Sitting of 7 July 1925

Preamble
The House met at a Quarter before Three of the Clock, Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair.

PRIVATE BUSINESS.
PRIVATE BILLS [Lords] (Standing Orders not previously inquired into complied with),
Mr. SPEAKER laid upon the Table Report from one of the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, That, in the case of the following Bills, originating in the Lords, and referred on the First Reading thereof, the Standing Orders not previously inquired into, which are applicable thereto, have been complied with, namely: —
Stock Conversion and Investment Trust, Limited, Bill [Lords].
Mersey Tunnel Bill [Lords].
Bills to be read a Second time.

The declared value of the exports from Great Britain and Northern Ireland registered as consigned to China, etc., during the twelve months ended 31st March, 1925, was as follows:

Country to which Consigned.

Produce and Manufacture of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Imported Merchandise.

£

£

China exclusive of Hong KONG. Macao and leased territories.

19,502,574

188,463

Hong Kong

8,508,854

10.966

Macao

5,556

114

Wei-hai-wei

19,055

63

Similar particulars are not available in respect of other territories in China held or leased by foreign Countries.

IRON PRODUCTS (GERMAN IMPORT DUTY).
Mr. R. MORRISONasked the President of the Board of Trade whether he has any information as to a recent agreement arrived at between the German, the French, the Saar, and the Luxembourg iron masters in regard to the import of iron products into Germany at half the normal import duty subject to the consent
French Protestant Episcopal Church of the Savoy Bill [Lords],
Read a Second time, and committed.
Glasgow Corporation Order Confirmation (No. 2) Bill [Lords],
Read the Third time, and passed, without Amendment.

ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS.
  TRADE AND COMMERCE.

    CHINA (BRITISH EXPORTS)
    H. WILLIAMSasked the President of the Board of Trade the total exports from this country to China during the 12 months ended the, 31st March, 1925. including exports to possessions in China belonging to this and other countries?
    The PRESIDENT of the BOARD of TRADE (Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister): If my hon. Friend will permit me, I will circulate in the OFFICIAL REPORT a table of figures giving i the information he desires as far as it is available.
    Following is the table:
    of their respective Governments, to whom this arrangement will be submitted as a suitable basis for the Franco-German trade negotiations: and, in view of the effect this proposal would have upon the iron trade in this country, will he make immediate inquiry into the matter?
    Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: I am informed that a provisional understanding

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    as regards the mutual interchange of certain metallurgical products has been come to between the German and French iron industries, but that this arrangement is dependent on the conclusion of an agreement between the respective Governments which has not yet been attained. The hon. Member may rest assured that the progress of these negotiations is being carefully watched by our representatives in France and Germany. I may add that we have been assured by the French Government that no final arrangements will be made as regards French and German metallurgical industries which involve the action or consent of the French Government without prior notice to Great Britain.

    EMPIRE SILK PRODUCTION.
    Mr. HANNONasked the President of the Board of Trade whether it is the intention of His Majesty's Government, on the recommendations of the Imperial Institute Advisory Committee, to make possible experiments in silk production in Kenya Colony, Uganda, Nigeria, Jamaica and Trinidad; and whether any steps are to be taken to stimulate production in India and Cyprus?
    Mr. A. M. SAMUEL (Secretary, Overseas Trade Department): Experiments in connection with sericulture have already been made at the suggestion of the Imperial Institute Silk Committee in all the countries mentioned. The Committee are at present considering the results obtained, and the possibility of recommending further work in this direction.
    Mr. HANNON: When does the hon. Gentleman think that a Report will be available from the Committee that is investigating this matter?
    Mr. SAMUEL: I cannot give any date, but if my hon. Friend would like to have further information, I will try to get it.

    INDUSTRIAL ALCOHOL.
    Mr. HANNONasked the President of the Board of Trade the principal sources within the Empire of industrial alcohol from prickly pear, coffee pulp, acorns, sweet potatoes, and molasses, specifying the countries of origin; and what steps His Majesty's Government proposes to take to increase the output within the Empire?
    The SECRETARY of STATE for the COLONIES (Mr. Amery): I have been asked to take this question. So far as I am aware, alcohol is not produced within the Empire from any of the products named except molasses, from which it is produced in certain parts of the Dominions, British Guiana and Mauritius. All information, together with the results of research on possible new sources and processes, is distributed by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in all quarters where it is likely to be of advantage.

    EXPORTS AND IMPORTS.
    Lieut. - Colonel Sir FREDERICK HALLasked the President of the Board of Trade approximately the value of the exports from Great Britain and Northern Ireland during the first six months of the present year and the value of the imports during the same period?
    Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: The values of the imports and exports during June and the first half of the current year will not be available until the end of the present week. Perhaps my hon. and gallant Friend will repeat his question at the beginning of next week. I gave the most up-to-date figures I could at the moment, in my speech yesterday.

    IRON AND STEEL TRADES.
    Mr. TREVELYAN THOMSONasked the President of the Board of Trade whether all those industries which would be affected, adversely or otherwise, by either a duty on the imports of foreign iron and steel or a subsidy on the home products, will be allowed to give evidence before the Civil Research Committee when they commence their inquiries into this matter?
    Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: As I stated yesterday, the Government would not propose a safeguarding duty to Parliament except after an inquiry on the lines laid down in the White Paper. It is not intended that the Civil Research Committee should embark on such an inquiry, or that it would be within their competence to recommend the imposition of a duty.
    Mr. THOMSON: Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether the industries

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    referred to in the question will have the right to appear before the Civil Research Committee?
    Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER:I have explained in my answer that the Civil Research Committee will not be concerned with recommendations. Like any other Cabinet Committee, it will have to take such steps as it thinks right to arrive at a conclusion.
    Mr. HARRIS: How can they arrive at satisfactory conclusions without taking evidence and going to the natural sources of such information?
    Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: I did not say that they would take no evidence, but I can give no undertaking as to what evidence they will be prepared to take. They must take whatever they think to be the best course to arrive at a decision.
    Commander WILLIAMS: Has the Government had much support in this matter of safeguarding from the party opposite?
    Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: No.

    FOREIGN-BUILT SHIPS (REGISTRATION).
    Sir NEWTON MOOREasked the President of the Board of Trade whether, before registering a ship as British, any inquiries are made as to whether it was constructed in Great Britain or was built of foreign material by foreign labour in a foreign port?
    Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: One of the documents required to be produced before a ship is registered as British is a builder's certificate, which contains, inter alia, particulars of the place where the ship was built.

    ARMS TRAFFIC CONFERENCE.
    Mr. LAWSONasked the Secretary of State for War whether it is proposed to publish the Report of the recent International Conference on Traffic in Arms; if so, when we may expect such Report; and whether the House will have an opportunity of discussing its findings?
    The SECRETARY of STATE for WAR (Sir Laming Worthington-Evans): The Conference has issued no Report. Its conclusions are embodied in a Convention, which was signed by the British delegate. I am informed by my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary that a copy will be placed in the Library of the House. The last part of the question should be addressed to the Prime Minister.

