Coal: Some Questions Which Must Be Answered

The scan: The Week v5 no6.pdf (PDF, Marxists Internet Archive, opens at this page)

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The coal crisis is reaching staggering proportions, Readers of The Week will have followed the reports of the acceleration of pit closures with concern, About forty thousand men left the mining industry last year, Five more years of such human wastage will mean that the industry will probably not be capable of maintaining an output of even half the recent annual target of 200 million tons, the scrapping of which has been a drastic blow against the mining community. The National Plan of the D.E.A. budgets for a decline in manpower of 29,000 per annum, from 1964-1970. It is also predicted on the assumption that outeat per manshift will rise by an average of 6.0% per annum in the same period. But the demoralisation which the uncertain future of the industry has rightly induced in the coalfields has meant that output per man shift rose by a figure nearer two per cent than the required six, last year,

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Mayhem among the collieries spells good business for the oil men. But whether such good business is good housekeeping for Britain, even in the stolidly neocapitalist framework set out by George Brown, is very much open to doubt. Coal does not produce a balance of payments problem. But as coal is phased out of use and more key sectors of the fuel economy, its replacements will, All of these facts speak with one voices the Government must sheath the knife it is holding over our miners. But there is another fact which speaks the same messages this is a Government which was elected to serve the interests of Britain!s workers, including its mineworkerse Over 40 of its MPs directly represent the NUM. It is flagrantly immoral to break trust with the mining community, and at the same time it will prove politically catastrophic if Labour alienates its staunchest adherents. Dennis Healey spoke this week of how necessary it was to keep faith with the oil Sheiks of the Gulf, in order that people might "trust Britain's word," How much more necessary is it to keep faith we oh the miners, if "Labour" is not to hecome a swearword in the pits?