§ Mr. LANSBURYI wish to call attention to the manner in which the Coronation festivities have been arranged for the county of London. I want at the outset that it should be quite understood I am not objecting to holidays as holidays. I think there are far too few holidays in London, and it would be a very excellent thing if there were many more. Neither must I be supposed on this occasion to be in any way attacking the fact that you are to have a Coronation, nor to be saying anything derogatory of the King or any one connected with the Court. But I understand that the arrangements with regard to Bank Holidays are made by the Gentlemen who sit on the Front Bench. It appeared to me that they made those arrangements in utter ignorance of the social and industrial conditions prevailing in this Metropolis, and without any regard to the convenience of the great masses of workpeople who will be concerned. When I first asked a question on the subject, the Prime Minister answered me by saying that the matter must be left to the generous consideration of the employers. I then put a question to the President of the Board of Trade on the subject of payment of workpeople for holidays, and he referred me to the Reports in the library on the subject of Work and Wages. I consulted those volumes, and I find that there is not a single trade union which reports that workmen are paid Bank Holidays, or any other holidays, but the invariable rule is that foremen and managers and people of that kind are paid for holidays, but the workmen are not. It may not so much matter in places like the cotton districts of Lancashire, where husbands, wives, and children go to work, and take into the home £2, £3 and £4 a week. Two days' rest does not affect workers in that position so much as it does people who are earning very much lower wages. I take it for granted that everyone in the House has read Mr. Rowntree's 543 book and Charles Booth's book on Life and Labour in East London. If they have read those books, of course, they will understand the subject which I am raising, but if they have not they will not realise the reasons that prompt me to bring this matter before the House. If they have read these books, they will know that there are multitudes of people who live just on the border line of destitution, and a very much larger number of people who live right underneath the border line. In our country to-day, the loss of a day's wages means a very considerable thing indeed. I would point out that it means a loss, not merely to the man, the head of a family, but it means a loss to the women and children—to the women at any rate who are not directly represented in this House at all. The mere loss of a day's wages means weeks and weeks of struggle and toil on the part of women to make ends meet. This arrangement by which the Coronation is to take place on one day and a drive through London on the next day, and the two days selected being Thursday and Friday, means—and I put it to any man who is in business where there are works dependent on steel and that kind of thing—that those factories will not be opened on Saturday for the half-day. It would not pay the majority of employers to start and light up merely for the few hours on the Saturday. Therefore, the people who arranged these holidays must have arranged them without any thought at all as to their effect on the industrial classes in the community. It means three days' enforced holidays. No workmen have been consulted as to whether they want those holidays or not. No representatives, so far as I know, of the working classes have been consulted on the matter, and, worst of all, this House has not been consulted on the matter. I quite agree with the hon. Member for South Donegal (Mr. MacNeill) that the matter he has raised is of the utmost importance, and that the House should have a voice in the settlement of treaties; but here is a domestic matter, concerning the well-being of multitudes of people in the country, settled over our heads, and we have no voice in the matter at all. I brought this matter before the House for two reasons: first, that I hope whoever speaks for the Government on the subject will make some kind of appeal that at any rate in London there should be general concord amongst at least the best kind of employers that the men shall either have 544 the opportunity given to them of making up the time in the preceding week or the following week, or that those employers who can afford it will show their loyalty by paying the men the wages for the time that will be lost. I quite understand that at present that is probably all that can be done, but I do ask that it should be done, and that it should be done as publicly as it is possible for such a thing to be done. I also desire to ask that in future when we are going in for celebrations of this kind that some regard shall be had for the industrial conditions of great masses of the people. I very much want to congratulate the President of the Local Government Board on the fact that the children in London are going to be fed during Coronation week.