SHIPPING CRISIS

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 94, 15 January 1935, Page 11

SHIPPING CRISIS

Effect on Britain’s Defence BEDROCK REACHED Rationalisation and Subsidies Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Roger Keyes, M.P., presided over a meeting of the Royal Empire Society in London recently, at which the crisis in British shipping was discussed by Mr. E. H. I Watts, Sir Archibald Hurd, ami others. Sir Roger Keyes, introducing the speakers, said that there must be some way out of the evil paths into which the mercantile marine had drifted. The policy of counter subsidies might be the solution, but there might be other and better ways. Mr. Watts, dealing with the present position of British shipping, said that so far as the “tramps” were concerned it was obvious that if the Government had been convinced of the dire straits of the industry the country could accept the verdict. The other day he asked a licensed valuer to value their tramp industry as a going concern. The figure he put on it -was £18,500,000. There was nearly £9,500,000 outstanding as mortgages, debentures, and debts. If their shipping industry ceased to exist its contribution to the national trading balance would be missed to such a large extent that the Chancellor of the Exchequer would have extreme difficulty in balancing his Budget and the repercussions of an Budget on the banking system and on the rest of the world hardly bore contemplation. Those invisible exports had dropped from £340,000,000 in 1920 to £65,000,000 in 1932, and as a rough guess he very much doubted whether they would be more than £50,000,000 in 1934. If War Cante. To-day it must be recognised that if the Admiralty required tile same amount of personnel from the Merchant Service as they asked for in 1914 it would be unable to have them if we were to continue to run the amount of tonnage at present on the British registers. We should, therefore, have to choose between an undermanned Royal Navy or an undermanned fleet of food carriers. He did not think it was any exaggeration to say that if in the future war broke out, within two months of its declaration we should have insufficient ships of our own to bring grain to this country and we should have to go, hat in hand, to the foreigner to save our population from starving. To-day that -would be a very quick process. Dealing with the causes of the crisis, he said that calculations showed that foreign State assistance amounted to at least £30,000,000 per annum, and this was an impossible burden for British shipowners to fight out of their own pockets. A second and equally important cause of the crisis was the coastal reservations of foreign competitors. The third and last cause was the lower standard of living of many of our Subsidies could not be considered a lasting remedy or a permanent policy worthy of an industry which meant so much to this nation. The third remedy was called rationalisation, and this was what the Government had asked the shipowners to pursue at an international conference. It was one of the conditions under which the tramp shipowners received their subsidy. He did not think one could be very happy about the way this was introduced. The Government, apparently, formulated this policy and asked the shipowners to get into direct touch with foreigners. In the meantime they wrote and informed the Dominions what they were doing. Personally, lie should have thought the proper way—certainly it would be the business way in a similar situation—would have been to call one’s partners together aud decide on a united front before approaching one’s competitors. He was afraid that this rationalisation scheme was going to be up against one very big fundamental question, and that was the basis on which each country of the world was going to rationalise. We on our side —and ho thought the Government had endorsed this view by their “scrap and build” policy by which they allowed us to buy foreign ships and scrap them and receive assistance to build British ships in their place—required more British ships to fulfil our national obligations. In fact, we required so many ships that nothing less than the 1914 basis could bring us up to what might bo described as the minimum safety line. On the other hand, the competitors who had captured a large proportion of our trade during the last 20 years were hardly likely to agree on 1914 when 1934 was so much more to their

advantage. He thought we should be wholly lacking in our duty to the general public, both of this country and the Dominions, if we were to sßibilise the foreigner on the basis of 1934 on the gains he had made from us. He supported a school of thought which believed that we ought to reinstitute the Navigation Acts in a modernised form. Each country should be taken individually and an agreement brought about with each so that those countries who sold more to us than they bought from us in exchange must make up tlie difference in value by taking British ships. This seemed to be au eminently fair arrangement, and it was particularly advantageous to this country because the bulk of the people with whom we h?id adverse trade balances were not very large shipowners themselves and would not be against such an arrangement. Bedrock Reached. Sir Archibald Hurd, speaking of international conferences, said international conferences, as experience had proved, were dangerous to British interests. We were usually pressed to make concessions for the sake of peace, and we made them. They could only hope that sacrifices would not be made at the coming conference which would hinder the recovery of the prosperity of British shipping. With less than 12,000,000 tons of ocean-going ships we had reached bedrock. Sir Charles Hipwood, formerly secretary of the Marine Department of the Board of Trade, said that they wished the best possible luck to the interim policy of subsidies, but it was only an interim policy, and must be succeeded by another policy of Empire defence. Captain Coombs, of flic Officers’ (Merchant Navy ) Federation, appealed on behalf of unemployed British officers . aud seamen. Over 2000 certificated officers of the merchant navy, he said, were unemployed, a large number of them being senior men. Many had had to sell their life policies and houses and were living on charitable grants from various organisations. It was to be hoped that something would be done to provide these men with pensions. Sir Parick Ford, M.P., contended that the State subsidy should only be given to firms which insisted on having certificated British officers and a reasonable proportion of British crews.