§ Mr. LANSBURYI beg to move,
That the composition and the proceedings of the Royal Commission on Food Prices are not such as to inspire public confidence, and this House is of opinion that action, legislative or otherwise, based upon the large mass of evidence already available and designed for the protection of the public against profiteering in the sale of food, Mould he undertaken without delay.In moving the Resolution I should like to remind the House that this subject of food prices and the cost of living is probably one of the most important that this House can discuss, because, in dealing with it, we are dealing with the whole question of the standard of life of the mass of the people, and at the same time we are dealing incidentally with another rather important question, the question of cheapening production. I believe that most Members of this House, and most people outside, think that the value of a man's wages depends altogether upon what the man's wife can buy with those 550 wages, and during the War and since the War the value of wages, as far as the ordinary workers are concerned, has to a very large extent steadily depreciated. I am quite aware that the cost of living is not at the point at which it was during the actual days of the War, but I think everyone will agree that it is very considerably higher than it ought to be. Those who cry out loudest for cheaper production must, I think, face the fact that there cannot be, so far as wages are concerned, any sort of cheaper production, because you have wages down at the present moment almost below the subsistence level, owing to the prices that people are obliged to pay for food.I want also to repeat something that I said in the House a week or two ago. Everyone who comes here interferes with the rights of private property. The old idea that you can leave business alone, and let business do just as it pleases—that is to say, the old Manchester school idea of everyone clearing a space for himself, and making his way in the world—that doctrine has broken down in practice, and to-day nobody denies that Parliament must to some extent deal with the operations of companies, trusts and monoplies. I should like to point out that the private individual running a business is more and more being improved off the face of the earth. Mr. McCurdy's Committee on Profiteering reported that 80 per cent. of the businesses to-day were businesses run by joint stock companies or by trusts. There is no such thing now, in a practical sense, except in very small businesses, as the individual business man building up a business without the help of shareholders and the joint stock company laws. That has led very largely to what is called "big business." I should like further to point out, in passing, that the operation of the big concerns, especially in the trades of grocers, chemists and druggists, meat and wheat, has crushed out of business many small people without any compensation what-so ever. It is very often put up against people like myself, who are Socialists, that we. want to take away people's businesses, and give them no compensation. The great multiple shop trust crushes out the small people without giving them any compensation whatever. That is a sort of thing in business which is entirely new in. these days—that is to say, it has arisen 551 within the last 25 or 30 years. The difference between ourselves on this side and hon. Members opposite and hon. Members here above the Gangway—who are not here—is that they want the trust to be owned by private individuals, while we desire that the nation should own and control the trust. We quite agree that modern production and modern distribution must be done on a big scale, and we say that it will be much better done if it be done in the interests of the community, instead of in the interests of sleeping partners, who only draw dividends and profits.
I repeat that the object of all trusts is to eliminate the middlemen, to eliminate competition, and to get, as far as possible, the whole of the business under their control. The operation of these trusts and monopolies has brought about such a condition of affairs that at the last Election every Tory candidate put up the poster, "Vote for So-and-so and Cheap Food." [An HON. MEMBER: "No!"] The hon. Member objects, and I Win not say that he did it. I would only say that I travelled all over London and very considerable parts of the country, and everywhere I went I saw that poster. One statement that was made was that the Labour party had sent up the price of fool, and it was added, "Return Mr. Baldwin and Food will come down." This stunt was worked so thoroughly that the Rothermere Press started immediately the Government was formed, a great campaign to force the Ministry to do something. and day after day Lord Rothermere repeated, in a parrot-like fashion," Something must be done." At last the Prime Minister did something. He did what all Prime Ministers do when they get in a fix—he appointed a Royal Commission to bury the subject. I sat on a Poor Law Commission, and gave about three and a half years to its work. We produced reams of reports, and there they are, ornamenting the library shelves now, but nothing whatever is being done. I would point out that there was no need for another Commission, because the facts are well known. A Committee that sat under Lord Linlithgow put the position perfectly straight and plain, as the House will hear later on in the Debate. Mr. McCurdy's Committee also put the position quite clearly, if any Government had wanted to deal with this subject in 552 anything like an effective manner. But they did not want to do so, so they appointed a Royal Commission, and, as I say, Royal Commissions, up to the present, have always been quite effective in burying a question for a very long time. So far as these benches are concerned we do not intend to allow it to be buried, if our opposition to the funeral service can have any weight at all.
When they did appoint a Commission, whom did they appoint? First of all, as I understand, the Labour party were not asked to nominate anyone to serve on this Commission. There are two members of the Commission who are connected with the Labour movement, but they are not the official representatives, and they are only two out of all the rest. I should have thought that in appointing a Commission to investigate this subject some of the victims of high prices might have been allowed to serve on it. I do not think we want learned expert people to find out the truth about any question of this kind. The people who were appointed are headed by Sir Auckland Geddes, and who is Sir Auckland Geddes He is a gentleman who came into the limelight, it is said, during the War. He was Director of Recruiting for one year: he was Minister of National Service—and we all know what that was—for three years; and then he became President of the Local Government Board. In the same year he became Minister of Reconstruction. He made a pretty fine mess of that for he did nothing and did it thoroughly. In the same year he became President of the Board of Trade. Then apparently he rushed off to become the principal of the McGill University in Canada and a year later he became British Ambassador to the United States. I should think he is a jack of all trades and master of none. If any workman had flitted about from one job to another like this he would have got the sack over and over again. He has now been elected a director of the Rio Tinto Company—a good English name that is—a company for the purchase and development of the sulphur and copper mining property of Rio Tinto, Spain, in place of the Minister of Labour, who resigned on being appointed to the Cabinet. This gentleman, who has all these jobs, is now one of the directors of the Liverpool and London and Globe Insurance Company, 553 and this is the gentleman who is appointed to be chairman of the Commission to investigate the working of trusts and monopolies and so on. It is like appointing a wolf to find out why a lamb should complain about being eaten. The idea of appointing such a gentleman is, I think, simply playing the fool with the British public. The other gentlemen are professors or business men of one sort or another and there are only two who can by any stretch of imagination be considered to represent the working classes of the country.
Sir Auckland Geddes, in his examination of witnesses, takes up an altogether hostile attitude. I saw him at work the other day, and I am certain, had he been cross-examining me, I should have been turned out of the room for alleged insults to him because I could not have tolerated a man speaking to me when I was volunteering to give evidence in the fashion in which he spoke to the witnesses on the day I was there. He acted as an advocate all the way through. Instead of wanting to get at the truth all he wanted to do was to trip up the witnesses, and he made insulting remarks that they should have supplied him with information as to where the many goes, and as to where money could be saved whereas he is appointed with his commission to do that very job. Any of the witnesses could only give him evidence as to how the high prices affected them themselves, and those they represent. I think he is quite un-fitted to be Chairman of the Commission. He is one of three brothers, all of whom flashed across our minds and our lives during and since the War, Sir Eric Geddes is the outgoing president of the Federation of British Industries, a central organisation of capitalist producers as distinct from capitalist middle-men. This is important to remember. Irvine C. Geddes, another brother, is director of Anderson, Green and Company, managers of the Orient Steam Navigation Steam Company, Limited, and among the chief directors of that company is Lord Inchcape. Lord Inchcape is the chairman of the Central Queensland Meat Export Company, the Ceylon Wharfage Company, Limited, the Doodputlee Tea Company, Limited, the Salonah Tea Company, Limited, the Australasian United Steam Navigation Company, Limited, 554 Eastern and Australian Steamship Company, Limited, the British India Steam Navigation Company, Limited, the P. & O. Steam Navigation Company, the P. & O. Banking Corporation, Limited, and he is also a director the National Provincial Bank, Limited, I think, and Lloyds and National Provincial Foreign Bank, Limited. The only thing now to do with him is to make him business dictator of Britain. We are often told by hon. Members opposite that we want to get all the business under one head and not leave anything to private people to have any initiative about. This gentleman is a kind of super-super-man, specially created in order to run all these companies. Anyhow there he is and here is another interesting little fact, to show how all these companies and friends get interwoven one with another. The Hon. Alexander Shaw is now a director of seven of Lord Inchcape's companies, and he got into this position either at the time or directly after Lord Shaw had presided over the Dockers' Inquiry.
Then there is a gentleman called Sir Harry Peat. I suppose he is the member of the Commission who is there to look after accounts. He happens to be one of the leading persons in the firm of W. B. Peat and Company, who run the British Trade Corporation, founded to finance export trade, and the National Provincial Bank, Limited, and his father, who is the senior partner of the firm, is one of the founders of the Federation of British Industries, and this is the man who is going to inquire as to where the money goes that people pay in high prices. I am quite willing to admit that occasionally Sir Auckland Geddes, like Satan reproving sin, gently reproves some of those who come before him on the opposite side to that of our friends. There is a gentleman named Lord Vestey, and there is Sir Gordon Campbell, whose firm is controlled by Lord Vestey's firm. They came before the Commission and upset Sir Auckland Geddes. I am getting mixed up with their names. They are three good Scotsmen who know how to take care of themselves. One got £50,000 out of the British public and got away with it very nicely indeed. Lord Vestey and Sir Gordon Campbell had their knuckles gently wrapped, but that was only for 555 public consumption. When they came back to give evidence that they would not give on the first occasion the door was shut. We do not know what they said. All we know is that it was private. This is how they are going to let the public know how and why they are being fleeced by high prices. You shut the door just when very interesting evidence is going to be given and we are asked to believe that we ought to have trust in them.
Sir William Vestey is one of those patriots who really believes that it is better to make money out of your country's necessities than to serve your country. If anyone on these benches or any workman who absconded from the country or attempted to do what these gentlemen did during the War, I do not know what language would not have been used about them by hon. Members opposite. I am quoting from the evidence given before the Royal Commission on Income Tax in 1919. We ought to know who this gentleman is, and what he says about himself, who helps to control the meat supply of this country. Here is what he says he and his friends were:
We are proprietors and managers of freezing works, cold stores or cattle ranches in Great Britain,"—I do not know where the cattle ranches are in Groat Britain—Russia, China, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentine, South Africa, Madagascar, France, Spain, Portugal"—I was going to say, "and Mars," hut he only says, "and other countries."The capital employed in the business and in the affiliated concerns under the same management. is in excess of £20,000,000. The business, therefore, ranks among the largest British industrial concerns and is larger than that of all the other British frozen and cold storage companies put together:.This is what happened to this gentleman. During the War the Government put up the Income Tax. They took men's bodies; they did not pay them anything, but they said to the people who were making money, "You must pay a little extra in money if these men are going out to fight to save your bodies and your profits." What did this gentleman do? He just cleared out of England. He is quite honest and quite frank about it.556 This is what he says. Here are questions put to him:
Prior to 1915 your head offices were in this country and the control was exercised from here?—Yes.In consequence of taxation you have moved the control to South America?—Yes, to Buenos Aires.So this is not a case of someone coming and telling us that they might have to take their business away, or would have to do so; you have actually done it?—Yes, we have actually done it.
Are you in Chicago?—We are domiciled in Buenos Aires.
You have not removed to the United States?—No.
So you have escaped the heavy American sur-tax?—There is no tax in Buenos Aires at all."
This is one of the gentlemen who control a very large part of the meat supply of this country.
