NECESSITOUS AREAS. (Hansard, 16 December 1925)

§ Mr. LANSBURY
I desire to reply to some of the remarks made by the Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Health about the late Government. This present Government has, under the Act of this year, repealed the Measure brought in by the Minister of Labour in the last Government, by which the local authorities were benefited. That is the first point. The second point is, that when I charged the present Administration with murder it was because the hon. Gentleman has been unable to answer the statement of the hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Evan Davies) that the death rate among babies in one district had gone up by 50. Each one of those babies is a victim of the policy laid down by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Health. You stood at that Box just now, and you said that in those districts they were so driven that they could not pay for their loans or their interest, and therefore they should have no more money. You forgot to say, or to explain, that you told them they could have more money than the £45,000 if they would knock a couple of shillings off the relief here and sixpence off the relief there, and so on. You very quietly put that on one side. You have not answered the charge that in that particular parish in the union of Abergavenny, the authorities are refusing, although they have the means of granting, the relief necessary for preventing the murder by starvation of these little children, and you calmly tell us to-night that we are to await a report from Sir 1578 Henry Goschen and his Committee. I want to say to this House—I may not have another opportunity—that all of us who do not protest against that will be responsible for the slaughter of every innocent little baby that dies of starvation. It is no use blinking it. If it was in Turkey, if it was somewhere in Iraq, if it were the Kurds and Turks, massacring Christian women and children, everyone would be up in arms, but I say, deliberately, that I would rather see a baby killed outright by a spear or a gun, or any weapon of that kind, than I would know it was being starved in its mother's womb, starved at its mother's breast, or then starved, if perchance it lived to be a few months old. That is what is happening.
To-night we have had a repetition. I am sick of hearing this charge of one Minister against six Ministers. Everybody can do that. We have got from the Minister who has replied exactly nothing. Nobody can say that you do not know anything about it. It was put to you by the Member for Abertillery a week or two ago. Nobody took any notice then, nobody has taken any notice to-night. If one or two of us were to use language that would get us suspended, I am perfectly certain that public opinion would be called to it, and you would have to deal with it. I know that our people have good hearts, and would not begrudge one single penny to assist one single baby.
What the Ministry of Health is doing— and this is why I call it the Ministry of Death—is because it is deliberately, in conjunction with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Ministry of Labour, saving over £7,000,000 on unemployment pay. You have driven men off the unemployment roll, you have forced them on to the guardians. The guardians are too poor to raise the rates, and they come to you and ask for a loan, and then you say to them: "Crush these people down to starvation level!" and you use your power to withhold the loans in order to enforce starvation. The hon. Gentleman cannot get up and deny that. You do not deny what the hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Evan Davies) told you about the rates of relief. You do not say a word about that. You sailed round about it by referring to what somebody had left undone.
1579 The policy which my party has always stood for is that of national responsibility for dealing with unemployment. Either pay out of national funds, as you are obliged to maintain the people, or else find them work. I charge the Minister of Health, the Minister of Labour and the Chancellor of the Exchequer with being the Ministers who are absolutely responsible. If there is a baby starving not one of you but would want to feed it, for many men and women in this House like myself have had babies of their own. It is this idea of public policy, of saying that the people must not under certain circumstances have assistance, which prevents you from realising the inhumanity of the business. In one area we have heard that 50 more babies per 1,000 are dying. Sir George Newman told us in his last report that the health of the children is going down. It is going down because these three Ministers are acting in cooperation with one another to save money at the expense of human lives. I say that each one of you are individually and collectively responsible and every Member who has not protested against it is responsible for the murder of every person who dies under these circumstances.

§ Mr. PALIN
The Minister's reply is very unsatisfactory. I do not think he realises the seriousness of one aspect of this problem. I see a very grave danger that if these local authorities in these specially necessitous areas are greatly burdened with increased interest charges upon the huge sums of money that they are having to borrow for the purpose of relieving the unemployed the point will be reached, and it is not far off, when they will default. What is going to happen then? It is not outgoing to affect the credit of those particular necessitous areas but of all the local authorities throughout the country. Even further than that it will have very serious results upon the finances of the country. That is not a matter which the Minister can afford to say is due to some lack of action on the part of his predecessors. It is a problem that is becoming increasingly serious as time goes on. Unless special measures are thought out to meet the situation the Government will find themselves in very serious difficulties. All the measures taken for the relief of unemployment up 1580 to now have only relieved a portion of the unemployed. In my area the bulk of the unemployed are women, and you cannot relieve women weavers or even men weavers by roadwork. Not only is the moral of the people going down because of the continuance of their unemployment, but there is a large number of people who have never been trained for any occupation. When you come to consider that the people who are going out of the country an emigrants are not the type of person who has never been trained to any employment, but the most skilled shipbuilders and engineers and agriculturists, all people whom we shall require, I feel that to say that a Committee has been appointed which may report in six months' time is a very ineffective answer to the very grave danger with which we are confronted, due, very largely, to the local authorities having to live on loans and the loans doing so little towards alleviating the distress that exists.