    WOOLWICH ARSENAL (COMMUNIST NEWS-SHEET).
    Sir F. HALLasked the Secretary of State for War whether the War Office propose to take any action with respect to the circulation among the workers at Woolwich Arsenal of the Communist news-sheet called the "Arsenal Workers' Bullet-in," in view of the fact that the object of this journal, modelled on the instructions given by M. Zinovieff, the head of the Russian Foreign Propaganda Department, is to provoke discontent and foster sedition among the Government employés at the Arsenal?
    Sir L. WORTHINGTON-EVANS: No, Sir, I do not think any official action is necessary. I believe that the good sense of the workers at Woolwich Arsenal is a sufficient safeguard against any harmful effects from the journal in question.
    Captain ARTHUR EVANS: Has the right hon. Gentleman's attention been drawn to the Communist circulation of propaganda at Aldershot, and is he prepared to take any action in that matter?
    Sir L. WORTHINGTON-EVANS: If my hon. and gallant Friend will put down a question specifying to what he refers, I will look into it.
    Mr. MONTAGUE: On a point of Order. May I ask whether it is in Order for a Member to put down a question making a definite statement, without giving proof of it, to the effect that this particular journal fosters sedition? Would that be in order in a question?
    Mr. SPEAKER: I am afraid that Members often make themselves responsible for statements for which I cannot vouch.
    Sir F. HALL: I have made myself responsible for this question, Mr. Speaker.

  SCOTLAND.

    POOR LAW (RECOVERY OF EXPENSES, IRISH FREE STATE).
    Sir ALEXANDER SPROTasked the Secretary for Scotland if he is aware that, when an individual comes over from the Irish Free State to Scotland and becomes chargeable to a Scotch parish under the Poor Law, his expenses cannot be recovered from his Irish parish nor can the individual be deported to his home parish if it is situated in the Irish Free State; and if steps will be taken to remedy this state of matters?
    The SECRETARY for SCOTLAND (Lieut.-Colonel Sir John Gilmour): I understand that, in consequence of the granting of Dominion status to the Irish Free State, parish councils in Scotland no longer have power to apply to the sheriff for a warrant authorising the removal of a person born within the territory of the Irish Free State who becomes chargeable to the poor rates in Scotland without having acquired a settlement or a status of irremovability under the Poor Law Acts. I am at present making inquiry into the situation thus created.
    Sir A. SPROT: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that, if the individual belonged to Northern Ireland, the power would exist to have him deported?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: Yes, Sir; that is the case.

    POLICE, KILMARNOCK.
    Mr. Neil MACLEANasked the Secretary for Scotland how many police constables in Kilmarnock have resigned, been dismissed, or suspended since Chief Constable Roy has been appointed; and whether any of those who were forced to resign are now in another police force and have shown sufficient efficiency to merit and obtain promotion?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: I am informed that, since the appointment of the chief constable referred to, five men have resigned, two have been dismissed, and two suspended pending investigation of charges against them. These figures do not include two probationers whose services were dispensed with on the ground that they wore unlikely to become efficient, or men who retired on pension in the ordinary course. No man
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    who has resigned from the Kilmarnock Force during the tenure of office of the present chief constable has obtained promotion in another force.
    Mr. MACLEAN: Is not the right hon. Gentleman aware that one of those who were asked to resign from this force has been promoted to an inspectorship in another force in Scotland?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: My information is that is not the case.
    Mr. MACLEAN: Will the right hon. Gentleman try to get some good information, instead of the information he is giving to the House?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: I understand that one man was transferred and has since got promotion, but he was not dismissed.
    Sir JAMES REMNANT: Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether this chief constable had previous service in the force, or was appointed from outside?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: I must have notice of that question.
    Mr. HAYES: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that a member of a police force, before he can be transferred to another force, must resign from the one in which he is serving—that it is not a question of transfer but of resignation and re-appointment?
    Mr. MACLEANasked the Secretary for Scotland whether he is aware that the police constables of Kilmarnock have been warned by their inspectors of the consequences of being seen either on or off duly in the company of or speaking to Hill and Moore, the two dismissed constables; and whether he can state the reason for such action on the part of the inspectors?
    Sir J.GILMOUR: I am informed that since the dismissal of the two constables referred to they have been frequently seen standing about the main thoroughfares in proximity to points where constables in uniform were stationed and, with the approval of the chief constable, constables on duty were warned by the inspectors not to gossip with them. No instructions were issued by the inspectors in regard to constables who were off duty. There are obvious disciplinary reasons for the action of the inspectors.
    Mr. MACLEAN: Are we to take it that constables are not to speak to any civilian in any particular area in which these constables are working? Is the persecution by this chief constable to be carried out against these two individuals even when they become ordinary citizens?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: No, there has been no question of police being prohibited from speaking to a man in plain clothes. Obviously it is within the jurisdiction of the chief constable to issue such instructions to his officer on duty as he may deem desirable.
    Mr. MACLEAN: If either of these two dismissed constables approached a constable and asked a perfectly legitimate question regarding certain things happening in the borough, are the constables not allowed to reply when asked that question?
    Mr. WESTWOOD: Is the House to understand that chief constables have power not only to interfere with constables when they are on duty but to interfere in their private life when they are off duty?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: My answer was perfectly clear. No instructions were issued by the inspector in regard to constables who were off duty.
    Mr. MACLEANasked the Secretary for Scotland whether he received a claim from the Constables Branch Board, Kilmarnock, signed by G. Hill, the secretary to the Board, sent through the usual and regular course, with details concerning the well-being of the police force in Kilmarnock, rest day improperly withheld, commencing day of annual leave, and complaints against treatment of constables by Chief Constable Roy; and whether it was on account of his share in sending this claim that Hill was dismissed by the chief constable three weeks after sending this claim on the instructions of his Board?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: I have received no communication from the Kilmarnock Constables Branch Board, but I am informed that they made representations to the chief constable and the police authority with regard to annual leave and the weekly rest day. As stated in the reply to the hon. Member's question
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    on the 12th May, the Joint Central Committee of the Scottish Police Federation made a representation to me on the subject, enclosing papers received from the Branch Board. As regards the last part of the question. I would refer to my reply on the 23rd June, in which the grounds of dismissal are stated. I have no reason to believe that the proceedings against Hill had any connection with his actions as secretary of the Branch Board.
    Mr. HAYES: Will the right hon. Gentleman receive representations re-received direct from the Kilmarnock Branch Board?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: I think the proper channel has been taken.
    Mr. HAYES: Will the right hon. Gentleman see that if representations are made by the Branch Board through the proper channels those representations are not blocked before they reach him? That is the point.
    Sir J. GILMOUR: I am perfectly willing to receive, through the proper channels, any representations from the proper quarters, but matters of discipline and questions of that kind lie outside my province and are in the hands of the chief constable.
    Mr. WALLHEAD: Does not the right hon. Gentleman see that this chief constable is a bully?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: No, I do not accept that.
    Mr. MACLEAN: Has the right hon. Gentleman considered the reply he has made? In that he says he has received no communication from ex-constable Hill to the Constable Branch Board, when, as a matter of fact, the question asked is "sent through the usual and regular course," and in his reply he has admitted that it came through the National Board, and Therefore through the regular course. Will he consider the contradiction he has made and try to let us have some information on the situation in Kilmarnock, which is growing beyond a joke?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: I do not think there is any difficulty in understanding my reply. I have stated plainly that I

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    received a communication through the joint general committee, and I have given full consideration to it and find no reason to take action.
    Mr. MACLEAN: Is not the first portion of the reply a statement that the right hon. Gentleman has received no claim from the ex-constable?
    Mr. SPEAKER: The reply had better be read. It was in two parts. The question is whether the second part explains the first. I think the hon. Member had better study it in writing. It was a full answer. He may think the two parts inconsistent, but there is no purpose in pursuing that for the moment.
    Mr. MACLEAN: Arising out of the whole situation, and the unsatisfactory nature of the replies which have been given, I give notice that I will raise the matter to-night on the Motion for the Adjournment.

