impossible task of producing 14,000,000 ingot tons in 1948. When the Federation's report does turn to the problems of the really distant future it does so with the sound business sense inherent in a nation which in the nineteenth century put its money into long-term ventures in all parts of the world and in the end got its money back. Prominence is given to the fact that we can restore our credit and balance our trade in the long run. If that fact, presented by independent business men fully aware of both the difficulties and the potentialities of British production, should happen to catch the eye of Mr. Snyder during his forthcoming visit to London, it can do a lot of good.
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