GREAT BRITAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 98, 27 April 1935, Page 9

GREAT BRITAIN

ECONOMIC LIFE

INDUSTRIAL CHANGES

HOME MARKET TRADE

1 The proposal of David Lloyd George for a new deal in Britain has raised the question as to how much further economic expansion could be carried on in this country if the stimulus of public works and centralised direction were more consistently applied. In this connection special interest attaches to recent evidence indicating the scope of the transformation which —though little appreciated abroad— already has taken place as Britain has sought to adjust her economy, perhaps permanently, to the reduced level of her overseas trade, writes Harold Callender in the "New York Times." In a report of the Ministry of Labour it was shown that in the seven years from 1927 to 1934 employment had diminished by 465,000 in the northern section of Great Britain, while in the South it had increased by 530,000. The most depressed industries are in the North, the most buoyant and expanding ones in the South. The heaviest unemployment is in the older industries producing bulky capital goods; the highest proportion of employment is in London. Industrial Britain is undergoing a kind of revolution. The structure of her economic life and the geographical distribution of her factories are changing. The great exporting trades, upon which Britain's industrial. supremacy was founded, have declined .while trades serving chiefly the home market have thriven. DISPERSION OF INDUSTRY. The primary industries have con.tracted in a time when a great variety 'of new industries, many devoted to "amusements and luxury goods, have sprung up and rapidly grown. The increased use of electricity for power and of motor vehicles for transport 'have made it unnecessary for the " newer factories to cluster, as the old -ones did, in the vicinity of either coal ■ mines or railways; and this has led to the dispersion of industry to new ■areas. ; ~ One notable consequence is that London, long the centre of trade and finance, is now also the greatest industrial area in Great Britain and the area showing the greatest growth in recent years. Perhaps the most notable lesson of the depression years has been the discovery that Britain, which grew wealthy by supplying the world with coaly textiles, heavy machinery, and shipping, could not only survive the permanent curtailment of her activities in so doing but could actually give employ- • ment to increasing numbers of her workers. Britain's destiny, it. appeared, was not nearly so dependent upon the heavy industries or upon foreign markets as her nineteenth-century experience ha 3 led many to suppose. Britain's progress in the last two years has been most remarkable—as surprising to the British as to- the rest of the world. But it cannot be accurately judged by the foreign observer who considers only the crowded restaurants and theatres of London and , the throngs in the shops in Oxford Street. Against the spectacle of London affluence must be set one that few visitors to England ever see—that of , the idleness and misery and hopelessness of'the depressed areas in the North and in South ' Wales, where whole towns have been left economically stranded, where industries . that supported thousands of families have languished to a point above which they may never rise again, where masses of labour can look forward to nothing but wholesale migration to new districts and new trades. There are three points to be noted regarding Britain's recovery: first, it has been uneven and "patchy," some areas and trades experiencing something approaching a boom, while others remained stagnant; second, the rate of expansion, based almost entirely on the domestic market, is unlikely to con- > tinue (it has already slowed down); third, the ,advance so strikingly, made ; since 1932 has rested upon a foundation quite different from that of Britain's former prosperity. "Britain's former dominance in overseas trade has passed," said a recent issue of the "Monthly Review" of the Midland Bank. "The mere existence of the general tariff indicates widespread and authoritative recognition of this view." Britain's abandonment of free trade ' was an acknowledgment that she no j longer counted upon her traditional j revenues from exports or the recovery lof her former foreign markets or the I revival of foreign lending on the pre- { war scale. It was an acknowledgment 'that her position in th^e. world had changed fundamentally because of the I rise of other industrial nations, both ' outside the Empire and within it. BRITAIN OF THE FUTURE. The Britain of) the "future, as economists picture it, will export more high-grade articles of skilled work- ' manship. She will specialise in quality goods that competitors cannot easily equal, rather than in coal and the products of the heavy industries which her ships used to carry to the newer i countries in exchange for raw mater- (' ials. i Nine-tenths or more of her people— ( as now, according to Professor John Hilton—will ■■be engaged in manufacturing and distributing goods for the domestic market. She will produce ■ somewhat more of the food she con- ' sumes and, since international trade probably will not revive on the old scale, she will not build or operate so many ships as formerly and she will not invest so heavily abroad as she used to do. j Her population soon will cease to \ grow, and this fact will permit the ( attainment of a new stability without ) the need of the constant expansion characteristic of the nineteenth century. Her factories will tend to become cleaner anl lighter, as electricity displaces coal as the source of power; and as the older trades are modernised and reorganised and the older towns 1 rebuilt, industry will gradually cease ito be associated either with the grime j and smoke of the "Black Country" or j with drab and unhealthful slums. Bri--1 tain will not again dominate the world ;in manufacturing, but her wage-earners . will live better than they did in the days of her industrial supremacy. !It has long been habitual to think iof British industry in terms of tex- ! tile mills, iron and steel, coal-mining, . and shipbuilding; to associate it chiefly with Manchester, Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle, and Clydeside; to picture it as being carried on in dingy, sooty towns and producing heavy, bulky goods. EXPANDING INDUSTRIES. But these are the very trades which have contracted most since the wardeclining in employment from 20 to 60 per cent. —while many industries having to do with electricity, motor-cars, wireless apparatus, entertainments, and sports have expanded " sufficiently to employ from 40 to 100 per cent, more workers. The newer trades have sprung up in many places, not only in the traditional industrial districts in the North and the Midlands, but also in the hitherto almost non-in-dustrial South, and most of them have