Where are you domiciled at present—in this country?—No, Buenos Aires. I am technically abroad at present, but I came over specially to appear before this Commission. … I am abroad: I pay nothing.He could not pay anything less. A Mr. MeLintock then asked:How much do you think you ought to pay in taxation in this country?This man who left the country rather than pay ordinary Income Tax replied:I will give you £100,000 a year, beginning to-morrow. to be allowed to come and work in this country.That is to say, he was willing to pay up to £100,000 a year Income Tax, but no more. That was a bargain which he offered. That was the offer that he said he made before he left the country. We can imagine what he must have been making, the sort of profits he must have been piling up, to be able to offer 2100,000 a year as a kind of bribe to be. allowed to remain here. He paid no tax in Buenos Aires. This man has now come back to England. When he gave evidence I think he was a knight. I should not call him very much of a knight. He was a knight of the purse, or a knight of brass. I do not think I should call him a knight of chivalry, to run away from the country in the middle of the War to escape taxation. [An HON. MEMBER: "A nightmare!"] Now he is back in England, and he is a Lord. It will be interesting if the right hon. Gentleman who is going to reply will inform the House what particular service this 557 gentleman rendered to the country, and also whether he contributed anything to party funds in order to get his peerage. It will be a scandal if this thing is not gone into right to the bottom. [HON. MEMBERS: "What has this to do with the question?"] It has to do with the question; these are the people who are plundering the public, and we see that this man is now a Peer of the British realm. Therefore, it is in order.
Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER (Mr. Hope)It would not be in order in Debate to answer the hon. Member on the point.
§ Mr. LANSBURYI hope that during the Debate someone may be able to get it in sideways. It would be so very interesting to know how this gentleman did it. As far as I can see, what he did was to get a very large amount of money out of the country, owing to the country's necessities. This gentleman and two of his relatives control the Union Cold Storage Company, which is a wonderful company. They also own 2,400 retail shops. They are interested in Eastmans, Limited, the Argenta Meat Company, the Western United Investment Trust, Limited, and Weddell & Company, and so on. The Vestey's, like Sir Auckland Geddes and others, are in everything. The facts I have quoted show the ramifications of these trusts which control prices and the gentlemen who control the trusts.
§ Mr. MacINTYREIs the gentleman whom the hon. Member is describing a member of the Commission, or merely a witness?
§ Mr. LANSBURYI am dealing now with facts. You do not need a Commission. All I am saying is well known to the public. The Government have it all on record in the Board of Trade documents that are published week after week. Everything I am saying the Government can dig up. I am sure they know more about it than I do. I do not wonder that Sir Auckland Geddes went into Committee, as it were, to take evidence in private from this gentleman. It, would have been too dreadful to have had it out in public.
Sir Auckland Geddes stated publicly. and this shows his unfitness for the position as Chairman of the Commission, that he, really did not know how costs went up. I propose to tell the House where 558 some of the costs go to. There is a monopoly concern called the Home and Colonial Stores. They pay 25 per cent. dividend. I do not know where that 25 per cent, dividend comes from if it does not come out of the pockets of the poor people who spend their pennies in the shops. It cannot come from anywhere else.
Then there is the Maypole Dairy Company. For two years this company paid 100 per cent, dividend. Hon. Members on the other side talk about fair-wages. I want to know what they consider is a fair dividend. One hundred per cent. is worse than Shylock. Not, only that, but every now and then the Maypole Company gave away up to 36,000,000 of 2s. shares to their shareholders, so that when dividend was paid. afterwards on these bonus shares it might appear less to the public, although it might very well be higher than it was before when the actual figure appeared to be high.
Then there is Messrs. Lyons Company, the great restaurant firm. We all appreciate the manner in which they have improved catering in London. They have managed very decently to serve God, the public, and themselves very well. In 1924 they paid 25 per cent. dividend. In 1918–1935 per cent., and in 1920–21 421 per cent. That is a good gilt-edged sort of security out of the food of the ordinary people. The next time we are discussing wages and what the worker ought to exist on just think of that. You have. merely got to sit clown and gather it in without doing anything whatsoever. You are not going to tell me that the shareholders do the cooking or do the wait up at the shops. I do not want to be waited on by any of the shareholders, but in addition to that in 1909–10 they gave away 10 per cent. in deferred ordinary shares to the shareholders. In 1921 they gave 100 per cent. to the A ordinary shareholders. That means to say that everybody who had had another £1 given to him, and if their dividend had gone down next year, they would have said, "Look! We are not doing so well as we have been doing." They would have been doing equally well if the dividend had been half.
When we come to flour, the facts are well known, and we do not want a Commission to establish them. Take the firm of Spillers Milling and Associated 559 Industries, Limited. It is described as a holding company, controlling more than a dozen subsidiary companies concerned in milling. In order to under-stand the evidence of Lord Vestey, and the evidence given on behalf of these gentlemen, the House should understand that subsidiary companies are only registered as private companies, and are not compelled to publish a balance sheet showing the profit and loss, and the dividends which they have paid, and all these concerns have very large numbers of subsidiary companies, and we cannot get any account from them. This company controls Spillers Victoria Foods, Spillers Steamship Company, the Uveco Cereals, the British Oak Insurance Company, Spillers and Bakers Limited, Turog Brown Flour Company, Spillers Grain Company, Vernon and Sons, Watson, Todd and Company, Frost and Sons, Cardiff, and Channel Mills, Limited, Spillers Nephews, Limited, John Jackson and Son, Limited, Rishworth, Ingleby and Lofthouse, Limited. No information is available about the profits and dividends of these subsidiary companies, but the dividends of the holding company were, in 1920 15 per cent., in 1921 15 percent., in 1922 15 per cent. In 1922–23, poor people, they got right down to 12½, per cent., but I think that that was due to the fact that in 1919 they gave away 100 per cent. share bonus. They get away with it one way or another.
Then we have the Union Cold Storage Company which started in 1893 with a capital of £50,000. They only had one cold storage establishment then. We were always told that our business cannot hold up its head, that these wretched workmen take every bit of profit and dividend away, and that the poor people who run the businesses cannot live. This company which had £50,000 at the start has now got a paid-up capital of £8,780,000. I suppose that they capitalised their losses. These people control Eastmans. They are proprietors of Fletchers, the Argenta 'Meat Company, the British Beef Company, the North Australian Meat Company, Lonsdale and Thompson, John Layton and Company, Donald Cook and Sons, the British Argentine Meat Company incorporating Nelson and Sons and the River Plate Fresh Meat Company. in addition, the company is allied to 560 Nelson Brothers, Weddel and Company and the Colonial Consignment and Distributing Company, and the shares pay 10 per cent.
Then we come to tea. We have the, Deamcoolie Tea Company which declared a dividend of 60 per cent. in 1924, with 20 per cent. of its capital to reserve. That means that the percentage of profit for that year was 75 per cent. Then there is the Upper Assam Tea Company, Limited. The capital was increased in 1923 by the. distribution of two new shares for every share held. That is what is called watering the capital. The dividend in 1924 was 25 per cent, on the new capital, equivalent to 75 per cent. on the old capital. Next there is the Tea Estates Company. The profit in 1924 after paying the preference dividend was equivalent. to 172.8 per cent. Never talk about the greedy workman any more. Next we come to banks. I always look on bankers as people who get money out of you for nothing. They write on a bit of paper—
§ Mr. LANSBURYEverything which I have said up to now has had to do with food. I am trying to point out that all the information necessary to show the Government that there is profiteering in food is available, and everything which I have quoted up to the present is from official documents. Now I am going to quote the profits made by banks who handle the money which is received by the merchants through whom they extract considerable sums of money from the British public, because I may point out that none of what is called money is of any value unless it has behind it human labour or raw material in one form or a nother.
Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKERThe hon. Member has been in order up to now, because he has brought forward prima facie evidence of profiteering in food, but when it comes to banks I do not see the relevance of his remarks.
§ Mr. LANSBURYThe connection is this. If I were in business, running a food establishment, and wanted bills discounted, I should have to get this done at the bank, or if I wanted an overdraft I should have to get it done by the bank, and the bank would charge me either a 561 fair or an usurious rate of interest. It is not for me to show which of these it is, but I want to point out that the money which the hank make out of business must come out of business. It does not come from Heaven or from the other place.
Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKERIn order to be in order the hon. Member must show that the profits of the bank have something to do with the price of food.
§ Mr. LANSBURYI must leave it to you and the House to judge whether it is profiteering after you have heard the figures. I do not accuse the banks of profiteering, but the interest must be paid by the consumer in one way or another.
Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKERThe hon. Member's argument would be perfectly, apposite on a general economic discussion, but by his Motion he is limited to food profiteering. Banks are not food merchants. [Laughter]
§ Mr. LANSBURYThe right hon. Gentleman opposite ought not to laugh, because he knows the truth of what I am saying.
§ The PRESIDENT of the BOARD of TRADE (Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister)My overdraft keeper charges me the same rate as he charges Poplar.
§ Mr. LANSBURYI am not so sure of that. We get it a little bit cheaper than you, because we get it from the Treasury. The bankers are very large financiers. They invest their customers' money in loans, and if they are making a very high profit part of it must be coming from foodstuffs and other interests of the people.
§ Mr. LANSBURYI bow to your ruling, of course. I shall have another opportunity of dealing with that matter. But you have rather spoiled a good round-off to my case. I shall have to get that argument out some other time. I do not want to resume my seat without saying two or three things, apart from profiteering and so on. I want right hon. and bon. Gentlemen opposite to understand that I know it is part of business to make as much money as possible, to create a monopoly or trust in order to get more money. I 562 do not blame anyone individually about this. It is business. But I think it is a business that at this time of day is played out. The world of mankind has come to the point where the old methods no longer avail. It is no use blinking the fact that we have 1,500,000 people out of work in this country, and that those who are at work live on the border line of subsistence. All of us are sent here to try to find a remedy. We on this side believe Socialism is a remedy; you think Socialism is not. It is no use imagining that you can get over the difficulties in which we find ourselves merely by coming forward with big schemes affecting the Empire far away.
I want to bring the House back to this: that. Up to the present the country has allowed, the great mass of the people have agreed, that the competitive system in industry is the right one. The capitalists of the world eliminate competition as much as possible. No great financier on the opposite side of the House, no big business men on that or on this side will deny the fact that the object of a business man is to eliminate competition. Any of us who are in business knows that that is the one thing we try to do. The fundamental of commercialism, free competition, has broken down. It is time this House considered how to apply the principles of co-operation as against corn. petition. The house had abundant opportunities during the War of applying the principle of co-operation. Every time they did it they got better service. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"]: There is no man on the other side who knew anything about supplies during the War who will say that we could have carried On the War if we had left private competition deal with these things. The country had to adopt modified Socialism in order to carry on the War.
I put it to hon. Members that as in war time they controlled foodstuffs, and the distribution of foodstuffs, in order that the people might be fed to carry on the War, so to-clay in peace time those things ought to be controlled in order to get people out of the slough of destitution and misery in which so many are living. If it was good enough to do these things in order to fight the Germans, it ought to be good enough to do them in order to fight poverty and destitution. Sooner or later this House will have to take in hand 563 the question of how we are going to restore a home market in this country. We have sooner or later to settle down to the task of seeing that every inch of land which can be cultivated, is cultivated, and cultivated, not in order to create rent or dividends or profit, but in order to create food for the service of the masses of the people.