    COMMUNIST PROCESSIONS, GREENOCK.
    Mr. SAKLATVALAasked the Secretary for Scotland if he is aware that permission has been consistently refused to the young Communist pioneers to hold street processions in Greenock, whilst the boy scouts and girl guides, composed of young people of a similar age, have been allowed complete liberty; and will he have an inquiry made as to the reasons for it?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: I have no information on this subject other than that contained in the replies I gave to the hon. Member's questions on the 29th June. The answer to the last part of the question is in the negative.
    Sir HARRY BRITTAIN: Will the right hon. Gentleman continue to refuse this permission to Communists?

    CONDEMNED HOUSES.
    Mr. STEPHENasked the Secretary for Scotland the number of inhabited houses in Glasgow, Dundee, Edinburgh, Perth, Aberdeen and Paisley, respectively, which have been condemned by the sanitary authorities as unfit for human habitation; and if he will consider the introduction of legislation to make it impossible for rent to be obtained from those condemned houses?
    Sir J. GILMOUR: In reply to the first part of the Question the figures are as follow:

    Glasgow

    …

    …

    …

    12,150

    Dundee

    …

    …

    …

    1,103

    Edinburgh

    …

    …

    …

    938

    Perth

    …

    …

    …

    273

    Aberdeen

    …

    …

    …

    1,099

    Paisley

    …

    …

    …

    93

    I am afraid that I cannot hold out any prospect of legislation on the lines suggested.
    Mr. STEPHEN: Seeing that leading Members of the Government feel that owners of such property have very uneasy consciences, will not they do something to try to relieve the burden of their conscience by keeping them from getting rent for such premises?
    Mr. JOHNSTON: In view of the appalling state of housing in Dundee, of which the right hon. Gentleman is quite cognisant, will he now withdraw the ban he has placed upon the Town Council for setting up, with public assistance, works for producing cement blocks?
    Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member should put that down.

  TRANSPORT.

    PORT FACILITIES.
    Sir N. MOOREasked the President of the Board of Trade whether his attention has been called to the necessity for substituting for the obsolete methods of discharging raw material in this country modern terminal facilities in order to reduce the cost to the manufacturer and consumer, and so conduce to economy in industry and cheaper food supplies; and what steps have been taken to carry out the recommendations of the Committee of Inquiry on Port Facilities in connection with the handling of imports and exports in the United Kingdom?
    The MINISTER of TRANSPORT (Colonel Ashley): I have been asked to reply. I presume that my hon. Friend refers to the Report made last year by the unofficial Committee appointed by the Chamber of Shipping. The responsibility for providing efficient and up-to-date discharging facilities at ports rests with the various port authorities, and my information is that improvements are

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    being continually carried out, in some cases with financial assistance from the Unemployment Grants Committee, both at the ports referred to by the Committee of the Chamber of Shipping and at other ports as well.
    Sir N. MOORE: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that our facilities are the worst in the world, and that, whereas in most places a vessel can discharge in a day, it takes about six days in this country?
    Colonel ASHLEY: I cannot for a moment accept my hon. Friend's description of our ports.
    Sir N. MOORE: It is a fact, all the same.
    Lord H. CAVENDISH-BENTINCK: Would the right hon. Gentleman do something to facilitate the provision of terminal facilities for British produce?

    BRIDGES.
    Sir H. BRITTAINasked the Minister of Transport the number of bridges now being constructed or of which the designs have been authorised throughout the country?
    Colonel ASHLEY: My information only extends to bridges towards which grants are made from the Road Fund, and I am not in possession of the com prehensive particulars sought by my hon. Friend.
    Mr. PALING: Can the hon. Member say whether any of these new bridges are being built in places where the only existing bridges are toll bridges, privately owned?
    Colonel ASHLEY: I must ask for notice of that question.

  COAL INDUSTRY.

    NATIONAL MARKETING.
    Mr. W. BAKERasked the Secretary for Mines whether he will consider the desirability of advising the Government to take steps for the national marketing of exportable coal on the lines suggested by the chairman of the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company?
    The SECRETARY for MINES (Colonel Lane-Fax):No, Sir. As the hon.
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    Member is aware, the difficulties of the coal industry, and the possible remedies for them, are now being considered by the recognised associations representing employers and employed. If they, or either of them, have any suggestion to make for any action by the Government I shall no doubt be approached in the usual way.
    Mr. RENNIE SMITH: May we take it that the Departments are doing nothing whatever and have not the least suggestion to make in regard to recovering these markets?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: No; it only means that we do not accept the suggestion.
    Mr. LAWSON: Is it true to say investigations are still being continued by both sides?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: I very much hope so.

    BY-PRODUCTS (COAL PRICES).
    Mr. J. BECKETTasked the Secretary for Mines what is the average price at which coal-mine owners interested in by-product works sell coal to themselves; and if these transactions are shown in the published profits by which wages are regulated?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: Receipts from transactions of this sort are included in the proceeds by which wages are regulated under the agreement, which provides that "fair market prices, based on current market values, are to be charged" in respect of them. I have no particulars of the actual prices charged. They are. of course, subject to scrutiny by the miners' accountants.
    Mr. BECKETT: Is the hon. and gallant Gentleman aware that although the receipts are included, the details of the transaction are not include, and as the greater part of the profits in the successful pits are made through by-products, the miners naturally feel that they are being seriously defrauded by the concealing of these transactions?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: I have not had a serious complaint.
    Mr. BECKETT: I made no suggestion that the accountants are not capable of dealing with it. The suggestion I made was that details were not divulged.
    Mr. BATEY: Is the hon. and gallant Gentleman not aware that the revenue from by-products is not included?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: I think the hon. Member is mistaken.

    LOW-TEMPERATURE CARBONISATION.
    Mr. SMITHERSasked the Secretary for Mines whether he can give the House any further information as to the progress that is being made to develop the process of low-temperature carbonisation of coal with a view to making it a commercial success?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: I have nothing to add to the statement made by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister in this House on 29th June.
    Mr. SMITHERS: Is the hon. And gallant Gentleman aware that over 200,000 tons of coal have been treated by this process and the products sold in the open market, and does he not think it has now pasted out of the experimental stage, and might be put on a commercial basis?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: I do not think I can add anything to what I have said I am very glad to hear it has got so far as the hon. Member says.
    Mr. SMITHERS: In view of the very desperate state of the country industrially, will the Government do all they possibly can to expedite putting this on a commercial basis?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: Every effort will be made.
    Vice-Admiral Sir REGINALD HALL: Have any collieries asked for assistance under the Trade Facilities Act in putting up this plant?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: Yes; in two cases applications have been made, I believe successfully.

    LABOUR SUPPLY.
    Mr. RENNIE SMITHasked the Secretary for Mines how long he estimates that the depression in the mining industry will continue; and whether he has any suggestion to make with regard to regulating the supply of new labour, especially boy labour, going into the industry so long as the depression continued?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: I regret that I see no immediate prospect of an improvement in the coal trade, but I do not think that Government regulation of the labour supply would help the situation.
    Lord H. CAVENDISH-BENTINCK: Are the Government making any effort to transfer the unemployed miners from the depressed districts to new areas in Nottingham and South Derbyshire? Is there any effort on the part of the Government to find work for unemployed miners in this way?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: Yes. I think a good many efforts have been made but, as the Noble Lord knows, the difficulty is the housing question. As soon as the housing question is less acute more could be done.
    Mr. BATEY: Has not the only effort of the Government been made so that they can cut off the unemployment benefit from the miners?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: No, Sir. I should be very sorry if the hon. Member thought that.

