IS PRECARIOUS

From Our Merseyside Correspondent ECONOMICS DESPITE PRESS BALLYHOO, ‘RECOVERY’

As election day draws nearer the Press talks more and more of Britain’s economic prosperity. Unemployment is falling, gold reserves are rising and the sun is shining. You’ve never had it so good.

But another page of your morning paper will tell you of the plans to close one-quarter of Britain’s coal-mines, and of compensation for textile manufacturers who are scrapping five million spindles and thousands of looms. What sort of recovery is this?

The post-war boom, which ‘new thinkers’ in the Labour movement told us was a permanent fixture, had three main bases.

First was the need to replace wealth destroyed in the war and to satisfy the demand for goods which had not been produced for six years.

Secondly, after 1949, the boom was sustained by the rearmament programme, which took labour, raw materials and machinery away from civilian production.

Third was the expansion of markets in the primary producing countries in Asia and Africa, as their incomes from the sale of raw materials went up.

Eventually the tendencies inherent in capitalist production caught up with the system and the ‘new thinkers’. ‘Defence’ expenditure could not go on expanding indefinitely. Overproduction appeared in one sector after another. The 1957 drop in commodity prices and in the demand for raw materials drastically reduced the incomes of the primary producers.

Government prepared the way Unlike the other post-war dips in the U.S. economy, this one coincided with a sag in the expansion in western Europe. Capitalism saw its biggest post-war slump.

In Britain the recession arrived to reinforce the Tories’ efforts to create a pool of unemployment. This policy began