§ 9.0 P.M.
§ Mr. BARNESI beg to second the Motion.
I consider that the speech of the Mover of this Resolution succeeded it, stripping of all pretence the operations of the Food Commission. The purpose of his argument has been to prove, in quoting the profits of many food companies in this country and abroad, that the cost of profit, like the cost of wages and other expenses, eventually finds its way into the cost of the commodity. We take this opportunity of pointing out to the House and to the country that, whereas hon. Members opposite and those who advocate the principle of private enterprise are for ever pointing their finger to the problem of wage costs in the production of food and other corn-modifies, they never point to the profit, the interest and the dividend cost as finding its way into the price of commodities. There is one difference between the wage cost and the profit cost. The wage cost does maintain life; it does give a standard of living to the individual who performs a useful task in society. That individual is necessary to the production of goods and commodities. There is no wage operation in this country in any industry, and particularly in the production of food, where any person can point out that the wage return is in excess of the function and the service performed. But when we come to the return of profit on capital in relation to sonic of the figures that have been read out to-night—not the profits of smaller concerns that do not effect the prices of commodities, but the profits of large operating companies, whose total figures run into millions—we find that those profits ultimately effect not only prices, but the return to those who perform useful service.
When we turn to profits of this description, which are published in the returns of the Inland Revenue authorities, I 564 think we shall see that there is legitimate point in a Motion which asks the Conservative Government why they are fooling about with food supplies and food prices when they already have the necessary information to enable them to proceed with legislation. During the General Election a newspaper which supported the party opposite, the "Daily Mail," worked up quite an effective stunt under the heading, "What is up?" The answer was, "Food is up, unemployment is up, but there are no houses up," and all of these results of the ordinary operation of the capitalist system were laid at the door of the Labour Government which had been in office for about six Months. As a matter of fact, the upward movement in the cost of foodstuffs was not nearly so great during the Labour Government's term of office as it has been during the three months' term of office of the hon. Gentlemen opposite. We are entitled to ask the "Daily Mail" why it does not come out now with the cry that the Conservative Government is responsible for the increase during recent months in the cost of food supplies, but, in place of the Conservative Government, the "Daily Mail" has selected the poor greengrocer as the villain of the piece.
In view of the Mover's effective analysis of the operations of private enterprise in profiteering, I wish to turn my attention to another phase of the problem. When we take the production of foodstuffs at the source, when we take the marketing and transportation. the manufacture and preparation and, ultimately, the distribution and consumption of foodstuffs, and especially when we relate a problem of this description to a country like Great Britain, we are faced with some phases peculiar to our country. One of the problems of the food supply of Great Britain is the fact. that the country itself only supplies roughly 30 per cent. of the national requirements, and we have to go overseas for roughly 70 per cent. of the food of the people. Obviously, therefore, the problem is not merely an internal one. The problem is to relate the home. consumption to international supplies generally. One would surely argue that any nation in that position should have more organisation, a more centralised control, and some guiding hand or power regulating this important and vital supply. The supply is not only important from the point of view of the sustenance 565 of the great majority of the people but it is linked up with our industrial system. Under private enterprise cheap food is more or less essential in Great Britain to enable us to meet the need to export our industrial goods.
Despite the fact that the prosperity of British agriculture is absolutely at the mercy of world supplies and world price, the policy of the Conservative party, of capitalism and-private enterprise, is to leave this vital service to the chance enterprise of private individuals and private companies—a service with so many possibilities for good or ill to the whole of the community. I do not emphasise the necessity for tackling this problem in an efficient and national way solely because of its effect on British agriculture. That is important, I know, but the British farmer is just like any shareholder in any of the companies which have been mentioned. During the War, he had an excellent opportunity of serving the people of this country. During the War the farmers of Great Britain, if they had been wise enough and far-sighted enough, would not have exploited the fact that the home market was at their mercy to the extent to which they did. Had they treated the consumers fairly and equitably, I suggest there would be a larger volume of opinion in the towns to-day in their favour, and the town dwellers would have made considerable sacrifices to render British agriculture a permanent and live force in the country. But the British farmer bled the consumer when he had his opportunity just as much as any of those concerns mentioned by the Mover.
§ Mr. BARNESThat was another instance of the operation of the capitalist system. Control during the War was not co-operative control.
§ Captain GEEWhat about the cooperative stores of which the hon. Member is a director?
§ Mr. BARNESI will deal with that, if you like. As I say, it was not co-operative control. Nearly all the persons in key positions in State Departments at that period were nominated by private concerns. The whole operation of the Ministry of Food, and other Departments, was organised from the 566 point of view of keeping intact private enterprise and private organisation and profits were deliberately fixed during the War to meet the most uneconomical form of commercial organisation. Take the butchers, for instance. The price of meat during the War was fixed in relation to the most uneconomical shop almost in this country.
§ Mr. BARNESIt applied to the farmer as well. It applied right through the-whole realm of profits. Does the hon. Member deny the fact that farmers during the War had a very rosy time in regard to wheat prices, meat prices, milk prices, and almost all the prices one could mention. The profits were lavish, as far as food' control was concerned, to the farmers of the country, and they took full advantage of the fact. If they had been more farsighted they would have a greater amount of sympathy from the urban population. than they have at the moment. When we turn to the question of marketing and transport we find an essential feature of the problem of food supplies. It is that the more chaos you have, the more competing elements there are, and the more intervention by middlemen, the more unnecessary factors, and the greater lack of organisation among farmers, and all this means a duplication of services, of plant, of machinery, and of expenses which, again, often find their way into the price of the commodity. You cannot cheapen the marketing and transport of foodstuffs, whether produced in this country or abroad, unless you have some co-ordinating and controlling influence operating for the nation and compelling all these processes to be subsidiary to the supply of foodstuffs to the people. You can never get that until producers. and consumers are organised on a cooperative basis so as to avoid overlapping in marketing and transport. You can never get the utilisation of byproducts which is so essential as regards reducing the cost of the goods; you can never got the adequate handling of the surplus supply, which can be made a factor in regulating the return to the producer, until you have cooperative organisation. One year we may get a bountiful harvest, more than sufficient to meet the demand, but there is no advantage to the farmer and the producer to-day if nature is good to them 567 and there is no advantage to the consumer if nature provides a bountiful harvest. If the supplies exceed the market demand, the farmers' price, instead of being good, falls to the bottom level, and he is often worse off when he has a good crop than when he has a poor crop. Can any hon. Member justify, in a community like ours, a position of affairs in which a bountiful harvest is injurious to the producer and often wasteful to the consumer.
Under conditions of that sort, you find wheat, when thousands of people are starving in our cities, fed to the boilers of steamships for the purpose of propulsion. You find fish, and milk, and other vital commodities, required by tens of thousands of people in this country who are under-fed, thrown away as useless, under a system of private enterprise. I say that any system that destroys food or the product of labour and nature while there is one person going without cannot be defended either on moral or economic grounds. Take cheap transport. How can you ever get the cheapening of food supplies until some powerful machinery representing the power of the State can co-ordinate and organise the transportation to avoid overlapping? At present, you find one farmer in one part of the country sending his goods to the other extreme of the country, where there is another farmer sending his goods back to the first locality. There is not one direction in regard to food supplies in which you do not find that the lack of organisation, the leaving it to chance on the part of private enterprise to serve the community, is responsible largely for the chaos and confusion and increase in the price of food supplies generally.
§ Mr. BARNESIt is because, on organisation and distribution, there is a measure and a margin under the general cost prevailing in private enterprise; because, although we work on market prices and current prices generally, if you take our surplus, it goes back to the consumer instead of to a small group of private shareholders. and the net cost of co-operative service generally is below the net cost of private enterprise generally.
§ Mr. BARNESThe hon. Member is taking a particular phase of co-operation, and there is an explanation of that. The explanation is that we were compelled to go into farming at a most expensive period, because we were being held up for our supplies by the operation of private enterprise. I can quote one instance where a private milk company tried to compel a co-operative society, owing to the operations of the margin of food control, to pay 2d. and 3d. a gallon more to accept the machinery they wished to lay down. The co-operative societies purchased their farms when they were at the highest price, and we have had to meet, in the ordinary way, the losses and depreciation of stock and the writing down of all values after the War. Nevertheless, I suggest that in farming, elsewhere, the co-operative movement will ultimately come out successfully and show the people of this country how to replace private enterprise.
§ Mr. WRAGGWould it not be better if co-operative societies reduced the price to the consumer and showed the profiteers how the price could be reduced?
§ Mr. BARNESThe co-operative movement does that repeatedly. If it were not for the co-operative movement, the price of bread would be much higher than it is to-day. We can produce case after case of that sort, and it is the usual experience of co-operative societies that they are always being bombarded by private bakers to put up their price, and repeatedly they refuse, but I do not want to be side-tracked from my main argument. Let us turn to the manufacture and preparation of foodstuffs. How does private enterprise serve the community there? The cost of foodstuffs is not measured entirely by price, because the local authorities of this country have to maintain an army of inspectors, detecting impurities and the adulteration of food—stuffs supplied by private enterprise. The public naturally want pure food and a sufficient variety, and they want properly graded and guaranteed food. There is no difficulty in ascertaining the requirements of the public, but you can never meet those ascertained requirements until you have some coordinated system operating through the State and the local authorities or co-operative control.
The farther you move away from the producer, the more waste and inefficiency 569 to translate into law the equality that has been granted to them in the political field. Although we have a preamble which creep into private enterprise in the problem of food supply. Take, for instance, distribution alone, distribution of the finished commodity. You will find there is hardly one article or one food product that the people of this country consume of which the cost, after it leaves the producer, when it is sold to the consumer is not greater than the price which the producer receives for it. The producer in practically every case gets a less price for producing the commodity than is put on after it leaves the farm or the land and before it finds its way to the consumer's table. That, in itself, is an indication of the wastefulness that exists, and if you take the bread, milk, coal, or any of those commodities that are distributed from house to house, under a coordinated system of distribution, avoiding the overlapping that goes on to-day. you could halve the price of distribution, and, while reducing the price to the consumer, you could at the same time give an additional price to the grower. Obviously, the grower and the consumer are the only two factors that should be considered in this problem of the growth and distribution of food, and why should modern society allow a whole host of parasitical influences and services to stand in between the producer and the consumer, taking their toll for their unnecessary services?
My last point is this: hon. Members opposite are continually telling us that we are the unpatriotic party, and that we have no interest in the development of the Empire. Their interest in the development of the Empire is in regard to how far they can exploit it. They are not prepared to serve the Empire if it would interfere with profit-making, but there is no direction in which you could get a better, a. finer, and a more permanent system of Imperial development than by linking up the home market with Imperial supplies. Why do you not develop the policy—you have the power, and you would get support from this side—of going to the Governments of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and saying: "Here in Great Britain there is a great potential market, and it is to our interests if you can produce the goods that we require and cooperate with us in marketing those goods 570 on the British markets at a less cost than we can get elsewhere?" There you have a natural linking up, a natural interdependence, of Imperial services with the home country, and we are prepared to support a policy of that sort, if the State will ruthlessly interfere with private enterprise, which is inefficient if it can no longer perform its service to the people at home and abroad. We are prepared to support the policy of the Government saying that their object is to supply the people of Great Britain with cheap food, not cheap food to bring down wages but cheap food to give them a larger opportunity and a more generous opportunity for a larger life. If you do that, we shall support you. You go on fooling about with Food Commissions of this sort, playing with one of the most vital issues. You cannot. complain if, when the time comes, and we are-authorised by the people to tackle the vital and fundamental problem of modern society, we deal with it in our own way. If, when we get a Labour Government with a full majority backed by the people of this country, at least in this matter we shall have no hesitation in removing private enterprise, which has completely failed in this service, and substituting co-operative control—whether co-operation of producers and consumers or co-operation in its larger sense by State control. I have much pleasure in seconding the Motion.
