S1R,—Reasoned argument like 'Why Nationalise Steel?' by Edward T. Judge,
will never impress a strictly dogmatic mind like Mr. Harold Wilson's. Everybody, including Mr. Wilson, knows that the British steel industry is under management of exemplary efficiency. 'But the principle is wrong,' they will say . . . Yet, should it come to it, we might live to see British steel and and steel products, including motor-cars, excluded from the US market. Under US law, customs authorities have the power to refuse admission to any consignment of goods arriving at a US port of entry, where there is a suspicion that the price of the merchandise has been 'manipulated,' either by State interference or by private cartel. After all, the American industry is itself constantly harassed and kept under severest scrutiny by the US anti-trust legislation and the anti- trust court. At any rate the day when British steel is nationalised will be a day of jubilation in the boardrooms of the American steel and motor-car industry. Mr. Wilson's round face would then no doubt change to drawn-oval. But that might hardly be consolation to four million British workers in the steel, motor-car and engineering industries.
Though the original concept of the Labour Party's election campaign as laid down in Signposts for the Sixties, namely an energetic drive for a specta- cular increase in productive capacity, has been abandoned before it ever started for exactly the contrary course—for a frantic quest for enhanced consumption (houses specifically), it may yet be stated that Mr. Wilson's in itself valid aim of guiding British industry to a stage where 'more sophisticated goods' are produced, would have proved abortive under his. government more than under anybody else's. These goods (in the class of highest developed electronic techniques) are actually a by-product of the manufacture of the most effective kind of arms. Britain's first (and last) real hope of entering com- petitively and competently the international com- putor market—just out this week with its interesting range produced by ICT--might never have come into existence without Ferranti's 'overcharge' of four million pounds on Blue Streak . . . Mr. Wil- son's avowed intention is, however, to create a Ministry of Disarmament. When will Socialist leaders at last learn the simple home-truth that the economy of division of labour works under laws which are indivisible—where the rough must be taken with the smooth—which must be accepted wholesale—or not at all.
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