§ I hope that the considerations that I have put before the Committee will convince them that we cannot, out of our present volume of production, have both full employment and a general standard of personal incomes much above those which we now enjoy. We could, perhaps, have higher personal incomes, often referred to optimistically as "inducement incomes," for some people if we were prepared to see others living in unemployment at a very low standard. Our general standards are well above those that we experienced before the war, because we have been able to keep all our people employed and so have the benefit of their production. That is a result of full employment.
§ Do not let us risk losing the advantages we have built up with such difficulty over these post-war years, just because we are unwilling to acknowledge the need to continue for a while longer stern measures to guard our achievement of full employment. If we were now to relax our restraint and to seek to distribute our hardly earned and essential surplus by way of tax remissions we should be like those bees, which seeing the honey stored in their hive for the winter, gave up their work and indulged themselves upon their apparent but much needed surplus, with fatal results in the ensuing cold weather. We have, by our increased production, earned and obtained not only a higher level of real earnings, but also greatly extended social services and benefits. It is indeed conspicuously in that form that we have, so far, received the major dividend of our successful labours.
§ So long as we can maintain full employment by whatever measures are from time to time necessary, including the attainment this year of a large Budget surplus above the line we shall at least 80 know that our National production is at its highest possible, and that we are all sharing in such standards of living as we are able to afford by reason of that National production. We shall also have the satisfaction of knowing that we have succeeded, by our planning, in practically eliminating that most undeserved suffering of our people, long-term unemployment which we tolerated so often and for such long periods in the years before the war.
§ Such changes as we can make this year through the Budget without endangering our fundamental objectives will be in the right direction, and these together with the increase in expenditure on social service and social benefits, and in earnings by way of wages and salaries which accompany increased production, will mark another small but well defined step forward in the direction of more equal and higher general standards of living and towards that greater happiness and contentment of our people that is our aim.
§ The ChairmanIt is now my duty to put the necessary Resolutions to the Committee. I assume that all hon. Members have received a copy of them—[flox. MEMBERS: "No."] Arrangements have been made to that end. I shall wait a moment or two while they are distributed and then forthwith put the necessary Resolutions. With the consent of the Committee I will put them in the shortened form which we have adopted recently.