§ Major SALMONI crave the indulgence of the House as a new Member in taking part for the first. time in debate. I. felt compelled to do this after having listened to the observations that have fallen from the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury). He seems to suggest that it is a crime to have a business undertaking. I have even heard it said by leaders of the Labour party that they would much prefer settling questions of wages with large employers than with small. That has often been stated, yet we find the hon. Member making a statement that, generally, it is undesirable that we should have private enterprise in this country and that, in particular, we should go in for nationalising the whole of the food services of the country instead. The results of such suggestions as have been thrown out by the hon. Member are to be seen in Russia where they started out with the idea of 571 showing how food was going to be produced by the people for the people, and the capitalist system completely abolished. The position to-day is that they are forced to go out into the world and obtain food for the sustenance of their own people. Yet we have hon. Members getting up on the benches opposite and suggesting that we in this country should follow suit. The success of this country has been built-up entirely by private enterprise. I would remind the House that the growth of the Dominions they have been speaking about this evening is entirely due to the personal capacity, hard work, and ambition of the individual, and not to State action. It is due to private enterprise that we have to-day the great States of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. When it is suggested that we should nationalise the industries of this country, I am afraid that unemployment, fearfully high as it is to-day, will be multiplied many times. The hon. Gentleman has said, why do not we have the assistance of municipalities? May I take for one moment the case of the London County Council, which, after all, does run certain services entirely for the people. One finds that no sooner do officials, however brilliant they may be as officials employed by the Government or the municipal authorities, interfere with business enterprise than they make a failure of it. It is easy to see the reason, when you come to consider the matter—and this hon. Members opposite do not always realise—that to make a business successful you have to understand your business.
If you wish to be a competent civil servant you have to be trained for it. This country has the most eminent officials in the world, but they have never been trained for business; and, therefore, if asked to run a business enterprise, they will fear to take responsibility of doing anything that requires vision or anticipation. Can anyone imagine that a business can grow and develop without vision and imagination? I am quite convinced that, if we want to see prices higher than they are to-day, we shall hand over business to State officials. May I remind the hon. Gentleman who is advocating this course, that during the War, when officials were enabled to know the number of persons to 572 be fed, and the amount of food each was going to eat, even then they had an enormous difficulty in obtaining and maintaining supplies. Their method of purchase was so bad that there was in this country sufficient butter, sugar and bacon to reduce the value of those three commodities enormously owing to the fact that these had been bought—and it is on record—at a very high price. They had not bought well so far as quality was concerned, and consequently they had to sell at a considerable loss. If this happened when they knew how many people they had to provide for, imagine what would happen if they did not know. Would hon. Members suggest that we should make contracts with the Dominions for the supply of certain commodities, and ignore food coming in competition from some of the South American States? They would have settled their price with the Dominions and food would be coming in from the South American States. Or would they suggest saying," You must not bring that food in: it can only be brought in provided that we, the Government, purchase it beforehand." If that. is their idea, I want to suggest to the House that when they discuss the question of a trust, they are creating a trust. At the present time in businesses where food is sold there is enormous competition, and it is a fine thing that there is competition, because it is a fine stimulus to trade. I suggest that as soon as all commodities were purchased by one big national concern, so soon would food be much dearer, for there would be no competition to show the mistakes made. The result would be that the public would pay for those mistakes.
The hon. Member for Bow and Bromley stated that at the last Election we said that, if we. were returned, food would be cheaper. I should like to make the definite statement that, so far as I am concerned, in my division such a statement was never made—rather the reverse. It was said that the Labour party at the Election before last told the people, "If you return us, your food will be. cheaper." They had no right to say that, because neither they nor we have any control over prices. It is purely a question of supply and demand, and the man who thinks he has a panacea for dealing with the high cost of foodstuffs, is living 573 in a fool's paradise. If we want to have prices lower than they are to-day—and am quite sure we all do—the only real way to do it is to increase the sources of supply, because, as I have already said, it is a case of supply and demand.
In listening to the Debate up to now, one seems generally to have heard that, because companies pay dividends, they commit crimes, and they must necessarily be profiteers. I venture 10 think that that view is wrong; it cannot be substantiated. I might remind the House, that the right hon. Gentleman the late President of the Board of Trade, when he occupied that office, was asked if there was any profiteering in food supplies. He turned round to this House and said, in so many words," I have no evidence that any profiteering, or that any trust exists." It ill becomes the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley to say, a few months afterwards, that there exist in this country a large number of trusts. I think myself the idea of trusts is merely a fetish of the Labour party, and, that they do not, in fact, exist.
§ Miss WILKINSONWhile appreciating the maiden speech of the hon. Gentleman, I wish to bring the discussion back to the subject which we have put on the Order Paper. This is not a Debate on the comparative methods of nationalisation and private interests, but it is a very definite vote of censure on this Food Commission. There is an immense amount of dissatisfaction with this Commission, especially on the part of the working-class women of this country. Our first objection to it, is its composition, and mainly because there is no working-class housewife on the Commission. I have nothing whatever to say about the ladies who are on that Commission, but I do want to say that the people who are most affected by the profiteering which exists, and by the possible results of this Commission, are the women who have to spend the working men's wages, and they are not represented. I think that is an almost fatal defect of this Commission. Secondly, those of us who have followed very closely the working of this Commission have viewed with grave apprehension the assumptions that are taken as axioms by this Commission before even asking questions of the witnesses.
574 If you take the evidence of the retail meat butchers, you find continually the assumption that the control of prices during the War was a fair one, and comparisons are made between that control of prices during the War and the present price, in order to decide whether profiteering exists. We have heard from the hon. Member who seconded this Motion what is an undoubted fact, that under Conservative control what happened was that prices were fixed at a standard at which the worst circumstanced district could make a profit. That was definitely stated by the late Lord Rhondda. If that price at a time of artificial shortage, owing to war conditions, be taken as the standard, and then, at a time of very real plenty in the world's supplies, we are to consider whether the difference between the two is profiteering, I suggest the Commission is starting its work on ail entirely false assumption.
Let me give some figures. It was pointed out that meat to-day, which was bought wholesale at 10d. a lb., is now being sold at 2s. 4d., that the controlled wholesale price was is. 2d. and the controlled retail price 2s. 2d., so that, while there was a reduction of 6d. in the wholesale prices, there was 2d. increase in the retail price. I submit it not 2d., but something infinitely more represents the actual profiteering in meat. The second assumption, which is much less culpable, and, perhaps, quite natural, but none the less is going to affect the report of this Commission, is the fact that the cost-of-living figure is taken as the basis of actual prices. What the working class housewife wants to know is where you can buy the goods at the prices given in the Board of Trade cost-of-living figures. We know it has been stated over and over again, that what they take are not actual prices in the shops, but prices supplied to them by retailers, and prices not checked by any consumers' organisation. Therefore, on that basis we have a profiteering price supplied, and on that basis the Commission does its work.
To come to another point. We have seen that, right from the very beginning of this Commission, there has been an attempt to whitewash those people who came before it representing what we consider profiteering organisations. It has been most astounding. I do not know 575 whether hon. Members have troubled to read the reports, but, if so, they will have found an amazing difference between the attitude of the Chairman when addressing Lord Vestey, or huge employers of labour who come before him, and when speaking to Mr. E. F. Wise, of the Independent Labour Party, or others who have come before him. It is not too much to say that the Chairman of this Commission has acted as counsel for the defence in the case of profiteers who came before him, and towards Labour representatives as though they were prisoners in the dock.
Another point we arc very much concerned about is the attempt of the Chairman each time to bring out from the witnesses evidence which will give the public the reasons for these prices. Let me give one of the most astounding attempts, it seems to me, made in this direction, and on the question of meat. There were certain housewives who came as witnesses. One of them stated in her evidence that the men of the country to-day would not be content with the poor quality of food they were content with before the War. That statement was seized upon by the Commission. The Chairman put questions upon it to raise up a ease which has been taken up in the newspapers and magnified far in excess of anything that the woman witness had apparently in her mind when she was bringing up the reasons for the high prices of meat today, and it was suggested that the reason of the high prices of meat to-day was that the workers buy the best cuts and will not buy any others. Even if that were true—and it is so ridiculously untrue as to be hardly worth examination for a moment—whatever the workers may prefer, consider a worker's wife buying the very best filet steak, when the husband is a fitter with a wage of £2 7s. per week, and they have five children to bring up on that amount! The husband, I imagine, is not going to get much filet steak. The mere statement is ridiculous on the face of it.
Again, there is the assumption on the part of the Commission that the workers must be content with the very poorest and the roughest food. I want to suggest to hon. Gentlemen opposite that they have to face a very different social problem to-day than had their predecessors 576 to face in 1014. For four years you took the vast majority of the manhood of the country. For the first time in their lives you put hundreds of thousands of them into a decent suit of clothes, with decent boots upon their feet, and you gave them three square meals a day. You told them that the British Empire depended upon them. Having done their bit, this Food Commission turns round to them and says: "Very well, now you can go home, and take care you only get the very poorest food and leave the best for others." Literally, what an amazing attitude on the part of the gentlemen who form this Commission. If we are going to accept the axiom that the demand for meat is greater than the supply, and that in order to cut down the price we must restrict consumption—I suppose this is the economic doctrine—what class ought to cut down their consumption of meat in order that the price should he less for the others? I am going to suggest to hon. Gentleman opposite that if we act on the basis of the Food Commission's assumption it is hon. Gentlemen in this House who should cut down their consumption of meat. The class which is represented so largely by hon. Gentlemen opposite is not the class which does the hard physical work—if I may judge from my own observation. It should cut down its standard of meat and it would not he one penny the worse. I suggest that the miner, the steel-worker, and those men I represent here, who have to put in eight hours a day before a furnace—those men should have the necessary food to do this heavy work. If we are going to have a class to cut down its consumption of meat, it is an amazing presumption on the part of the Food Commission to suggest that the working classes, with the heavy work to do, should cut down their consumption.
I want to suggest another thing to the Chairman of the Commission. Certain members of the Commission have tried to suggest that the amount of profiteering that goes on is not so very large, and have pointed out that there is only a slight rise in prices in some of the important food commodities. But it never seems to have occurred to the Commission to realise that certain staple articles of food do, as a matter of fact, form an almost excessive portion of the expenditure in the average working class 577 family. That is something that the house wife would like to place before this House and the Commission. If you take figures supplied by the Board of Trade you find that the proportion of lowest incomes in the cases quoted on the present basis is not less than 67 per cent. Those connected with the Food Commission may consider that a penny increase in a loaf of bread is not a great deal and attempt to belittle it; whereas it may seem to them that that is not very much, to gentlemen who perhaps spend thousands from the family purse, that penny on the loaf of bread means a most tremendous thing to the housewives of this country. It means that somebody has actually to go without food. I do suggest to the Commission and to this House that to deal in a sneering way, as sometimes this Commission has dealt, with some of the. witnesses who have come before it, and especially in relation to the amount of profits made, has raised the indignation of the women of this country to an extent that is not realised by members of the Commission.