produced, not smoking chimneys and soiled towns, but bright factories of concrete and glass which use electricity for power and motor trucks for transport. The decline of the older and heavier industries may be seen in the statement of the Minister •of Labour that coal-mining, engineering, shipbuilding, iron and steel, railways, and the cotton : and woollen mills employed 984,000 fewer persons in 1933 than 1923; while the growth of the newer and lighter industries is indicated by the fact that the trades producing electrical goods, motor-cars, motor cycles, aircraft, printing, building. mescellaneous metals, artificial silk, and rayon—together with various distributive and entertainment enterprises—employed 1,327,000 more persons in 1933 than they had employed ten years earlier. (The figures did not materially change in 1934.) Meanwhile the numbers employed in manufacturing have increased about 5 per cent, in the last decade, while those employed in building, transport, and in various service trades have increased from 40 to 50 per cent. Hence while the exporting industries have languished and the trades producing more or less new-fangled articles principally for the home market have grown, there has been a shift in relative employment not only from primary into new and luxury trades, but also from manufacturing into distribution and service. Consequently the traditional conception of British industry as an occupation of the North and the Midlands, and of workers living in slums in coal-blackened towns, has become somewhat misleading. For British industry has spread to new areas and new products. Typical of the newer and more thriving activities of industrial Britain are those to be seen in the London area, now become the chief industrial centre. When one drives towards Windsor along the Great West Road, or toward Essex to the east or Hertfordshire to the north, one passes rows of modern or ultra-modern factories. Their walls are largely of glass. There are few smoking chimneys or smoking railway engines about. These factories lie near great arterial roads on whose smooth surfaces motor trucks travel faster than most railway trains. In the new factories many articles are made which nineteenth-century Britain never thought of exporting, articles unknown to the grandfathers of the present generation, articles which only recently were regarded as luxuries- of the rich—electrical appliances, motor-car fittings,.vacuum cleaners, electric refrigerators, novel toilet preparations, patent foods, mechanical gadgets of infinite variety. They are made' hot primarily to be sold to foreign lands which supply Britain with raw materials, but to be sold to a British public which in spite of the depression probably enjoys a higher standard of physical comfort than at any time in the past. Here one gets a glimpse of a probable future industrial Britain—a vast area which uses coal only in the form of power transmitted by electric cables, where factories need not grow about crowded- centres near coalmines or ports but may thrive in small villages, where workers need not labour in a smoky atmosphere or live in congested tenements, where the conquest of world markets.need not be the chief consideration, where capital will'flow into an increasing number of trades ministering to the comfort and enjoyment of the British people as well as into the traditional capital goods industries. <