    MINES CLOSED AND RE-OPENED.
    Mr. SMITHalso asked the Secretary for Mines the number of pits which have been opened and reopened in the last five years, the number which have been closed down, the number of workers now occupied in the new pits, and the number dismissed from the pits closed down; and, of the persons employed in the new pits, what number were previously working in occupations other than mining?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: Aggregate figures for the last five years could hardly fail to be misleading and would be most laborious to extract. Since the beginning of June, 1924, which may be taken as the starting point of the present depression, 508 coal mines, normally employing 110,483 wags-earners, have been closed and not reopened, and 96, at present employing 8,522 wage-earners, have been opened or reopened. I cannot say how many of the latter were previously working in other occupations.

    ROYALTIES.
    Major Sir GRANVILLE WHELERasked the Secretary for Mines what is the amount of money paid for coal

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    in royalties for the years 1923 and 1924; what is the average royalty per ton throughout Great Britain; whether there is much difference per ton in the royalties paid in different districts; and what is the approximate net amount received by the mineral royalty owner per ton after Mineral Rights Duty and deductions for Income Tax, Super-tax, etc., have been made?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: Six million six hundred and forty-three thousand pounds were paid in 1923 and £6,430,000 in 1924. The average per ton was 578d. in each year, and the district average in 1924 ranged from 351d. in North Wales to 9'49d. in Cumberland. I am advised by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer that the rate of Mineral Rights Duty is 1s. in the pound on the amount of royalty less Income Tax, but as the effective rate of Income Tax and Super-tax depends on the total income and family circumstances of each taxpayer it is impossible to express the total burden of taxation by any average figure. In the case of the largest owners the taxation paid in the two years referred to will therefore amount to about one-half of the royalty received.
    Mr. WALLHEAD: Will the Minister say what service the recipients of this £6,000,000 render for the millions they get?
    Mr. SPEAKER: That does not arise out of the question.
    Mr. H. WILLIAMS: What royalty is paid in the Forest of Dean to the Crown?
    Mr. BECKETT: Is it fair for the Crown to make these royalty owners collect the money for them? Would it not be better to take the money straight away?

    MINERS' PHTHISIS.
    Mr. D. GRENFELLasked the Secretary for Mines whether he is in a position to report upon the inquiries of his Department into the incidence of miners' phthisis among men engaged in rock-drilling by the use of compressed-air machines?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: I am not in a position to give any general conclusions, for the inquiry in question was confined to three mines. But its result was to support the apprehension that, in those mines,
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    rock drilling may be dangerous to health. I have arranged for a more extensive inquiry to be put in hand at once. Meantime the inspectors are taking up the question of precautionary measures at the three mines.
    Mr. GRENFELL: Will the hon. Member get information to help the Commission to come to a right conclusion on this subject? Will he invite evidence from the workmen and the medical men?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: I should imagine the Commission are quite capable of doing that for themselves. If the hon. Member thinks that any evidence has not been brought forward, I should be glad to hear of it.

    UNEMPLOYMENT (GREAT BRITAIN AND UNITED STATES).
    Mr. D. GRENFELLasked the Secretary for Mines if he will give the figures showing the comparative extent of un employment in the coal industries in Great Britain and the United States at the end of 1924?
    The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of LABOUR (Mr. Betterton): I have been asked to reply. The percentage of workpeople unemployed in coal mining on 22nd December, 1924, in Great Britain was 79. No statistics of unemployment are published by the United States Government and I regret therefore that I am unable to supply comparative figures for that country.

    INDUSTRIAL DISPUTES (WORKING DAYS LOST).
    Mr. GRENFELLalso asked the Secretary for Mines if he will furnish the statistics showing the number of days lost through industrial disputes in the coalfields of Great Britain, France, Belgium and Germany during the years 1922–23 and 1923–24?
    Mr. BETTERTON: I have been asked to reply. The approximate number of working days lost through industrial disputes in the coal mining industry in Great Britain was 1,246,000 in 1922; 1,183,000 in 1923 and 1,460,000 in 1924. For Belgium the figures were approximately 206,000 in 1922; 480,000 in 1923 and 2.527,000 in 1924. Corresponding figures for France and Germany are not available.

    TRADE DEPRESSION.
    Lord H. CAVENDISH-BENTINCKasked the Prime Minister whether he will either appoint a Committee to inquire to what degree the present depression in the mining industry is due to lack of efficient organisation or invite the coalowners to make suggestions, other than the reduction of wages, for the improvement of the organisation of the mining industry?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: I have been asked to reply. The causes of the present depression and possible remedies have recently been the subject of discussion between the coalowners and the mine workers, and I still hope that those discussions may be resumed with a sincere desire on both sides to find a way out of the present difficulties. I do not think that to appoint such a Committee as my Noble Friend suggests would help matters.
    Mr. HARDIE: May I ask whether the money which is taken out of the mines in this country in profits and sent abroad to Northern China and other places for coalfield development, if invested at home would have put the mines Here into the highest state of scientific development?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: I do not think that that arises out of the question.
    Mr. HARDIE: It does.
    Colonel LANE-FOX: If the suggested Committee were to inquire into all questions of that kind it would take many years.
    Mr. HARDIE: If the Committee is made up of the gentlemen to whom I refer, how can you expect any sense of justice in the Report?
    Mr. T. WILLIAMS: Is not almost all the evidence with regard to the inefficiency of the mines in Great Britain embodied in the Sankey Reports and recommendations, and will the right hon. Gentleman recommend the Prime Minister to rive effect to these recommendations?
    Colonel LANE-FOX: If that is so. obviously an inquiry is not required.

  MOTOR TRAFFIC.

    DRIVING LICENCES (TESTS).
    Sir H. BRITTAINasked the Minister of Transport whether, seeing that no form of medical or driving test
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    or knowledge of the road is required for those to whom driving licences are granted, he will consider the suggestion that a leaflet, containing the principal rules and regulations, details of signalling, and general etiquette of the road, be printed and read by each applicant for a driving licence before that licence is handed to him?
    Colonel ASHLEY: I am in sympathy with the object my hon. Friend desires to achieve in so far as details of signalling and general etiquette of the road are concerned, but I prefer the methods of attaining it recommended by the Departmental Committee on the Taxation and Regulation of Road Vehicles, in their Second Interim Report, paragraphs 167 and 168. I am sending him a copy of these paragraphs. As regards furnishing information to motor drivers on the principal rules and regulations relating to mechanically - propelled vehicles, I think this course might be open to objection, as if the information were complete it would be voluminous, and, if incomplete, it might be misleading.
    Sir H. BRITTAIN: In view of the ignorance of many people who acquire licences to-day, does not the right hon. Gentleman consider that some suggestion of this kind would limit the number of accidents on the road, even if the suggestion were limited to signalling alone?
    Colonel ASHLEY: The whole matter will be taken into consideration when I am able to bring in the Road Vehicles Bill, which was mentioned in the Gracious Speech from the Throne.
    Major COHEN: Does the hon. Member think that it is possible to make people on the roads ladies and gentlemen simply by regulations of this sort?

    ACCIDENTS (FAULTY MECHANISM).
    Colonel DAYasked the Minister of Transport whether he is aware that the large number of road accidents occurring to licensed chars-a-banc and motor omnibuses, especially in rural areas, are caused through faulty or worn-out mechanism; and, in view of the Report of the Departmental Committee of the Ministry, will he consider introducing immediate legislation to give all local authorities power to inspect these vehicles in their areas?
    Colonal ASHLEY: I would refer the hon. and gallant Gentleman to the answer which I gave on the 23rd June to the hon. Member for North Tottenham, of which I am sending him a copy.
    Mr. R. MORRISON: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the recent speech which he delivered at Bolton has given the impression that the Government intend to introduce proposals almost immediately?
    Colonel ASHLEY: I hope I did not give that impression. I hope I gave the impression that the Government would introduce a Bill as soon as public business enabled them to do so. The hon. Member knows the congested state of public business.

