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Two leading academics had some. important things to say about Britain's brain drain recently. ‘Professor Titmss gave some important facts and figures about the worsening situation at a conference on social welfare and Lord Bowden, Vice Chancellor of the Manchester College of Science and Technology, even applied a kind of Marxist analysis to the crisis in an interview on television on the same day. First, here are some of Prof. Titmss's main points:- America's "borrowing" of doctors, scientists and engineers will save them thousands of millions of dollars, Prof Richard M. Titmuss, told the British National Conference on Social Welfare at Church House, Westminster, last week. "Since 1949 the U.S. has absorbed and to some extent deliberately recruited 100,000 doctors, scientists and engineers from developed and developing countries," he declared, and went on to estimate that in about 18 years the U.S. would have saved some $4,000m. by not having to educate and train, or train fully, this "vast quantity of human capital. "It has spent more on consumption goods, less on public services. It has taxed itself more lightly while imposing heavier taxation on poorer countries} he stated. Prof. Titmuss, said that estimates of the amount of foreign aid going into the U. S. left out of account the social and economic effects in Britain - and more significantly in the world's poorer countries - of having to train more doctors, scientists and engineers, and of having to pay heavier inflated rewards to prevent American recruitment and offset the harmful repercussions on incomes, prices and levels of taxation. "In medicine alone, foreign doctors now account for nearly 20 per cent of annual additions to the U. S. medical profession. The world now provides as much or more medical aid to the U. S. in terms of dollars as the total cost of all American medical aid, private and public, to foreign countries." Prof. Titmuss said a study he made recently showed that American advertisements for British doctors - often accompanied by recruiting campaigns - rose from 134 in 1951 to over 4,000 in 1966. Many monetary experts abroad seemed to place a different valuation on countries which depended heavily on "borrowing" human capital as distinct from those which borrowed financial capital. "For such transactions, no payment is made to the lending country. There are no interest charges, and there is no intention of repaying the loan," he said.
Free speech campaign: We have received for publication a full length article outlining the important progress this campaign has made, Unfortunately, owing to space reason we are unable to publish it in this issue. We will do so in the next issue, However, we are sure readers will be very pleased to know that the response to the press adverts has been extremely encouraging, end that people and organisations from all over the country have sent money and messages of support.
Britain, he pointed out, also relied heavily on the skills of doctors from
poorer countries. But "at least it cannot be said that we are deliberately
organising recruitment campaigns in economically poorer countries. Just as
we have recognised the injustice and the waste in the unrestricted free
international movement of goods, material and capital, so we must now
recognise the need for the richer countries of the world to take he to
protect the poorer countries from being’ denuded of skilled manpower, argued
Prof. Titmss.
Lord Bowden made his remarks in the TV programme 'Future'. He explained how
the number of British scientists going to the United States was rapidly
increasing; he then went on to point out that this was part of a world-wide
problem. For instance, the Swiss Government have recently produced a report
indicating their concern at the loss of top scientists from Switzerland to
the U.S. Bowden went on to say that the loss of British doctors had meant
that we had become dependent on Asian (especially Indian) and African
doctors for the manning of British hospitals - even though the poor nations
of the world are in the most desperate need of doctors. Bowden added that
he felt that the Marxist theory about the increasing impoverishment of the
workers in all countries was not correct, but he was convinced that Marxist
theory as applied to nations was accurate - the rich nations were getting
richer and the poor were getting poorer, When asked for his ideas on
_ possible solutions, Bowden commented that the Berlin Wall had been
technically successful but politically disastrous. He thought that the
idea of a transfer fee - with the richer nations having to pay much more
for any skilled technicians they wanted from the poorer nations, should
be seriously studied.
A Comment:=- It is clear that the poorer nations are currently subsidising
the social services and welfare of the richer countries, notably that of
the United States, And all the European scientists and technicians who
are being recruited by the largest American business corporations simply
add to the domination of such corporations in world markets. The U.S.
parent companies pay the highest fees to the world's best brains and use
them in their U.S.-based research and development programmes. The large
American corporations do not develop such advanced work in their European
or Latin American subsiduaries, Nearly all the research and development
work is done in the United States plants and only the resulting new
techniques are passed on to the corporations' subsiduaries. This results
in the European-owned companies being unable to compete. This in turn
encourages further U.S. take-overs. Such is the power and inhumanity of
presentday international capitalism. Only the forces of international
socialism can put an end to it.