SHIPBUILDING BOOKINGS

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 133, 2 December 1935, Page 11

SHIPBUILDING BOOKINGS

(British Official Wireless.)

RUGBY, November 29.

Important contracts valued at £2,500,000 were secured by Clyde shipbuilding firms in the month of November. In the last eight weeks 20 shipbuilding yards on the Cyde have had bookings aggregating over £1,000,000 per week. There are at present 80 vessels building in Clyde yards.

to subsidise various employments indispensable to the well-being of the State. Every country in the world has' had to make its choice between subsidy or collapse1 during the prolonged depression. If they had been State industries the subsidies would have been larger, or, in Mr. Attlee's words, the "doles" would have been more "lavish."

The large Treasury grants to locnl authorities for housing purposes are in effect subsidies to the building and allied trades. In this case Socialists complain not that the National Government have given so much, but that they have not given very much more. Yet since the war these Treasury grants have amounted to nearly £1,000,000,000. Housing grants and agricultural subsidies—both are subsidies.

i The common object of them all has been "to improve the lot of the people." In very great measure they have succeeded. The plight of tens of thousands would indeed ,be deplorable if these subsidies had been withheld. STEEL'S RECOVERY. If the Socialists cannot see a "single constructive step" in the manifold agricultural experiments which have been undertaken, I wonder what view they take of the tariff policy of the country. The recovery of the iron and steel industry is attributable directly to the tariff.

. Direct wages in the steel trade were 30 per cent, higher in 1934 than in 1933. There is every prospect of an output for this year of 10,000,000 tons of steel. Iron and steel exports are 15 per cent, higher for the first five months of the year than they were in 1934.

The British steel .industry, which for long lay at the mercy of the Continental cartel, is now inside the cartel, and fully able to hold its own at its councils. Here is a "constructive step," which Mr. Attlee somehow seems to have missed. Thousands who owe their employment to the tariff bless its name.

Again, is not a balanced Budget a "constructive step," and is not a series oi such Budgets a solid staircase to prosperity? Is not the maintenance of a cheap money policy a constructive step, and was it not a constructive step of the first magnitude to convert the gigantic 5 per cent. War Loan into a 3£ per cent, loan, and at a stroke save the country nearly £30,000,000 interest?

Under the National Government a million new houses have been built; the slums are in rapid process of clearance, and 300,000 houses are to be built for the replacement of their occupants. The Overcrowding Act provides new machinery to reduce overcrowded housing conditions by providing flats or houses to be let at about 10s per week, inclusive of rates. Still nothing constructive. O, myopic Attlee!

The whole programme of the Government in every department has been "constructive" and ameliorative, and the British people were never better fed, nor better housed, nor better clothed than they are today. Their health is better, their working conditions are better, their transport is better, their education is better, their recreative opportunities are better.

And while the National Government has been engaged on building these constructive steps to prosperity, how has the Socialist Opposition com-: ported itself? It has puled and puked in peevish and impotent petulance.