We put down this Motion very definitely as a Vote of Censure on the present Commission and on the way it has worked. I am not one of those who suggest that the Government, in putting forward this Food Commission, were not acting in good faith, but I do say that the actions of the Commission have very greatly shaken the faith of people in the good faith of the Prime Minister when he appointed that Commission. If he was going to appoint a Commission, he ought to have at. least appointed people who were suffering from the effects of high prices. The Commission has been one which has whitewashed various operations and business activities. I hope that the Government will urge upon the Commission to take a very different attitude to that it has taken up till now. If the Commission does not do that, its Report will be regarded as much of a farce as is the Commission itself.
§ Mr. A. V. ALEXANDERI desire to speak for just two or three minutes, and to say one or two things very definitely about the procedure of this Commission. I, myself, have attended as a witness on two occasions, and probably shall have to do so again. I suggest to hon. Members that the chief objection to the procedure of the Commission has been crystallised by hon. Friends behind me 578 on the Chairman of the Commission. I should like to remind the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade, that there was in the Press in January a scare about tea—if I might have the attention of the right hon. Gentleman for a moment.
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERI was talking to your Whip.
§ Mr. ALEXANDERAs a result of the scare run in the "Daily Mail," information was asked for with regard to the tea position, and I myself supplied the Board of Trade with very full information with regard to the tea position. I afterwards appeared as a witness before the Commission. As a result of the report which was submitted by the co-operative movement through myself to the Board of Trade, it was stated that there would be no necessity for any special evidence to be called with regard to tea. Ten days later, appearing before the Commission as a witness on an entirely different subject, and asked to bring technical evidence and witnesses only with regard to wheat, flour and bread, suddenly during that evidence I was asked lo answer questions with regard to tea supplies and lea stocks. Because we asked then for notice of questions of that kind horn the Royal Commission, we are so treated by the Chairman of the Commission as to lead the Press to report for days after that that apparently the witness had desired to withhold information from the Royal Commission. And after we had supplied another report, a second report, to the Royal Commission, a tardy announcement is made that after all there was nothing in the point which had been put against the co-operative movement. Surely that is very unfair procedure for any Commission to pursue. I have not seen any similar procedure adopted towards any other witness on any other subject which the Commission has taken up.
It is just as well that the House should know something of what the true position was. As a fact, we have born able to demonstrate, in the last 12 months, that the collectivist operations of the working-class consumers not only saved the consumers organised in that movement hundreds of thousands of pounds upon tea, but. also saved all the rest of the community, as well, very considerable sums, though, as the right hon. Gentleman 579 will remember from questions put by me from this bench, I have pointed out to him that there has been an attempt in the last 12 months to corner tea, supplies in this country, and to make a change of basis in the market at Mincing Lane. Had it not been for the existence of the co-operative organisation, they would probably have been successful in their aims. When the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Colne Valley (Mr. Snowden) took the duty off tea. last April, and an increased demand came, the price soared on the market. Why did it soar at once? It was because firms who had agreed to try to corner the market by arranging forward contracts for tea still growing, and who, in order to do this, had at first depressed the home market by putting supplies on the market, had found themselves short when tin-demand came, went on the market to buy, had to buy for four or five months, and in doing so raised prices to the consumer to such an extent that the whole of the advantage given by my right hon. Friend in the Budget last year was lost in the wholesale price. But during the whole of that time the co-operative consumers' movement never raised its price, until 16th October. The other people were raising prices, and if it had not been for this working-class organisation working on the lines which my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Ham (Mr. Barnes) spoke of to-night, there would have been far greater soaring of the price of tea. The same thing applied with regard to other commodities which the Commission has dealt with.
There is one other point I want to put to the right hon. Gentleman before I sit clown. There is a considerable feeling, and I think a feeling with some ground for it, that the Commission has been wrong in procedure, because it finds itself now unable to obtain all the facts that a Royal Commission ought to obtain. My point is that it might have decided at the commencement of its proceedings to examine its powers, and to use all its powers to the full to investigate completely the accounts and operations and costings of firms at all stages. and if it found it had not sufficient powers it should have obtained those powers, as it could have done from the Board of Trade, through Parliament if necessary, or by getting the dispensation which can be 580 afforded to Royal Commissions. It should have completed its investigations—not merely putting accused persons into the box, examining them, hearing their statements, and then finishing, but investigating the matter from beginning to end in each particular trade and with regard to each particular firm involved. Until the Royal Commission adopts some process such as this, it will never arrive at the truth which it ought to be desirous of arriving at.
10.0 P.M.
Another point, which has been made already by the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury), is that a great deal of the information necessary for action by the Government if they had desired to take action was already in existence. I gave evidence on seven or eight occasions before the Committee which my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade had some connection with, I think—the Linlithgow Committee. The Linlithgow Committee made a large number of recommendations with regard to food prices, and I have yet to learn, although that was a Committee set up by a Conservative Government, that many of these recommendations have been put into effect. So much detailed evidence with regard to costs and profits was given before the Linlithgow Committee that the Government had plenty or material to act upon if they had really desired to act; and if that evidence had not been sufficient, they had heaps of other material to go upon in the Reports, which exist in the files of the right hon. Gentleman's Department, compiled by the sub-Committees under the Central Profiteering Committee, nearly every one of which recommended at the time that legislation should be passed by this House to secure the desired end. The present Prime Minister, when he was President of the Board of Trade in 1921–22, decided not to act upon those considered recommendations of sub-Committees under the Central Profiteering Committee. We are now having what has appeared to be almost a make-believe inquiry by a Royal Commission set up by the Prime Minister, although with all the information which was obtained under the Central Profiteering Committee, and with the definite recommendations they laid before him, he decided when he was President of the 581 Board of Trade that it would not serve any useful purpose for him to act.
I think there is still room for the Royal Commission to improve and for the Government to help it to improve. One result of this Debate to-night will be. I hope, to bring home to the Government the keenness with which the whole country is following the inquiry by the Royal Commission. As ray hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough East (Miss Wilkinson) has said, a great deal of dissatisfaction exists throughout the country with the way the Commission is proceeding, and we want the. Government to see what it can do to get the Royal Commission to expedite the reports it now has under preparation, because if we are not going to get the interim reports on meat and bread until Easter, although the Commission has been sitting since 10th December, I suppose we may not get the reports on all essential foodstuffs until perhaps 1027. or 1928 or 1929 or 1930—nobody knows exactly when. I would also ask the right hon. Gentleman if he will see that the Royal Commission, if they have not sufficient powers, obtain powers to go into the costings and profits at all stages of firms dealing in foods. I hope that as a result of the evidence already given one of the recommendations of the Royal Commission, which I hope will be acted upon by the right hon. Gentleman, is that all the great firms in the country dealing in food supplies shall be required to file with the Board of Trade or Somerset House, a much more fuller statement of accounts than is now required, and that they should be audited by a public auditor
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERI do not propose to follow all the speakers who have taken part in the Debate, because they have travelled over a very wide course. I would like to confine myself more to the terms of the Motion which has been set down on the Paper. The hon. Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury) delighted the House with a. most entertaining account of a. large number of people and firms. The hon. Gentleman said a good deal about the activities of those firms during the War. I can assure him that for my part I have no more use for the war profiteer than I have for the conscientious objector, and if ever we find ourselves involved in another war, which 582 Heaven forbid, I shall be ready to join with the hon. Member in doing my best to suppress the activities of both those classes of people. The Motion which has been moved is designed to criticise the Royal Commission, and I will say a word about that in a moment. The second part of the Resolution is designed to express regret that action, legislative or otherwise, has not been taken upon the mass of evidence already available. I think that speech would have been more effective had it been delivered at a meeting of the hon. Member's own party any time during the nine months when the Labour Government were in office.
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERWe did something the very first month we came into office and we did exactly what the. Prime Minister promised we should do. [An HON. MEMBER: "What was it?"] Hon. Members opposite must not be so anxious about this scrutiny of their own past. The hon. Member for Bow and Bromley said it was most regrettable that action was riot taken upon the mass of evidence already available and the mass of evidence offered to the Royal Corn-mission on Food Prices, and he expressed the opinion that the Commission consists of wrong-headed people who know nothing about the subject. This means that if you want to solve a business proposition you must consult: with those who know nothing about business.
The suggestion that action should have been taken upon the evidence obtained before the Royal Commission sat was supported by the hon. Member who was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade in the Labour Government (Mr. Alexander) and he lectured me very severely, saying that in the office of the Board of Trade there are masses of evidence and facts carefully tabulated—the records of the Linlithgow Committee and the Profiteering Committee. To use language which has often been used by the party opposite whose benches are now somewhat void, we were told that that was a reform which" brooks no delay," but the hon. Gentleman the late Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade and the greatest of all statisticians, the right hon. Member for Seaham (Mr. Webb), were at the Board of Trade for nine months, 583 and why did they not produce one of those urgent reforms which they now declare are so simple and short and easy to produce when you have the evidence which is already to hand. Both the hon. Member for the Hillsborough Division (Mr. A. V. Alexander) and the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Seaham sat together in the Board of Trade for nine months and they did nothing at all.
§ Mr. ALEXANDERI want to point out that the Profiteering Sub-Committee did supply information upon which the late, Minister of Health introduced a Profiteering Bill which the present Government have not proceeded with, and we were also at work on another Measure which we could not proceed with for want of Parliamentary time.
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERThe period of gestation was very long, but I cannot really imagine that a more rapid action would have led to a miscarriage of justice. If it be true that careful consideration is required in this matter, then I think we have been reasonably prompt. I think all the strictures of the hon. Member apply with tremendous strength if directed to the Leaders of his own party, and I have no doubt he will develop that part of his speech which was unhappily ruled out of Order, and which I was longing to hear, at his next party meeting. The challenge that was thrown out to me by the hon. Gentleman was that we were not carrying out our pledges. As a matter of fact, we are doing exactly what we promised to do. The hon. Member gave an account of various electioneering efforts, although I do not think his account was very accurate. He challenged the Prime Minister, and I am going to take him up on that point. The Prime Minister may not be quite so astute an electioneer—
§ Mr. LANSBURYDo not belittle him.
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERAt any rate, he is an extraordinarily honest electioneer, and I believe that honesty is the best policy, because it has its own reward and it brings its sheaves with it. The Prime Minister, so far from holding out false hopes about food, made a most sincere speech in the course of the Election in which he said that anybody was very immoral who said he could guarantee to reduce the price of food, 584 because it was not within the capacity of any one person to do that. That was a very honest statement. He went on to say that there was one thing, and one thing only, which he would undertake to do, and that was that, if he was returned, he would appoint a Royal Commission.
§ Mr. WHEATLEYWhy?
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERWhy? To find the facts.
§ Mr. LANSBURYYou have had two before.