    AFFORESTATION.
    Mr. RAMSDENasked the Prime Minister whether, in view of the statement in the Report of the Forestry Commissioners that a settled policy of afforestation is necessary, he is prepared to indicate the intention of the Government with regard to this question?
    The PRIME MINISTER (Mr. Baldwin): So far as the present Government are concerned, there is no intention of departing from the policy embodied in the Forestry Act, 1919.

    UNEMPLOYMENT (SUGGESTED COMMISSION OF INQUIRY).
    Sir H. BRITTAINasked the Prime Minister whether he is prepared to consider the suggestion, widely supported by representative employers and employed, that a Commission comprising leading men of all parties in the House should be set up with power to work together, without consideration of any party politics, with the object of discovering a real remedy for the evil of unemployment; whether, if such a Commission were formed, he would give facilities for its action to be made effective; and whether the Commission could be empowered to call upon independent leaders of industry, commerce and labour to share its deliberations and assist in putting its conclusions into operation?
    The PRIME MINISTER: I would remind my hon. Friend that a strong Committee under the chairmanship of Sir Arthur Balfour was set up last July to inquire into the conditions and prospects of British industry and commerce, and is still at work, and that the problems presented by the iron and steel industry have been, within the last few days, referred specially to the Committee of Civil Research. In addition, there is a Committee of the Cabinet continuously in being, which promotes and co-ordinates Government action in all measures for the relief of unemployment. The last thing I should wish to do is to reject without full consideration any suggestion which seems to contain the promise of fruitful results, but I am bound to say that I cannot at present sec the advantage of appointing a Commission such as my hon. Friend suggests, in addition to the bodies which, as I have explained, are already dealing with the matter from various aspects.
    Captain WEDGWOOD BENN: Can the Prime Minister say when the steel report is likely to be received.
    The PRIME MINISTER: No, Sir.
    Mr. A. V. ALEXANDER: With reference to the first part of the Prime Minister's answer, could he say whether it is intended to issue an interim report by the Balfour Committee on Trade and Industry? I put the question yesterday on the Board of Trade Vote, but received no answer.
    The PRIME MINISTER: I do not know about that, but perhaps the hon. Member will put down a question.
    Mr. MAXTON: Does the right hon. Gentleman hope shortly to have a report from the Co-ordination Cabinet Committee?
    The PRIME MINISTER: No.
    Mr. MAXTON: Are we to assume that there is nothing doing anywhere?
    The PRIME MINISTER: I believe that my hon. Friend probably will make that assumption in any event.
    Mr. MAXTON: Does the right hon. Gentleman not think that that assumption is justified from his answer?
    The PRIME MINISTER: No.

    FOODSTUFFS (STATE PURCHASES).
    Mr. STEPHENasked the Prime Minister if the Government intend to introduce legislation to provide for the purchase in bulk by the Government of Colonial foodstuffs and the marketing thereof in this country so as to provide foodstuffs at cheaper prices?
    Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: I have been asked to reply. No, Sir. And in this connection I may point put that the Royal Commission on Food Prices were not convinced that State purchases would result in cheapening the food of the people, and recommended the Government to refrain from embarking upon them.
    Mr. STEPHEN: Has the Prime Minister changed his opinion, which he stated last year in the Debate on Imperial Preference, with regard to the marketing of Colonial produce? Am I not entitled to get an answer?
    Mr. WALLHEAD: Surely the Prime Minister knows whether he has changed his opinion or not.
    Mr. SPEAKER: Those things usually are matters of opinion.

    INTER-ALLIED DEBTS.
    Mr. H. WILLIAMSasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he is in a position to furnish any information in respect to the negotiations for a settlement of inter-Allied debts?
    The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER (Mr. Churchill): On the 26th June Notes were addressed to the French, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Rumanian and Serbian Governments stating that His Majesty's Government hoped to receive from each of the Governments concerned at an early date, definite proposals for cash payments in respect of their Debt. In these Notes attention was drawn to the statement which I made in this House on the 10th December, 1924, that
    "Any payments made by our debtors in Europe to. their creditors in the United States should be accompanied simultaneously pari passu by proportionate payments to Great Britain."
    An acknowledgment has been received from the French and Portuguese Governments; the French Government, after
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    referring to certain preliminary conversations which have already taken place, confirm the statement recently made at Geneva to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs by the French Minister of Finance that negotiations will be resumed very shortly with the desire to arrive at a speedy decision. The Italian Government, as I informed the hon. and gallant Member for South Hackney on the 30th June, have formally notified His Majesty's Government of their willingness to initiate conversations of a definite character for a friendly settlement of their War Debt to this country.

    INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL CONFERENCE.
    Mr. BOOTHBYasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether, in view of the condition of our export trade, His Majesty's Government will now take steps to facilitate the holding of an international financial conference in the near future, with the triple object of reaching a final settlement of the debt question, of exploring the methods by which all the European currency systems may be related to gold, and of providing a solution to the currency problem by the establishment, if possible, of a gold exchange standard?
    Mr. CHURCHILL: I do not think that the objects which the hon. Member has in mind, and with which I fully sympathise, can be achieved by the method he suggests.
    Mr. BOOTHBY: Is the right hon. Gentleman not of opinion that the recent 10 per cent. rise in the exchange value of sterling has had an effect on our export trade, and can he give the House an assurance that he is exploring every method of stabilising the European currencies, so as to make them more satisfactory to our exporters than they are at the present time?
    Mr. CHURCHILL: I sympathise fully with the objects which the hon. Member has in mind, and I will without cessation endeavour to advance them.

    TRADE FACILITIES GUARANTEES.
    Mr. HARDIEasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he will bring

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    before the House for confirmation all transactions of the Trade Facilities Committee, or any arrangement for subsidy to industries?
    Mr. CHURCHILL: As regards Trade Facilities the conditions under which the Treasury may give guarantees, the total limit to such guarantees and the period within which they may be given are ail prescribed by Statute, while succeeding Governments have undertaken to abide by the undertaking given at the time of the passing of the Trade Facilities Act, namely, that in granting guarantees they will follow the advice of the independent Trade Facilities Act Advisory Committee. Guarantees given are regularly reported to Parliament but to introduce a further stage of confirmation by Parliament is impracticable as a matter of machinery and would defeat the purpose of the scheme. As regards the latter part of the question, the Government could not make any arrangement for subsidy to industries without Parliamentary authority.

  FINANCE ACT.

