TRAVEL BRITISH

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 205, 13 August 1932, Page 3

TRAVEL BRITISH

UNDER THE UNION JACK SUPPORT EMPIRE SHIPPING AGAINST UNFAIR COMPETITION. Writing to a friend in Hawke’s Bay, a Cornishman whose home is near Falmouth, relates how sad it is to see the Fal river so crowded with laid-up British ships. Vessels of all classes and tonnage, he says, lie crowded together, all out of commission and with little prospect of finding cargoes for months, perhaps years, to come. He stresses the duty of the people overseas to travel on and use for cargo carrying no other vessels than British, for it is upon the supremacy of her mercantile marine that the prosperity of the nation and the Empire largely depends. British shipping has much to contend with in being faced with unfair competition, mainly arising from subsidised foreign shipping. The Interna tional Maritime Conference, whose headquarters are at Copenhagen, in the current issue of its publication refers to this ‘ ‘ indiscriminate building of vessels on subsidies,’’ and declares that it would be “almost poetic justice to resort to the same means to undo the evil which has been done and to use the subsidies for breaking up tonnage instead of building it.’’ The scheme assumes Government participation in many countries in breaking up tonnage, but shipping authorities in Great Britain considered that the Governments concerned would raise strong objections to it. A cable published in the “Tribune” yesterday, however, reported that Germany, the country which, while pleading bankruptcy and inability to pay war reparations, has nevertheless spent huge sums of borrowed money in subsidising construction costs of building new German liners for competition with British, is giving her shipping companies twelve million marks (approximately £600,000) for scrapping 400,000 tons of their superfluous ships now lying idle. All this goes to show how keen the foreigners are to indulge in unfair competition with the British Mercantile Marine. The plain fact is that Germany, America, Italy, and the other nations that are subsidising their shipping are individually bent upon building up their sea carrying trade at Great Britain’s expense. This being so, sureIv, if in self interest alone, everyone I

within the Empire should support the British Mercantile Marine by every means in his power, remembering always that it is self reliant and not spoon fed as are so many of the commercial fleets of its foreign competitors.