§ Mr. WHEATLEYIf the Prime Minister believed that no one could do anything to bring down the price of food, why appoint a Commission?
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERThe right hon. Gentleman is a very subtle controversialist. What the Prime Minister said was that no one could guarantee to bring down the price of food, but he did say that he would see what could be done to help in the matter, and. as the result he appointed the Royal Commission, assisted by very able people, both men and women. I do not want to anticipate their Report, and do not know what is going to be in it hat I expect, and shall be greatly disappointed if I do not find in it, some very much more capable and well thought-out suggestions than that last effort which was so rapidly thrown off by the right hon. Gentleman in the last days of his greatness. I am not quite sure whether he carried all his colleagues with him, but T do not want to go into that. The Prime Minister, therefore, exactly fulfilled his pledge in appointing this Commission. He appointed it with great rapidity, and it has acted with great. rapidity. It is not there to put matters to sleep. It has held a great many meetings, and it has examined, I think, 90 witnesses.
§ Mr. DUNCANHas it hatched anything?
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERIt is laying an egg at the present moment, and I do not think I am making either a premature or an indiscreet disclosure when I say that I think we shall receive that egg by Easter. So far from appointing a Commission in order to put matters to sleep, the Commission has been appointed in order that it may deal with matters, and, judging by what we have 585 heard to-night, it appears to have been dealing effectively and impartially with a great many people. There is something to be said for a certain brutal frankness when you are dealing with practical problems. No Commission, I think, at any time, has acted with greater speed than this Commission has. I want to take up just one or two points that have been made in criticism. It was said that it was wrong ever to hear evidence in camera, I do not think that that is at all a reasonable complaint. If you want to get full evidence of the details of people's businesses—and that is necessary in an inquiry of this kind—you must allow the body which inquires to have a discretion as to whether it will have that evidence given in public or in private. Of course, if what you desire to do is to destroy a business, then I can well imagine that you may want to disclose every particular about that business to its foreign competitors; but if, instead of that, you want to get at the facts—
§ Mr. ALEXANDERIs that why we happened to he the only people to whom questions on stocks were put in public?
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERThe hon. Gentleman, in common with any other witnesses, has full power to ask that any evidence of a confidential character, the disclosure of which he thinks would be undesirable, shall be given in camera, and I am perfectly certain that the Commission will give exactly the same treatment, in regard to whether it hears evidence in public or in private, to any firm, any individual, or any society in this country.
§ Mr. LANSBURYDoes the right hon. Gentleman think it would injure a business if it were stated in public what the private companies subsidiary to it paid in interest?
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERI certainly would not give a decision as to what evidence in a particular case—
§ Mr. LANSBURYIt is the crucial point.
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERReally, if the hon. Gentleman puts a question to me, he must allow me to answer it. I think I have probably had as much 586 experience of the taking of evidence in Courts of Law, and also of business matters, as he has himself. I certainly would not give any ruling in advance as to what kind of evidence might or might not be of value to a commercial rival. I say, with full experience, that you cannot possibly lay down a hard and fast rule, and if you want to get at the facts and get your full evidence given, it is absolutely necessary to give the tribunal which is making the examination a full discretion as to what things it hears in public and what evidence it hears in private.
The hon. Member criticised the personnel of the Commission. I may sum it up by saying, "This is a very disgraceful affair. You want to find out how you are to run the business of food in this country more efficiently and cheaper, so that you get a more efficient service and a cheaper supply to the community, and how do you set to work? You have put on this Commission, men and women of affairs, men of experience and capacity, men who have been successful in business. It is outrageous. One or two of these men have actually been associated in business with Lord Inchcape; they have been indeed so far disqualified for any public service or any business service that they have been selected by Lord Inchcape to be his associates in business. What a tremendous disqualification that is for a business inquiry." I will say one thing about the hon. Member. He is always absolutely faithful to the principle and practice of Poplarism. There is only one crime and that is making money. But when he comes back into office, as I am sure he will, I believe he will find that the business which makes money is really not the worst kind of business. It pays taxes, for instance, which is really rather important when you have to get relief for Poplar. As he explained to me, he was able in Poplar to get far better terms on an overdraft than I could hope to get because he got his from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I had to get mine from the bank. He is very lucky. But the Chancellor of the Exchequer has got to get the money he advances to Poplar from somewhere and he gets it out of the taxes, and the bulk of the taxes come out of business, and the only business that can pay the taxes is the business that makes a profit. You do not get any out of the business that makes a loss.
587 Let me carry it one step further. If the hon. Member asks any of his constituents, those of them I mean who do not have a permanent preference for the dole, and I am sure the great majority of them do not—[Interruption]—he will find that the business which is able to conduct its affairs at a profit and to declare a dividend is much more likely to be a sound employer of labour and to keep men at work than the business which is run at a loss. If ever I am out to find someone to run an undertaking or to select advisers who can advise me how best to get a thing efficiently done, I shall not select the people who are always making a loss. I shall try to find people who have run their business more or less successfully, and I think the hon. Member will probably find that he will make a somewhat similar selection. I do not want to follow the hon. Member for East Ham, South (Mr. Barnes). through all his speech, particularly because I think it was completely answered by a very able speech delivered by the hon. Member for Harrow (Major Salmon). The hon. Member for East Ham, South, made two charges to which I would like to refer. The first charge was that the Ministry of Food had always been prejudiced in favour of private enterprise. I do not think that is in the least true, and I will leave the hon. Member to settle that with the right hon. Member for Platting (Mr. Clynes), who was Minister of Food for some time. He also said that prices were constantly fixed too high. That may be true. What was the experience of every Government which tried control during the War? It is much easier to control during war than at any other time, because in a war you have practically complete compulsion over the whole mass of the people. Even in an extreme Socialist state, I do not believe that you would be able to get as effective compulsion, though you would try to get it, as you can get even in an individualist state in the crisis of a war, when the great majority of the population are willing to accept every form of control and every form of discipline. Even with all these advantages in its favour, in a period like that, it was the universal experience of every country that tried to control prices, and certainly it was the 588 case within the British Empire, that control raised prices, because you always have to fix some mean price which was higher than the most efficient man could do it at. That is a foretaste of any form of control which anybody else is likely to bring in.
I should like to deal with one remark made by the late Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, the hon. Member for Hillsborough (Mr. Alexander). He referred to some questions which had been put to him, and he appeared rather to resent them. It is a very remarkable thing that he gets up here this evening and says that several questions were put to him which contained, if not allegations, at any rate suggestions that hits co-operative society had bought forward, not to meet its necessities, but because it was speculative. He said it was a perfectly disgraceful thing that he should have questions like that put to him at the Commission.
§ Mr. ALEXANDERThat is a most grotesque description of what I said. What I said was that there had been a campaign in the "Daily Mail" in regard to tea, and as a result of Board of Trade inquiries I submitted a statement to the Board of Trade, 10 days before I appeared at the Commission, and the opinion was then expressed by the Board of Trade that in view of that statement no special evidence was necessary in regard to tea. But in spite of that, on a day when we were called to bring technical witnesses on another subject, the question of tea was raised, without notice, without our having technical witnesses present.
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERI am obliged to the hon. Member for that explanation, and I take what he. says. He complains of questions of that kind being asked without notice. I do not think it is a very reasonable complaint. It is very easy to take this and that out of a very long series of questions at a Royal Commission, but I would say this, quite frankly, to the hon. Member: what have we heard here to-night? We have heard a repetition of what his party have been doing all over the country—allegation after allegation brought against every sort of firm, without notice, and without the possibility of reply.
§ Mr. DUNCANIs this a Commission?
§ Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTERIt is a place where people did not in the past make charges which there was no opportunity of answering. As long as Members of the party opposite spend the whole of their time going up and down the country vilifying every private firm by name—[HON. MEMBERS "No!"]—they cannot complain, and when they learn to be a little more careful in the charges which they bring, it will be time enough for them to complain. I regret profoundly certain suggestions which have been made that the Commission has been showing prejudice. I have no evidence whatever of that. I found that the Commission has dealt quite firmly with anybody who came before it who, it felt, was not giving the fullest evidence that could be obtained. The hon. Gentleman thinks that criticism was directed against him, but if he reads, as I have no doubt he will, the examination of the various other people who came before the Commission, whom he would call capitalist witnesses, he will agree, I think, that nothing said to him was anything like as severe as what the Chairman and other members of the Commission have said to other people who came before them.
It has been said by one hon. Member who spoke to-night, as a matter of complaint, that. it was unreasonable to ask certain witnesses how money could be saved. That is exactly the question which the Royal Commission was bound to put to witnesses. The whole object of the Royal Commission is to find out how much can be saved so as to make food cheaper, and if it is not relevant to ask a gentle-. man, who came forward with a tremendous plan which is going to upset the whole business system of the country, wholesale and retail, how he is going to save money and give cheaper food to the people of the country, then I do not know what form of question would be relevant.
I regret sincerely that some hon. Members have thought it necessary to criticise the impartiality, while they are still sitting as a Commission and while we are still waiting for their report, of a number of men and women of great experience who are doing what is not a pleasant duty, but a very onerous duty in a thoroughly impartial way. We have all a great liking in this House for the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley, but I do not think there are many people in 590 any part of the House who would select him to judge in a contest of impartiality. I am asking the House to do what I think it will always do where there is a Royal Commission sitting: that is to reserve its judgment until the Royal Commission has made its report. That is the moment to consider whether the Royal Commission has done its work well. I can only suppose that in making the criticism which the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley has thought it right to make to-night, and in particular the criticism against a man whose work in the Ministry of National Service is sneered at. [Interruption.] There are many people in this House who were here during the War, and there are still more who were serving in the Army during the War, and I say without fear of contradiction that there were few men, in the service or out of it, to whom this country owed more during the last year of the Great War, for the success of the enterprise of our troops, than to Sir Auckland Geddes. He did a great deal more during the War than anybody on the Labour Benches. I can only express regret that charges of this kind have been made against members of the Commission who are honestly trying to do a very difficult task, to do it rapidly, to do it fairly and effectively, and I can only imagine that the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley was led to make these charges out of a profound regret that during the nine months his party were in office they contributed nothing whatever to the solution of this problem.
§ Mr. T. JOHNSTONI do not know whether or not the right hon. Gentleman imagines that he has answered the case put from these benches. I do not know whether he considers that the second-rate university dialectics, with which he commonly regales this House, are to be considered the last reasoned word on the part of the Government in relation to the charges that have been definitely made, and made upon evidence, by the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury) and others to-night. The right hon. Gentleman concluded his remarks with a eulogium of the services rendered to the nation by the Chairman of the Food Commission. What that gentleman did during the War matters nothing to the point of our discussion, but I think it clues matter to the impartiality of the 591 inquiry he is supposed to be undertaking at the present time whether or not the statement is true that appeared in "The People" newspaper on the date of his appointment to this Commission, namely, that he had left a job at £4,000 a year as director of the Anti-Socialist National Propaganda in order to take over the chairmanship of the Food Commission. Whatever he has done on that Commission he has at any rate not transferred his political allegiance very far from the allegiance which he was serving at the time when he was director of the Anti-Socialist National Propaganda. The hon. Member for Bow and Bromley spent a considerable portion of his time in discussing the personnel of the Commission, and I do not want to go ever the ground again except to say that there are people on that Commission who, it is believed, are not altogether financially disinterested as regards some of the witnesses who have come before them.