    FOREIGN GOODS IMPORTED.
    MR. CHURCHILL'S STATEMENT.
    Mr. GEORGE HARVEYasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer inasmuch as the dumping of foreign motorcars and parts appears to have been excessive since the new duties were proposed, if he anticipates making such duties retrospective?
    Sir JOHN MARRIOTTasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether his attention has been called to the large quantities of cheap foreign motorcars imported during the last few weeks in anticipation of the re-imposition of the duties; and whether, to avoid loss of revenue, he proposes to make these duties retrospective in respect of such imports?
    Mr. CHURCHILL: As the House is aware, the present state of the law does not enable new duties to be collected on the authority of Resolutions. We were therefore confronted with the alternatives, either of waiting till the Budget was passed before enforcing the new duties or introducing a new separate Bill, in advance of the Finance Bill, authorising the collection of the new
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    duties from the date of the passage of that new Bill. The additional legislation would have been strenuously opposed, and would have probably affected a week of Parliamentary time. For this reason we decided to follow the ordinary practice, but to accelarate as much as possible the passage of the Budget into law.
    During the first month after the Budget announcement the importations were not more than had been anticipated, and it was not until the early days of June that a large expansion of imports became evident. This continued during the whole month; and I regret to say that on the average nearly four months' importations have been forestalled, entailing a loss to the Revenue, above what has been allowed for, of possibly a million on the McKenna Duties.
    In these circumstances the Government have had to decide whether or not to introduce retrospective legislation making the duties payable from the date (i. e., 6th May) on which I gave notice that I should hold myself free to do so if the importations were excessive-There are, of course, serious considerations attaching to such a course, and we have come to the conclusion that at this period in the Session we cannot ask the House to spare the time involved, which might well prolong our proceedings by an additional Parliamentary week. The loss and inconvenience must therefore be accepted, and the question of amending our general legislation will be considered before another Budget is introduced.
    Sir WILFRID SUGDEN: Is it not more important to deal with retrospective legislation in this matter and save the taxpayers' pocket and enable our manufacturers to compete with foreigners, rather than to save another week of Parliamentary time?
    Mr. A. V. ALEXANDER: Am I to understand from the last part of the answer that it is anticipated that the proposed amendment to general legislation will be made next year?
    Mr. CHURCHILL: I do not think that that at all arises necessarily out of the answer which I gave, but obviously if duties are to be imposed at any time it is absurd that a period of nearly two months of delay should be enforced by our existing Parliamentary procedure, which

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    enables the will of Parliament to be seriously deflected. We shall certainly consider whether next year the question of altering the procedure must be taken in hand. With regard to the supplementary question asked by the hon. Member for Hartlepools (Sir W. Sugden), I stated also that serious considerations attach to the question of retrospective duties. Although in certain circumstances I think we ought to be perfectly free to assert ourselves in that matter, nevertheless the relation of any such action to the existing commercial conventions with different countries would require very careful consideration and would have to be gravely weighed against the disadvantages of the existing system.
    Colonel GRETTON: What was the amount of revenue lost by the anticipation of the duties?
    Mr. CHURCHILL: I am not sure that I carry the figure in my memory. I should say that about one month's loss was allowed for by the Government, whereas the importations which developed in the last few weeks probably entailed an average four months' loss. That would be about the proportion, but I am speaking without an opportunity of making an exact calculation.
    Captain BENN: Has the right hon. Gentleman the intention of introducing soon this legislation which will enable a tariff to be imposed simply by one resolution of the House of Commons?
    Mr. CHURCHILL: No, Sir; no such legislation will enable a tariff to be imposed by one resolution of the House of Commons. The process of financial procedure will have to be gone through in all cases, but the question whether, when a resolution has been passed by the House, the duties should be collected or the assumption that the Budget would actually be passed, is a question on which further legislation must be considered. It is not proposed, so far as I am aware, to add to the labours of the present period of the Session, but questions as to this must be addressed to the Leader of the House
    Sir W. SUGDEN—
    Mr. SPEAKER: I think we had better get on with Questions.

    EXCESS PROFITS DUTY.
    Mr. H. WILLIAMSasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer the receipts and repayments of Excess Profits Duty during the three months ended 30th June, 1925, and the arrears outstanding on that date?
    Mr. CHURCHILL: The approximate gross receipt of Excess Profits Duty (including Munitions Levy) during the three months ended 30th June, 1925, was £2,560,000. Repayments of duty during the same period amounted to £2,640,000, leaving a net deficit of £80,000. The amount of Excess Profits Duty (including Munitions Levy) in assessment, but un paid at the 30th June, 1925, was approximately £123,000,000; but the amount to be ultimately received by the Exchequer will fall far short of this figure.
    Mr. DALTON: Does the Chancellor still believe that his estimate for the present financial year of the Excess Profits Duty will be realised?
    Mr. CHURCHILL: I have not seen any reason to anticipate a different result.

    BANK AMALGAMATIONS.
    Commander BELLAIRSasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether the Treasury, through the Advisory Committee on Bank Amalgamations, is considering any further proposals for amalgamations with the large banks in this country; and whether they are prepared to approve of such proposals?
    Mr. CHURCHILL: While I cannot forecast the recommendation of the Committee in cases not before them, I share the view expressed by my predecessor the late Chancellor of the Exchequer on the 26th February, 1924, that further amalgamations with the larger banks would not, in principle, be regarded with favour by His Majesty's Government.

    COMMITTEE OF CIVIL RESEARCH
    Mr. A. V. ALEXANDERasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he will indicate in which Vote is included the estimated expenses of the Committee of Civil Research or whether there will be a Supplementary Estimate?
    Mr. CHURCHILL: Such provision as may be needed will be included in the Vote for the Offices of the Cabinet and Committee of Imperial Defence whose staff will be responsible for the secretarial arrangements of the Committee of Civil Research.

    EX-SERVICE MEN (CIVIL SERVICE).
    Sir J. REMNANTasked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury if he is aware that, by Regulations published on 29th April, 1919, the candidates who took the 1921 open competition for the administrative class of the Civil Service were promised all vacancies up to the date of the announcement of the result of their examination except such as might be filled under the reconstruction scheme. but that, according to the "London Gazette" for 6th June, 1919, three of these vacancies were filled by the appointment of men who took the 1915 examination and were not reconstruction candidates: and if he will state what compensation will be given to the throe 1921 candidates, two of whom were ex-service men, who have thus been deprived of appointments for which they were invited to compete at considerable personal expense, including an entrance fee of £6?
    The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the TREASURY (Mr. Guinness): The three appointments in question were made in fulfilment of an arrangement made some time before the Regulations for the open competition of 1921 were published. I am unable to agree that any of the candidates at the 1921 open competition have been deprived by this arrangement of appointments for which they were invited to compete.
    Sir J. REMNANTasked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury if he is aware that six appointments from the 1914 and 1915 open examinations for Class 1 of the Civil Service, including that of a 1914 candidate who took nintyninth place, were announced in the "London Gazette" for 2nd May, 1919, and 6th June, 1919, as having been made nearly five and four years, respectively, after those examinations at which all the candidates were non-service men; and if
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    he will state why the 1921 candidates, the great majority of whom were ex-service men who in many cases had been given no other opportunity of competing for such appointments, were not given equally generous treatment, seeing that non-service men at the next examination would otherwise receive the privilege of obtaining vacancies which arose more than six months before the announcement of the result of their examination?
    Mr. GUINNESS: The appointments of candidates from the 1914 examination to which the hon. and gallant Member refers were made in pursuance of undertakings given in 1915 that candidates who did not receive offers of appointment owing to absence with the forces and who obtained a higher place on the list than candidates who secured appointments would be appointed after the termination of the War. An analogous arrangement was applied to the competition of 1915. There is no parallel between these candidates and those unappointed at the open competition held in 1921.
    Sir J. REMNANT: Is it a fact that all these vacancies which were promised to the ex-service men have been given to them and not given to men who have not served in the War?
    Mr. GUINNESS: At the open examination special arrangements were made under the reconstruction proposals for admitting ex-service men without this examination, and the ex-service men had the additional opportunity of going in for the 1921 competition, into which a small number went.
    Sir J. REMNANT: Is it not the case that, if the full number of vacancies had been given to ex-service men for whom these new regulations were made, next spring they would have been available for the vacancies which were remaining?
    Mr. GUINNESS: I think my hon. Friend misunderstands the conditions of that examination. There was no undertaking that special treatment would be given at this open examination of ex-service men, but the candidates at this examination had special advantages in that the list was kept open for vacancies which occurred, not only for the normal six months after the examination, but for 2½ years.
    Sir HENRY CRAIK: Was it not possible to have given some of the candidates, who were ex-service men and who had passed the examination in 1921, the advantage of vacancies which have since occurred?
    Mr. GUINNESS: They had five years, that is, 2½ years' notice of the examination, during which period any vacancies which fell due were allotted on the result of the examination subsequently, and 2½ years after the examination. That is five years, as against the normal period of one year.
    Sir H. CRAIK: Notice of examination does not matter in the least. They passed the examination high in the list in 1921. They were men who had served or were wounded, and presumably they went back to the universities and studied so as to pass this examination. Why should they not have been appointed to vacancies which have since occurred?
    Mr. GUINNESS: If my right hon. Friend looks at the Regulations, he will see that the normal procedure is that, after notice of the examination is given, all vacancies which arise are given to the successful candidates by subsequent examination; that is, six months. In this case they were given 2½ years, and after the examination a further 2½ years.
    HON. MEMBERS: Order, order! Is this a private conversation?
    Sir J. REMNANTasked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury how many of the candidates at the 1914 and 1915 open examinations for Class 1 of the Civil Service were given permanent appointments in that class after the end of the War, how many of the men who received this exceptional treatment were ex-service men, and how many were men who, although of military age, were offered temporary clerical employment during the War, exempted from military service, and subsequently given permanent appointments in the highest class of the Civil Service?
    Mr. GUINNESS: Eight such appointments were made. Six of the men were ex-service, one was a Territorial office compulsorily retained in charge of an O.T.C., and one was rejected on medical grounds for the Army and for the Indian Civil Service.

