BRITISH COAL FOR EUROPE

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25364, 11 December 1947, Page 7

BRITISH COAL FOR EUROPE

SMALL SHIPMENTS MAY BE MADE STOCKS UNABLE TO BE MOVED BY RAIL (Special Correspondent N.Z.PA.) (Rec. 7 p.m.) LONDON, December 10. Coal Board officials are conferring with coal exporting firms on Tyneside and in South Wales this week to decide what quantities of coal can bte exported to Europe. The decision to authorise these exports has not been made because of any immediate surplus, but because stocks of coal are accumulating at some pitheads in the absence of rail transport to move it. It has therefore been decided that where such stocks can conveniently be moved by sea they should be exported to Europe. The quantities are not expected to De more than token shipments. “The Times” refers in* a leading article to a prediction by Mr Arthur Horner, secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, that Britain will be in a position to export between 10,000,000 and 15,000,000 tons of coal in less than a year’s time. It says: “The improvements in coal output are still too recent to justify more than restrained hopes about the near future. Most people will prefer to wait a little longer before accepting -Mr Horner’s belief that the worst is over and that from now on the prospect is one of steady and apparently rapid improvement. , , . “Mr Homer is confident that all this can be done because nationalisation has reversed all the tendencies to decline from which the industry was suffering. The nation will look to Mr Horner and his colleagues, the Coal Board, and the miners, to justify this confidence by results and to justify the results themselves by the cost at which they are achieved.” Good Production Week

The Ministry of Fuel announces that British miners have had their best production week since Dunkirk. The miners produced 4,298,700 tons of deep-mined and open-cast coal in the week ended December 6. The Ministry of Fuel recalled that the production record reached in Dunkirk week was 4,953,400 tons. . The in keeping production in recent weeks at about 4,250,000 tons, had brought the year’s production so far to 185,080,200 tons. This output would not achieve the 1947 target of 200,000,000 tons in 52 weeks, but it might do so in the 53 weeks of the Coarl Board’s working year, ending January 3, 1948. U.S. Labour Leader’s View

In Washington, Mr John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America, testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee which is conducting an investigation into fuel shortages in the United States, said: “The British Empire is being liquidated before our eyes.” He blamed the refusal of the miners to agree to mechanisation and the “rapacity” of private owners for this #tate of affairs.

He said that the United States was able to supply as much coal as the world wanted as long as there was transport to carry it. He said that the British miner could produce only one ton of coal to the American miner’s six tons. "The Empire is collapsing because Britain’s economy has foundered,” he declared. “That economy is based on coal.”

He added that it was now definitely the United States’ task to fill all those markets which British coal exports had previously filled.