Britain for the British

by Robert Blatchford

How is it that the Press never reproaches any of those four idle and overpaid classes with selfishness in causing the poor workers of other trades to go short of fuel?

How is it that the Press never chides these men for their folly in trying to keep up profits, royalties, and interest in a "falling market"?

It looks as if the "immutable laws" of political economy resemble the laws of the land. It looks as if there is one economic law for the rich and another for the poor.

The merchants, commission agents, and other middlemen I leave out of the question. These men are worse than worthless—they are harmful. They thwart; and hinder, and disorder the trade, and live on the colliers, the coal masters, and the public. There is no excuse, economic or moral, for their existence. But there is only one cure for the evil they do, and that is to drive them right out of the trade.

I claim, then, that if the price of coal must be reduced, the sums paid to the above-named three classes should be cut down first, because they get a great deal more, and do a great deal less, than the carriers' labourers and the colliers.

First as to the coal owners and the royalty owners. We see that the whole sum of the wages of the colliers for a year was only £6,000,000, while the royalty owners and the coal owners took £17,000,000, or nearly three times as much.

And yet we were told that the miners, the men who work, were "selfish" for refusing to have their wages reduced.

Nationalise the land and the mines, and you at once save £17,000,000, and all that on the one trade.

So with the railways. Nationalise the railways, and you may reduce the cost of the carriage of coal (and of all goods and passengers) by the amount of the profits now made by the railway companies, plus a good deal of the expense of management.

For if the Municipalities can give you better trams, pay the guards and drivers better wages for shorter hours, and reduce penny fares to halfpenny fares, and still clear a big profit, is it not likely that the State could lower the freights of the railways, and so reduce the cost of carrying foods and manufactured goods and raw material?