    INSPECTORS OF TAXES.
    Mr. BURMANasked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury the total number of His Majesty's inspectors of taxes employed in England and Wales during the financial year 6th April, 1924, to 5th April, 1925, and for the same period in 1913–14?
    Mr. GUINNESS: For the financial year ending the 5th April, 1925, the number of His Majesty's inspectors of taxes employed in England and Wales was 1,433; for the same period in 1913–14 the corresponding figure was 594.

  NAVAL AND MILITARY PENSIONS AND GRANTS.

    WIDOWS AND DEPENDANTS (PAPERS).
    Mr. W. BAKERasked the Minister of Pensions whether he is aware that it was the practice in the Ministry of Pensions automatically to transfer the papers for attention by the widows' and dependants' section on the death of the pensioner; and by whose orders was that practice stopped and when?
    The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of PENSIONS (Lieut.-Colonel Stanley): The practice referred to, which was not inappropriate during the period of the War, in cases where death occurred on service or within a short time afterwards, was discontinued in 1921 for the reasons given to the hon. Member in the reply to a question on a similar point on the 2nd instant. For these reasons, I do not think it advisable to reintroduce the practice.
    Mr. BAKER: Do we understand that the present Minister has discontinued the practice which was such an advantage previously?
    Lieut.-Colonel STANLEY: The hon. Member is not to understand anything of the sort. The practice was discontinued in 1921, four years ago. It was not considered necessary then. We are on a totally different footing now.

    MODIFIED PENSIONS.
    Mr. W. BAKERasked the Minister of Pensions whether, seeing that Article 1,163 pensions are based on pre-War conditions and that the Pensions (Increase) Acts only apply to pensions in payment on

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    1st August, 1914, he will consider the advisability of introducing legislation to cover the position of those men who are in receipt of modified pensions?
    Lieut.-Colonel STANLEY: I would refer the hon. Member to the answer given on 28th April last to a question on the same subject put by the hon. Member for Southwark, of which I am sending him a copy.

    PENSIONS ISSUE OFFICE.
    Colonel DAYasked the Minister of Pensions the amounts raised by the staff of the Pensions Issue Office for the benefit of disabled ex-service men in the years 1922, 1923 and 1924, respectively; what were the number of the clerks and writing assistants employed at this office in each of the years; and what was the average wage received?
    Lieut.-Colonel STANLEY: These efforts to raise money to provide entertainments on behalf of disabled ex-service men are unofficial, and I have no detailed information as to the sums raised, but I understand they amount to thousands of pounds. The numbers of clerical officers, temporary clerks and writing assistants employed at Pensions Issue Office on the 1st July, 1922, 1923 and 1924, were 4,382, 3,935 and 2,834 respectively, and the average wage of these officers were approximately £146 a year.
    Colonel DAY: Will the hon. and gallant Gentleman say where did the Minister get the figure of hundreds of thousands of pounds mentioned in the Debate on the Estimates?
    Lieut.-Colonel STANLEY: I think either the hon. and gallant Member must have mistaken what was said or it is a slip on the part of my right hon. and gallant Friend. As I say in my answer the sum did amount to thousands of pounds, which these people have voluntarily raised for the benefit of ex-service men.

    FISHING GROUNDS (EXPLORATION).
    Mr. WOMERSLEYasked the Minister of Agriculture if any progress has been made in the direction of providing
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    a fishery vessel for exploration of new fishery grounds, in view of the importance of the provision of such a vessel owing to the scarcity of fish on the old fishing grounds?
    Captain HACKING (Vice-Chamberlain of the Household): I have been asked to reply. A preliminary specification and estimates have been prepared, and are now receiving my right hon. Friend's consideration.

    SUGAR BEET COMPANIES (FOREIGN CAPITAL).
    Mr. STEPHENasked the Minister for Agriculture the total amount of capital of the companies which are receiving subsidy under the Sugar Beet Subsidy Acts; the proportion of this capital which is owned by people of other than British nationality; and the amounts of the subsidy enjoyed by these firms?
    Captain HACKING: The 10 beet sugar factories which are built or in course of being built have a nominal share capital of £2,845,000. Of this sum, £1,891,459 has been issued, of which, I am informed, £825,299 is owned by people of other than British nationality. The net amount of subsidy paid on sugar and molasses produced from home-grown beet during the past manufucturing season to the three factories then in operation, after deducting the Excise Duty, was £246,806 7s. 7d.
    Mr. STEPHEN: Can the hon. and gallant Member state why all this capital had to be obtained from foreign sources when the capitalists of this country could invest £12,000,000 in the German Loan?

    CYCLISTS (REAR LIGHTS).
    Mr. T. THOMSONasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if, when considering the Traffic Report of the police authorities and road users, and its recommendation in favour of rear lights on all bicycles, he will be willing to receive a deputation of the accredited representatives of the national organisations of cyclists on this question?
    Colonel ASHLEY: As the hon. Member knows, I have already received a number

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    of deputations from representatives of bodies interested in this subject. I am doutful whether any useful purpose would be served at present by my receiving another deputation. If, however, there are any fresh facts which the hon. Member desires to put forward, I shall be glad to consider them.
    Mr. THOMSON: As this Report was made to the Home Office, is not the Home Office considering the matter?
    Colonel ASHLEY: It is not technically a report made to the Home Office. It is an investigation by the Association of Chief Constables who are, it is true, under the Home Office, but this is not a Home Office matter.
    Mr. MARCH: Does not the hon. and gallant Member think that these cyclists are endangering their own lives by not carrying rear lights?
    Sir H. BRITTAIN: Is it not the case that the hon. Member, who is a cyclist, and who constantly puts these questions, is very fortunate to be still with us?
    Mr. SPEAKER: Hon. Members are giving their views.

