Despite a decrease in output of nearly 400,000 tons, the Powell Duffryn Steam Coal Company is enabled to show a profit for 1915 of £438,799, as compared with £422,204 for 1914 and £364,421 for 1913. The usual 20 per cent is distributed on the ordinary shares, free of income tax, and last year's allocation of £50,000 to the reserve fund is repeated. In addition, the reserve for income tax benefits to the extent of £50,052, and there remains £120,236 to carry forward. The decrease in output, it should be noted, is due to the enlistment of the miners, and its restoration to the normal and probable increase after the war should balance the decline in profit that may be expected to attend the decreased demand.
5. The Times, May 19, 1916:
SOAPMAKERS' "RECORD" PROFITS
Presiding yesterday at the annual meeting of Joseph Watson and Sons (Limited), soapmakers, Leeds, Mr. Joseph Watson said that the company's profits for the year amounted to £122,000, or £19,000 in excess of any previous year's profits. Their turnover had largely increased because they were now supplying soap to France, Belgium, Scandinavia, and a small amount to Spain and Italy. It was not a question to-day of getting orders; it was a question of refusing them. They had at the present time three months' orders on the books.
6. The New Witness:
THE SCANDAL OF WAR PROFITS
It is a sinister and deplorable fact—one of the most ironical with which the continuance of the War has yet confronted us—that there has grown up in Great Britain a number of firms and businesses to whom a successful prosecution of the campaign would mean ruin, and who have an actual vested interest in the indecisive continuance of hostilities. This is due entirely to the lack of grip and resolution which the Government have displayed in dealing with the ugly phenomenon of War Profits. We know, of course, what happens to those profits at present. Half is taken by the State: half passes to the firms who are getting "rich quick" out of its necessities. In theory, it is an anomalous arrangement, indefensible in logic, and opposed to every canon alike of justice and of taxation. In practice it works out in the way we have indicated: that certain privileged firms and individuals are amassing huge fortunes out of the gravest crisis through which the nation has passed, and which will pinch us all before it is over.
Let us give some examples of the mammoth profits that some of these concerns are making. There is first of all the famous old English firm of Levinstein—Messrs. Levinstein of Manchester—to be considered. This "all-British" concern has not done badly out of the terrible situation through which we are slowly toiling. While mere vulgar English Tommies have been dying in the trenches or have returned incapacitated to England—to find that their country cannot afford them a pension—Levinsteins have been pocketing several thousands of that country's cash. Levinsteins' are dye-makers, and in 1914-15 they made a profit of £80,000 on a capital of £90,000: a profit large enough to make the mouth of the deceased usurer Kirkwood dry with envy. But, while our legislature passed laws to restrain the usurer in his exactions, the "war profiteer" has no restriction placed on him. His workmen can, in certain cases, be fined or sent to prison if they absent themselves from work, and hundreds have been proceeded against under the Defence of the Realm Act. But the profiteer himself is immune! It is childish to say that the State can recover half of the profit he has wrung from the country's necessity. What right has he to the other half? In the case of Levinstein, this £80,000 profit enables the company to pay 14-1/2 years' preference dividend, to distribute a dividend of 30 per cent on its ordinary shares, and to write off £21,000 for depreciation! It is merely fatuous to pretend, or to endeavour to pretend, that the appropriation of half these profits squares matters between the community and the British firm in question.
As with Levinstein, so with other firms. Messrs. Cammell, Laird & Co. averaged profits of £146,000 for the three years before the war. Since last year those profits have risen to £237,000. Those profits, of course, are subject to war profits taxation. But most manifestly that taxation is utterly inadequate. So it is in the case of Messrs. W. Beardmore, whose profits rose from £184,000 (three years' pre-war average) to £219,000; of the British Westinghouse Co., which rose from £56,000 to £151,000; and of Beyer Peacock's, which increased from £57,000 to £109,000.
In all these cases the deduction of 50 per cent by the Government is entirely inadequate and utterly misleading. It is at once an admission that the firm in question has no right to amass huge profits out of the welter and tragedy of the European War, and that the State is content to stultify itself by surrendering the other half.