§ Captain GEEMay I ask the hon. Gentleman to give us the names?
§ Mr. JOHNSTONYou may ask, but you will not get an answer.
§ Mr. BASIL PETOMake a statement outside, and give the names, and see what will happen.
§ Mr. JOHNSTONThe point I intend to deal with is the nature of this Coin-mission and the reason for its appointment. When we. get Conservative newspapers openly declaring, when this Commission was appointed, that it was to serve no useful purpose except as a "blind," I think we are entitled to say that the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley is right when he calls it a bogus Commission. I have here a quotation from a Conservative newspaper, the "Evening Citizen" of Glasgow. It is great supporter of the right hon. Gentleman who expected to be Chancellor of Exchequer under the present administration, and it says in a leading article of 19th November:
Mr. Baldwin is to appoint a Royal Commission to inquire into the high price of food. Clearly this is the appropriate course to take, for Royal Commissions never do anything and nothing ever can be done to control the price of commodities. However, a Royal Commission and a little cautious publicity may help matters and cannot do any harm.592 The only thing up to date that the Commission has been able to do is the British public. The right hon. Gentleman said we had supplied no evidence as to bullying and impertinence on the part of some members of the Commission towards witnesses. Let me call his attention to page 23 of the Minutes of Evidence of 31st December, 1924, questions 1697 and 1698. Sir Charles Fielding was being examined. He is not a wild Bolshevist. He was Director of Food Production during the War, and he was giving skilled testimony before the Commission, and this is the sort of question put to him:Are you aware that in 1842"—It sounds like Lord Rothermere undergoing his exam.—Are you aware that in t842 Sir Robert Peel said that he regarded 58s. 9d. as a remunerative price for a quarter of 504 lbs.?Poor Sir Charles could only say"I am sorry I cannot say.—Then follows the next question:You have come here to tell us all about these figures. How are we to get on with the business? You should be able to answer our questions. Would you agree that that was said?Poor Sir Charles, anxious to get on with the next business, replied—I dare say it was, at the time.After a careful examination of every minute taken of the proceedings of that. Commission, I have come to the considered conclusion that the producer makes nothing—he is level at the end of the year—that the export and transport companies are philanthropists, and are in the job for what they can give away, that the importer is a charitable institution, that the wholesaler and the retailer are on the dole, and that the only villain in the piece is the consumer, who has not been paying enough. Let me endeavour to show the right hon. Gentleman that there was no need for this Commission, that he has got all the evidence he requires in his own office, and that. he has got it impartially, as a result of an inquiry undertaken by a Committee under the chairmanship of Lord Linlithgow, a prominent member of his own party. What does Lord Linlithgow's Report say?Our investigations have led us to the conclusion that the spread between producers' and consumers' prices is unjustifi- 593 ably wide. Taken as a whole, distributive costs are a far heavier burden than society will permanently consent to bear.You have the evidence justifying that statement in your own archives. What follows?The retailing of food from a large "lumber of establishments is in any event an extravagant method of distribution compared with, say, the system of municipal retail markets existing in many countries abroad. In the case of fruit and vegetables, there are sometimes six distributing agencies between the grower and the consumer. At each stage the produce is handled two or three times by porters or railway employes, making in some cases as many as sixteen to twenty handlings.Further—and the hon. Member for Hillsborough (Mr. A. V. Alexander) on our own Front Bench will be interested in this quotation, and it answers the point which the hon. Gentleman opposite tried to make against him:It is to he inferred, therefore, that if by improved methods these private traders reduced their costs to the level of those of industrial co-operative societies, they could correspondingly reduce prices to the public by over one-twelfth.This is not a Committee of co-operators. As far as I know, it is a Committee composed of non-co-operators or anti-cooperators, sitting under the chairman-ship of Lord Linlithgow, which deliberately reached that opinion.Further:
In an extreme case, the chain of distribution may be as follows: Grower, local dealer, commission salesman, commission buyer, wholesaler, second wholesaler, retailer, consumer; and the expenses incurred are multiplied accordingly, each intermediary taking his quota of commission or profit, and each stage in the passage of goods involving additional cost of handling and transport.Finally, they say:We wish to record our opinion in the strongest possible terms that this market (Covent Garden), the largest of its kind in the Kingdom, ought to be placed under a public authority with a view to its development in the interests of the trader and the customer.I will not quote further from that Report, but I will quote from other agencies acceptable to hon. Members opposite. I will take the "Morning Post." It says about this precious Commission, on the 26th January:The evidence taken as to speculation in wheat cargoes can only be called inept, and the warehousing question was not so much shirked as deliberately cut out.594 The "Morning Post" further alleged that there was £175,000,000 paid annually by the consumers in this country for bread, meat and milk alone after 10 per cent. profit had been allowed to every producer and distributor who handles the commodity. The right hon. Gentleman says he is helpless. He will not have control. He will have nothing to do with control. What do they do in France? The Minister of Commerce in France gets a credit from the. Chamber for 150,000,000 francs in order to deal with French profiteers in wheat. I have here a quotation from President Coolidge of the United States of America. In a speech of 4th December, 1924, he says:Looking to the future the Government must assist, in developing a national agricultural policy on broadly constructive lines. It will support any sound programme to release the farmer from the individualistic competitive conditions under which agriculture has been conducted. It must encourage centralised markets as a substitute for the haphazard and wasteful distributive methods of the past.If you get the President of the United States and the Minister of Commerce in France facing pretty much the same problem as the right hon. Gentleman opposite has to face; if you get, those two gentlemen facing the problem on socialistic lines, it speaks ill indeed for the right hon. Gentleman that he should come here to-night and in reply to the statements made by the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley and others offer us his cheap witticisms and cheaper dialectics.Let me, in conclusion, give the right hon. Gentleman a quotation. He asks where this money was lost. I will tell him. The paper called "Modern Transport" gives one case. 2,500 bags of cocoa coming from West Africa to Holland. They are intercepted at sea. They are not allowed to land in Holland. They are bought by a Liverpool merchant. The ship goes away back round the South up to the Mersey and the cargo is bought by a merchant in New York. The cargo goes away to New York. It is transhipped at New York, put on the railway, bought by a merchant in Philadelphia, sold by that Philadelphia merchant back to the Liverpool merchant again and it comes back across the Atlantic. The extra cost of transport for running round the world must, obviously, in the last resort, be paid by the consumer.Con- 595 sider the enormous waste of all your stock exchanges, all your stockbrokers, all your bill discounters, all your unnecessary employment of the parasitic classes, who increased in the City of London by 30 per cent, in the 10 years between the Census of 1901 and the Census of 1911, while the general population only rose by 3 per cent.
These problems have got to be faced by whatever Government is in power, and they are not faced. We may be wrong, but we have a carefully thought-out scheme. You are entitled, if you can, to pick holes in it, or you ought to produce a better scheme. You are in power with a majority. It is your duty to tell the housewives of this country, struggling under a load which they are physically unfit to bear, how you are going to deal with the profiteers, how you are going to deal with the people who, in a time of scarcity, jump prices. "Supply and demand" simply means that when you get the consumer at your mercy, you strangle him. [An HON. MEMBER: "Like the building unions!"] If that is your philosophy, if those are the principles upon which you go, then speak out straight and frank before the public. Tell the working classes you intend to take the last ounce out of them, that you intend to support the profiteering system of the capitalist class, the banking class, the landowning class.
| Division No. 30.] | AYES. | [11.0 p.m. |
| Adamson, Rt. Hon. W. (Fife, West) | Dunnico, H. | Lawson, John James |
| Adamson, W. M. (Staff., Cannock) | Edwards, C. (Monmouth, Bedwellty) | Lee, F. |
| Alexander, A. V. (Sheffield, Hillsbro') | Fenby, T. D. | Lowth, T. |
| Ammon, Charles George | Graham, Rt. Hon. Wm. (Edln., Cent.) | Lunn, William |
| Attlee, Clement Richard | Greenall, T. | MacDonald, Rt. Hon. J. B.(Aberavon) |
| Baker, J. (Wolverhampton, Bilston) | Greenwood, A. (Nelson and Colne) | Mackinder, W. |
| Barker, G. (Monmouth, Abertillery) | Grenfell, D. R. (Glamorgan) | Maclean, Neil (Glasgow, Govan) |
| Barnes, A. | Griffiths, T. (Monmouth, Pontypool) | March, S. |
| Barr, J. | Groves, T. | Maxton, James |
| Batey, Joseph | Grundy, T. W. | Mitchell, E. Rosslyn (Paisley) |
| Beckett, John (Gateshead) | Hardie, George D. | Montague, Frederick |
| Bens, Captain Wedgwood (Leith) | Harney, E. A. | Morris, R. H. |
| Bowerman, Rt. Hon. Charles W. | Hartshorn, Rt. Hon. Vernon | Murnin, H. |
| Broad, F. A. | Hastings, Sir Patrick | Naylor, T. E. |
| Bromfield, William | Hayday, Arthur | Oliver, George Harold |
| Brown, James (Ayr and Bute) | Hayes, John Henry | Palin, John Henry |
| Buchanan, G. | Henderson, Rt. Hon. A. (Burnley) | Pethick-Lawrence, F. W. |
| Buxton, Rt. Hon. Noel | Hirst, W. (Bradford, South) | Ponsonby, Arthur Potts, |
| Cape, Thomas | Hore-Belisha, Leslie | John S. |
| Charleton, H. C. | Hudson, J. H. Huddersfield | Richardson, R. (Houghton-le-Spring) |
| Clowes, S. | Jenkins, W. (Glamorgan, Neath) | Riley, Ben |
| Connolly, M. | John, William (Rhondda, West) | Ritson, J |
| Cove, W. G. | Johnston, Thomas (Dundee) | Roberts, Rt. Hon. F. O.(W. Bromwich) |
| Dalton, Hugh | Jones, J. J. (West Ham, Silvertown) | Robertson, J. (Lanark, Bothwell) |
| Davies, Evan (Ebbw Vale) | Jones, Morgan (Caerphilly) | Robinson, W. C. (Yorks, W. R., Elland) |
| Davies, Ellis (Denbigh, Denbigh) | Kelly, W. T. | Rose, Frank H. |
| Davies, Rhys John (Westhoughton) | Kennedy, T. | Salter, Dr. Alfred |
| Day, Colonel Harry | Kenworthy, Lt.-Com. Hon. Joseph M. | Scrymgeour, E. |
| Dennison, R. | Kirkwood, D. | Scurr, John |
| Duncan. C | Lansbury, George | Sexton, James |
§ We on our part say that only by a co-operative national organisation of our resources can we supply everybody in this land with the foodstuffs necessary to a decent life. It is my firm conviction, and it is the conviction of many on these benches, that the only thing that can bring this old country down is the profiteer allowed to run riot. We on these benches who stand for a national system, who stand for the commonweal, who stand for an equal right to every man and woman in the land to a fair share of the necessaries of life, we condemn the bogus Food Commission that you have set up. We intend to push you all we know until you have been driven to begin the organisation of the national resources in food supples.
§ Mr. T. GRIFFITHS rose in his place, and claimed to move, "That the Question be now put."