§ Mr. KIRKW00D
I want to begin with a protest, as emphatic as I can make it, on behalf of the working-class people—

§ Mr. KIRKWOOD
As I was saying, I wanted to enter a most emphatic protest against the way in which this most important matter has been handled by the House. Little did I think that my protest would be more justified by the part that has been played by the Tory party. If this had been a question of the Treaty of Locarno, you would have had the Tory Benches packed. The Tory Government are nothing more nor less than a mutual admiration society, because they have placed the Foreign Secretary on a pinnacle and made him to be supposed to be a great man when he is anything but a great man. He is typical of the Government. To think that we have been discussing the whole evening the matter of unemployment, and to think that the Government have not been represented! That is not to say that members of the Government are not in the vicinity. They are. They are in the building, and they have the audacity, the Ministers of the Crown— God help the Crown that depended on them! the Ministers of the Crown, not to 1581 have been here to hear what we have got to say on this most important matter, which, if not attended to, is bound eventually to overthrow, not only this Government, but present civilisation. If the powers that be think that men are going calmly to stand this, they never made a bigger mistake. It is all in keeping with the arrest of the 12 Communists. This is part and parcel of the game. They arrest 12 Communists and throw them into gaol, men who have been drawing attention to the Hellish conditions of working-class life in this country: and to-night these men will be shivering to the very bone. I know what it is to be in a cell. They are to-night suffering because they stood up for the working-class, and the working-class and the Labour movement have stood by and seen these men in prison. Because they have got off with the arrest of these men, they think that they can treat this House in the same manner, namely, with contempt. It serves us right if we take it. I say that I for one am not going to submit. If I am kept down as I have been tonight, I will use every means of drawing attention to what is going on.
To think that men on the Clyde, where I come from, the very finest type of artisans in the world, have been walking the streets unemployed for years! AH has been stated here to-night already, some of our very best tradesmen have had to leave their native land and cross the wild Atlantic sea for the United States of America, leaving their native land against their wish, forced, driven from home by the big financiers of this country, by the ruling class of this country. Here we stand time and time again; we have tried to reason with you to the best of our ability. We have tried to show you what can be done immediately. Take my own constituency. The men there are right up against it. I refer particularly to Dumbarton. They have there the finest shipbuilding place in the world. There is no ship on the stocks —not one! We have appealed to the Scottish Office. I am glad to see the Secretary of Health for Scotland and I was pleased earlier to see the Secretary for Scotland present during most of the Debate. That cannot be said for the rest. That is why I am doing my best to pillory them before the British Empire. The Chancellor of the Exchequer 1582 had every right to be here to-night. The Prime Minister had every right to be here. From time to time he has got up and said, "Give peace in our time, O, Lord." Why is he not here to-night to give us some guidance as to what he is going to do on behalf of the people who need help.
To come to the town of Dunbarton. We have suggested to the Scottish Office what might be done in the immediate vicinity. There is a building scheme in operation at the present moment for housing the people who have been living in the houses that have been up for a hundred years. To get to these places they have to go over a level crossing on the main line. That level crossing is now a menace to the little children going to school. But that fact has no effect upon those concerned. The children risk their lives every time they cross that main line. We have appealed to the company to put up a bridge.
We took advantage of the railway company coming here to ask concessions to try to get that railway bridge. Nothing was done. Right from Dumbarton down to Helensburgh we have miles of foreshore, the most valuable fertile soil in Britain, waiting to be reclaimed. There are miles of foreshore on the Clyde which, when the tide conies in, is under water, and to reclaim it would give the men good work and work that would be beneficial to the country in days that are to be, but a deaf ear is turned to everything that we put forward.
To turn to the bigger question. We are asked. What did the Labour party do? The Labour party did many things; but as far as you are concerned you are up against the big financiers of this country. To begin with, I would say, and I am only speaking now for myself as a Socialist, that every day we have to pay £1,000,000 for interest on War debts. Until we are prepared to repudiate that War debt it will hang like a millstone round the neck of the people, and until, also, the people are prepared to force the Government to take over the land—not nationalise it, because, if we were to nationalise it, we would be placing another millstone round our neck in paying these people compensation. If I had time I could tell you; I have it all worked out.
1583 Another thing we could do in the immediate future—there is a Royal Commission sitting now—is to nationalise the mines. Not in the usual orthodox fashion would I nationalise the mines. They would not get a penny-piece from me. I not only would repudiate the National Debt, but I would take over the 1584 mines, the workshops, the factories, and the railways, and not give them a pin for it.