plans in Reading turn from a trickle into a flood. At the end of last year Huntley and Palmers, part of the Associated Biscuits' combine, announced plans to transfer production from Reading - where it has been a staple industry for nearly 150 years - to their other factories, beginning the rundown in 1974. In June, Gillettes said they intended to switch some production lines away from Reading. ron more recondy surtons seces nave dccideo to move away from Reading to East Berkshire, and planning permission nas aiready been granted lor warenouses to De bullt on ineir scea inal grounds. And we report cise wnere on ine workers resistance to moves by Adwest Engineering to shift production of power steering gears for the motor industry to a new plant in Sunderland.
On top of all this has now come the announcement on 24 August by Courages, part or tne impenal 1obacco Company, that it intends to close down its brewery in Reading, and centralise all its breweries at a single -new site. Eleven hundred jobs are involved here. This spate of closure plans is all part of the transformawon waien une town or keading is undergoing. Uver the past decade Reading's closeness to London has begun to tell in an unprecedented way. Since the mid1960s the movement of businesses and people out of London, with its restrictions on new office building, over-crowaca suburos, and rockeung rents and land prices, increased tremendously. The main attraction of Reading is its well-placed position m une communicanons ne work eis on une M4 motorway, has extremely easy access to" London, and is close to Heathrow Airport, making it quicker to get to Paris than to Manchester, for instance.
But this movement from London has gone ahead with no serious attempt to plan these changes, which are anccung te nyes ol tens or tousands or peopic It is not only the production and distribution of goods, but also the development of the cities where industries are located, which goes on in a chaotic wav in CaDILalISE SOCICLY Thus, in 1971 Reading's town planners' envisaged a growth of up to 1.5 million square feet more office space by 1981. But now, only two years later, half the total planned tor the whole ten-vear period is already either under construction or planning permission nas been granted.
One result of these developments is that Reading and London land and house prices are now virtually the same, win moustral land currently retening £100,000 an acre, and houses selling for an average of £11,500. No less than two-thirds of all the employment in the insurance, banking and finance belt of cntral Berkshire - North Hampshire Nort-west surrey Is concentratea mn Keading, and new office blocks are going up faster than workers can be found to fill them.
And as these businesses move in, so the old industries move out. Firms like Courages and Huntley ana ramers occupy vast acres orlana walca ome are clamouring to buy. Courages' 14 acre site close to the town centre would probably sell for over f1½ million; the sprawling biscuit factory covers an even larger area of land; and the Adwest Group own hunGrees or acres wnic will orme tem a vast sum or money if they put it on the market.
So the Reading which was the overspill and commuter town for what London could not take in the 60s. i now increasingly confronted by the same pressures for wach carner providea London s renet. une work force from the factories closing down is generally not well-suited to the needs of the new employers in Reading, and many of these workers will face great difficulties in finding comparable jobs in the area. Mean wnne une shortage or skiica labour grows and grows, and the lucky landowners pocket millions. And where will the offices move to after Reading? ILLUSION In its treacherous talks with the Heath government, the TUC is peddling the illusion that the living stardards of the working class can be protected through the control of prices -es pecially those of food and other basic neces sities. It poses this as an alternative to the Tories' plan for threshold agreements (analysed in this column last week).
In theory, food price controls could be introduced with or without a subsidy from the State to the producers of the goods with controlled prices. But if there is no subsidy, then any temporary gain to the working class would be quickly outweighed by the capitalists' efforts to extricate themselves from the effect of price control in reducing their profits. Either they would stop putting their goods on the market in the normal way, and so shortages and black markets would develop; or else in some cases they might stop putting their goods on the market altogether, either selling them abroad in more lucrative markets or else stockpiling them in anticipation of higher prices later. Nixon's panie price control measures, introduced as a sop to the working class in June of this year, give a most dramatic example of this kind of result. Most of the controls were rapidly abandoned in response to the food producers' hysteria. But as a result of the control on beef prices, which remains until 12 September, producers have simply left beef on the hoof and slaughtered less cattle, while distributors have held it in deep freeze. The result is that beef has all but disappeared from American shops, and there is an outburst of wild west style cattle rustling.
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