§ It was not without some misgivings, which I concealed as much as possible, that I last year committed myself to a tax on silk. It was hardly to be expected that the raising of over £6,000,000 from one comparatively small industry would 1698 have been attended by benefits to those directly concerned. The complexity of the tax, its many uncertain features, and the fact that it had been so often examined and rejected by my predecessors, all these factors incited tremors, if not, indeed, actual trepidation, and to those were soon added the extravagant denunciations and the lugubrious predictions of political partisans and the natural fears of the interests affected. Let me dispel the apprehensions of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Colne Valley (Mr. Snowden). I am not going to quote his speeches of a year ago, nor am I going to analyse in retrospect the accusations of ruining the textile industry of Lancashire, by which I was so seriously assailed by solid deputations from Manchester and Bradford. I have made careful inquiries as to the state of opinion in these trades, and I am quite sure that if I this afternoon were to announce the repeal of the Silk Duties, that announcement would be received throughout those trades with universal dismay.
§ It was, of course, inevitable in a duty of this kind, that the working of the tax should show a certain number of anomalies and inconveniences on which I shall at the proper time have minor mitigating proposals to make during the course of the Budget. But apart from this the tax—its Customs Duties, its Excise Duties, and its rebate—has worked with an unexpected smoothness which, I think, redounds to the credit of the Customs and Excise officials who performed a task which 'required all sorts of qualities of tact and patience. The natural and the artificial silk trades have both been largely compensated for the tax by the favourable margin accorded to them in the scale of the Customs Duties. There has recently been a check in the consumption of artificial silk, but, though feminine fashion flickers at the moment, the trade has continued to progress. The Excise Duty has been paid out of the profits of the great firm of Courtaulds, without apparently reducing its profits to a discouraging level. The Customs Duties on artificial silk have been paid by the foreigner. Between the announcement of the tax and its enforcement there were, as the 1699 Committee remembers, very heavy forestalments. More than the revenue, however, which I expected to get in the face of these forestalments, has actually been collected, and yet the price of artificial silk goods in the common forms is, at the present moment, somewhat below what it was this time last year. We have, moreover, secured a revenue which in a full year will be between £6,000,000 and £7,000,000, without, I am thankful to say—for it would he a very wounding thought—without making any dearer the finery of poor working girls. It is, however, my duty to admit that while the cost to the consumer has not indeed been increased by the Artificial Silk Duties, we have probably intercepted to a very large extent a reduction which otherwise would have reached the, consumer in this country.