Bernard Shaw, in the preface to Androcles and the Lion, cites as another example the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, which starts off by establishing the descent of Joseph, father of Jesus, from Abraham. This is merely one example of a habit of mind which is extremely widespread, and perhaps always has been. The two utterances do not always come from the same sources, but there must certainly be many people who are capable of holding these totally contradictory ideas in their heads at a single moment. Simultaneously with this - and sometimes in the same column of the same paper - there have been statements that it would be undesirable to make use of Poles or Germans because this might lead to unemployment in the coal industry. One set of figures which I saw last week estimated the annual ‘wastage’ of mine workers at 60,000 and the annual intake of new workers at 10,000. Many recent statements in the press have declared that it is almost, if not quite, impossible for us to mine as much coal as we need for home and export purposes, because of the impossibility of inducing a sufficient number of miners to remain in the pits.
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