§ Question, "That the Question be now put," put, and agreed to.
§
Question put accordingly,
That the composition and the proceedings of the Royal Commission on Food Price are not such as to inspire public confidence, and this House is of opinion that action, legislative or otherwise, based upon the large mass of evidence already available and designed for the protection of the public against profiteering in the sale of food, should be undertaken without delay.
§ The House divided: Ayes, 126: Noes, 229.
| Shiels, Dr. Drummond | Sutton, J. E. | Welsh, J. C. |
| Short, Alfred (Wednesbury) | Taylor, R. A. | Westwood, J. |
| Sinclair, Major Sir A. (Calthness) | Thomas, Rt. Hon. James H. (Derby) | Wheatley, Rt. Hon. J. |
| Slesser, Sir Henry H. | Thomson, Trevelyan (Middlesbro. W.) | Whiteley, W. |
| Smillie, Robert | Thurtie, E. | Wilkinson, Ellen C. |
| Smith, Ben (Bermondsey, Rotherhithe) | Tinker, John Joseph | Wilson, C. H. (Sheffield, Attercilffe) |
| Smith, H. B. Lees (Keighley) | Trevelyan, Rt. Hon. C. P. | Wilson, R. J. (Jarrow) |
| Smith, Rennie (Penistone) | Varley, Frank B. | Windsor, Walter |
| Snell, Harry | Viant, S. P. | Wright, W. |
| Spencer, George A. (Broxtowe) | Wallhead, Richard C. | Young, Robert (Lancaster, Newton) |
| Stamford, T. W. | Walsh, Rt. Hon. Stephen | |
| Stephen, Campbell | Watson, W. M. (Dunfermline) | TELLERS FOR THE AYES.— |
| Stewart, J. (St. Rollox) | Webb, Rt. Hon. Sidney | Mr. Allen Parkinson and Mr. |
| Warne. |
| NOES. | ||
| Acland-Troyte, Lieut.-Colonel | Fairfax, Captain J. G. | Macmillan, Captain H. |
| Agg-Gardner, Rt, Hon. Sir James T. | Falls. Sir Charles F. | Macquisten, F. A. |
| Ainsworth, Major Charles | Fanshawe, Commander G. D. | MacRobert, Alexander M. |
| Albery, Irving James | Fielden, E. B. | Maitland, Sir Arthur D. Steel |
| Alexander, E. E. (Leyton) | Ford, P. J. | Makins, Brigadier-General E. |
| Alexander, Sir Wm. (Glasgow, Cent'l) | Forestier-Walker, L. | Manningham-Buller, Sir Mervyn |
| Allen, J. Sandeman (L'pool, W. Derby) | Forrest, W. | Margesson, Captain D. |
| Ashmead-Bartlett, E. | Fremantle, Lieut.-Colonel Francis E. | Merriman, F. B. |
| Astbury, Lieut.-Commander, F. W. | Galbraith, J. F. W. | Mitchell, S. (Lanark, Lanark) |
| Balfour, George (Hampstead) | Ganzoni, Sir John | Monsell, Eyres, Com. Rt. Hon. B. M. |
| Balniel, Lord | Gates, Percy | Moore, Sir Newton J. |
| Barclay-Harvey, C. M. | Gibbs, Col. Rt. Hon. George Abraham | Moore-Brabazon, Lieut.-Col. J. T. C. |
| Barnston, Major Sir Harry | Gilmour, Lt.-Col. Rt. Hon. Sir John | Moreing, Captain A. H. |
| Beamish, Captain T. P. H. | Glyn, Major R. G. C. | Morrison, H. (Wilts, Sallsbury) |
| Bellairs, Commander Carlyon W. | Gower, Sir Robert | Morrison-Bell, Sir Arthur Clive |
| Benn, Sir A. S. (Plymouth, Drake) | Grant, J. A. | Murchison, C. K. |
| Bethell, A. | Greene, W. P. Crawford | Nall, Lieut.-Colonel Sir Joseph |
| Blades, Sir George Rowland | Greenwood, William (Stockport) | Neville, R. J. |
| Blundell, F. N. | Grenfell, Edward C. (City of London) | Newman, Sir R. H. S. D. L. (Exeter) |
| Boothby, R. J. G. | Gretton, Colonel John | Nuttall, Ellis |
| Bourne, Captain Robert Croft | Guinness, Rt. Hon. Walter E. | Oakley, T. |
| Bowyer, Captain G. E. W. | Gunston, Captain D. W. | O'Connor, T. J. (Bedford, Luton) |
| Brass, Captain W. | Hacking, Captain Douglas H. | Owen, Major G. |
| Brittain, Sir Harry | Hall, Capt. W. D'A. (Brecon & Rad.) | Pennefather, Sir John |
| Brocklebank, C. E. R. | Hammersley, S. S. | Penny, Frederick George |
| Brooke, Brigadier-General C. R. I. | Hannon, Patrick Joseph Henry | Perkins, Colonel E. K. |
| Broun-Lindsay, Major H. | Harland, A. | Peto, Basil E. (Devon, Barnstaple) |
| Brown, Maj. D. C, (N'th'l'd., Hexham) | Harrison, G. J. C. | Peto, G. (Somerset, Frome) |
| Brown, Brig.-Gen.H. C. (Berks,Newb'y) | Hartington, Marquess of | Plelou, D. P. |
| Bullock, Captain M. | Harvey, Major S. E. (Devon, Totnes) | Pownall, Lieut.-Colonel Assheton |
| Burman, J. B. | Hawke, John Anthony | Price, Major C. W. M. |
| Butler, Sir Geoffrey | Henderson, Capt. R. R. (Oxf'd, Henley) | Raine, W. |
| Butt, Sir Alfred | Henderson, Lieut.-Col. V. L. (Bootle) | Ramsden, E. |
| Cadogan, Major Hon. Edward | Heneage, Lieut.-Col. Arthur P. | |
| Campbell, E. T. | Hennessy, Major J. R. G. | Rawlinson. Rt. Hon. John Fredk. Peel |
| Cassels, J. D. | Henniker-Hughan, Vice-Adm. Sir A. | Rawson, Alfred Cooper |
| Cazalet, Captain Victor A. | Hoare, Lt.-Col. Rt. Hon. Sir S. J. G. | Rees, Sir Beddoe |
| Chapman, Sir S. | Hogg, Rt. Hon. Sir D. (St. Marylebone) | Reid, D. D. (County Down) |
| Charteris, Brigadier-General J. | Hohier, Sir Gerald Fitzroy | Rentoul, G. S. |
| Churchman, Sir Arthur C. | Holbrook, Sir Arthur Richard | Rice, Sir Frederick |
| Clarry, Reginald George | Holland, Sir Arthur | Richardson, Sir P. W. (Sur'y, Ch'ts'y) |
| Homan, C. W. J. | Russell, Alexander West-(Tynemouth) | |
| Clayton, G. C. | Hope, Capt. A. O. J. (Warw'k, Nun.) | Rye, F. G. |
| Cochrane, Commander Hon. A. D. | Hopkinson, A. (Lancaster, Mossley) | Salmon, Major I. |
| Cockerill, Brigadier-General G. K. | Horlick, Lieul-Colonel J. N. | Samuel, A. M. (Surrey, Farnham) |
| Colfox, Major Wm. Philip | Hudson, Capt. A. U. M. (Hackney, N.) | Samuel, Samuel (W'dsworth, Putney), |
| Conway, Sir W, Martin | Hudson, R. S. (Cumberl'nd, Whiteh'n) | Sanders, Sir Robert A. |
| Cooper, A. Duff | Hume, Sir G. H. | Sanderson, Sir Frank |
| Cope, Major William | Huntingfield, Lord | Sandon, Lord |
| Courthope, Lieut.-Col. George L. | Hutchison,G.A.Clark (Midl'n & P'hl's) | Savery, S. S. |
| Craig, Ernest (Chester, Crewe) | Huffe, Sir Edward M. | Shaw, R. G. (Yorks, W.R., Sowerby) |
| Crook, C. W. | Jackson, Sir H. (Wandsworth, Cen'l) | Shaw, Lt.-Col. A. D. Mcl. (Renfrew, W) |
| Crookshank, Col. C. de W. (Berwick) | Jacob, A. E. | Shaw, Capt. W. W. (Wilts, Westb'y) |
| Crookshank,Cpt.H.(Lindsey,Gainsbro) | Jephcott, A. R. | Simms, Dr. John M. (Co. Down) |
| Curzon, Captain Viscount | Jones, Henry Haydn (Merioneth) | Skelton, A. N. |
| Davies, A. V. (Lancaster, Royton) | Kidd, J, (Linlithgow) | Smith, R. W. (Aberd'n & Kinc'dine,C.) |
| Davies, Sir Thomas (Cirencester) | King, Capt. Henry Douglas | Smith-Carington, Neville W. |
| Dawson, Sir Philip | Lane-Fox, Lieut.-Col. George R. | Smithers, Waldron |
| Drewe, C. | Lister, Cunliffe-, Rt. Hon. Sir Philip | Somerville, A. A. (Windsor) |
| Duckworth, John | Little, Dr. E. Graham | Spender Clay, Colonel H. |
| Edmondson, Major A. J. | Loder, J. de V. | Stanley, Col. Hon. G. F.(Will'sden, E.) |
| Edwards, John H. (Accrington). | Looker, Herbert William | Steel, Major Samuel Strang |
| Elliot, Captain Walter E. | Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh Vere | Stott, Lieut.-Colonel W. H. |
| Ellis, R. G. | Luce, Major-Gen. Sir Richard Harman | Stuart, Crichton-, Lord C. |
| Elveden, Viscount | Lumley, L. R. | Sugden, Sir Wilfrid |
| England, Colonel A. | McDonnell, Colonel Hon. Angus | Sykes, Major-Gen. Sir Frederick H. |
| Evans, Capt. Ernest (Welsh Univer.) | MacIntyre, Ian | Thompson, Luke (Sunderland) |
| Everard, W. Lindsay | McLean, Major A. | Thomson, F. C. (Aberdeen, South) |
| Thomson, Sir W.Mitchell-(Croydon,S) | Wells, S. R. | Womersley, W. J. |
| Tinne, J. A. | Wheler, Major Granville C. H. | Wood, B. G. (Somerset, Bridgwater) |
| Turton, Edmund Russborough | White, Lieut.-Colonel G. Dairymple | Wood, E.(Chest'r. Stalyb'dge & Hyde) |
| Waddington, R. | Williams, Com. C. (Devon, Torquay) | Wood, Sir Kingsley (Woolwich, W.). |
| Ward, Lt.-Col. A.L.(Kingston-on-Hull) | Williams, C. P. (Denbigh, Wrexham) | Wood, Sir S. Hill-(High Peak) |
| Warner, Brigadier-General W. W. | Williams, Herbert G. (Reading) | Wragg, Herbert |
| Warrender, Sir Victor | Winby, Colonel L. P. | Yerburgh, Major Robert D. T. |
| Waterhouse, Captain Charles | Windsor-Clive, Lieut.-Colonel George | |
| Watson, Rt. Hon. W. (Carlisle) | Winterton, Rt. Hon. Earl | TELLERS FOR THE NOES.— |
| Watts, Dr. T. | Wise, Sir Fredric | Captain Gee and Mr. Lamb. |