    BRITISH MONOMARKS, LIMITED.
    Mr. B. SMITHasked the Home Secretary for what reason special privileges have been promised by his Department to British Monomarks, Limited?
    The UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE for HOME AFFAIRS (Mr. Godfrey Locker-Lampson): I am not aware that my Department have had any dealings with the firm referred to. If the hon. Member will furnish me with further particulars, I will be glad to have inquiry made.
    Mr. SMITH: Is the hon. Gentleman not aware that the agents representing this particular company are importuning large industries in this country to join in an association, the object of which is a boycott on industry, and whether, in fact, they are stating that he and the Postmaster-General are prepared to offer facilities for their assistance.
    Mr. LOCKER-LAMPSON: We have had very careful inquiry made into the records of the Home Office, and we cannot find anything at all.
    Mr. SMITH: I will let the hon. Member have it.

    UGANDA RAILWAY.
    Mr. WADDINGTONasked the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether he is aware of the chaos existing on the Uganda Railway; that bookings from Uganda to the sea have been entirely suspended, and large numbers of bales of cotton are still unhandled and lying exposed to the elements; and, seeing that this delay will seriously prejudice the sale of the cotton in Lancashire owing to late arrival, and that the delay is due partly to poor management and partly to inadequate rolling stock, he will consider the desirability of taking drastic measures of alteration in the whole system of management of this line?
    Mr. AMERY: As this reply is a long one, I propose, with the hon. Member's permission, to circulate it in the OFFICIAL REPORT. I should, however, like to make it clear that I do not accept any charge of faulty management or chaos in the arrangements. I have every confidence in the general manager.
    Mr. WADDINGTON: Is not the right hon. Gentleman aware that chaos has existed for four or five years, and that there have boon continual complaints to the Colonial Office in connection with the management?
    Mr. AMERY: I could not admit that. I know the volume of traffic has been steadily increasing and that the railways have been steadily increasing the facilities.
    Following is the reply:
    It appears that following upon an exceptionally heavy rush of import traffic which, owing to temporary labour difficulties, could not be cleared rapidly, there was a sudden demand for the immediate despatch outwards of cotton bales very much in excess of the anticipated and realised expansion of the cotton crop. Although the amount carried out in the first quarter of the year was 50 per cent. higher than any previous first quarter, it was not possible to accept all the cotton which exporters wished to rush out, and the cotton which is said to be lying exposed to the elements is, I understand, largely

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    that which was brought to the transport system, regardless of the fact that the railway had not accepted it. I have no information that bookings from Uganda to the sea have been entirely suspended, but I understand that the amount of cotton to be allowed at the Jinja Pier has been limited and that this course has been attended by good results.
    The matter has been the subject of in quiry by the Inter-Colonial Railway Council, the Uganda Cotton Control Board, and a Committee specially appointed by the Government of Uganda, and I understand that the first-named body is satisfied that the railway administration had endeavoured to make every effort to provide for the needs of the service.
    I shall await the full reports of these bodies and any comments which the general manager may wish to make upon them, but I desire to make it clear that I do not accept any charge of faulty management or of chaos in the arrangements, and that I have entire confidence in the general manager.

    QUESTIONS TO MINISTERS (INDEX).
    Mr. GEOFFREY PETO: I beg to ask, Mr. Speaker, whether you have been able to arrange for an index of questions, to be kept up to date, so as to be available for reference by Members?
    Mr. SPEAKER: In response to a rather general request of Members of the House, I have arranged for a careful index of questions to be kept by the clerks in the Library of the House, and I shall have a record kept to show how much Members avail themselves of it, so as to see whether the expense involved is justified. It is hoped that the index will result in a saving in the cost of printing and preparing answers to questions which now appear on the Paper, and which have been asked and answered previously. This index is being compiled as from 1st July last.

    NAVAL SHIPPING PROGRAMME.
    Commander BELLAIRS: May I ask the Prime Minister whether the Cabinet have yet reached a decision on the naval ship-
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    building programme; and whether Supplementary Estimates will be printed?
    Mr. SPEAKER: There is a question on the Paper for to-morrow on that subject, which ought not to be anticipated.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE.
STEPHEN: Can the Prime Minister give us any information as to when the Government intend to take the Second Reading of the Rent Restrictions (Scotland) Bill which has been introduced?
The PRIME MINISTER: I am afraid I could not answer that question to-day.
Ordered,
"That the Proceedings on the Unemployment Insurance Bill be exempted, at this clay's Sitting, from the provisions of the Standing Order (Sittings of the House)." — [The Prime Minister.]

SELECTION (STANDING COMMITTEES).
  STANDING COMMITTEE B.
  Mr. WILLIAM NICHOLSON reported from the Committee of Selection; That they had discharged the following Members from Standing Committee B: Major Harvey and Colonel Mason; and had appointed in substitution: Mr. Christie and Colonel Sir George Courthope.

  STANDING COMMITTEE C.
  Mr. WILLIAM NICHOLSON further reported from the Committee; That they had discharged the following Member from Standing Committee C (added in respect of the Seeds Act (1920) Amendment Bill and the Protection of Animals Bill): Sir Philip Richardson; and had appointed in substitution: Lord Hunting-field.
  Mr. WILLIAM NICHOLSON further reported from the Committee; That they had discharged the following Member from Standing Committee C: Captain O'Connor; and had appointed in substitution: Sir Walter de Frece.

  STANDING COMMITTEE D.
  Mr. WILLIAM NICHOLSON further reported from the Committee; That they had nominated the following Members to serve on Standing Committee D: Mr. Ernest Alexander, Viscountess Astor, Mr. Atkinson, Mr. Walter Baker, Mr. Batey, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Bird, Mr. Brocklebank, Mr. Buchanan, Captain Bullock, Mr. Burman, Mr. Campbell, Brigadier-General Cockerill, Mr. Connolly, Mr. Arthur Davies, Mr. Rhys Davies, Captain Arthur Evans, Mr. Finburgh, Lieut.-Colonel Gadie, Sir John Ganzoni, Major Glyn,
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  Sir Robert Gower, Mr. Grace, Mr. Arthur Greenwood, Mr. George Hall, Mr. Hammersley, Mr. Hayday, Lieut.-Colonel Headlam, Lieut.-Colonel Heneage, Sir Sydney Henn, Mr. Hilton, Mr. Haydn, Jones, Mr. A. R. Kennedy, Mr. Kirkwood, Mr. Livingstone, Mr. Lloyd, Captain Loder, Major Alan McLean, Captain Macmillan, Sir Mervyn Manningham-Buller, Sir William Lane Mitchell, Captain Moreing, Sir John Pennefather, Mrs. Philipson, Mr. Preston, Mr. Rameden, Mr. Remer, Mr. Robinson, Mr. Sexton, Mr. Thomas Shaw, Mr. Skelton, Lieut. - Colonel Spender-Clay, Mr. Stephen, Major the Marquess of Titch-field, Mr. Viant, Mr. Wiggins, Mr. Womersley, and Mr. Robert Young.
  Reports to lie upon the Table.

ORDERS OF THE DAY.

  UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE BILL.
  Order for Second Reading read.
  The MINISTER of LABOUR (Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland): I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read a Second time."
  This Bill is quite a short Bill and, as I say advisedly, it is a stop-gap Bill. At the same time, it is based on considerations some of which are tolerably intricate, and it has to be considered both by itself and also in relation to the rest of the system of social services of which it forms a part. Consequently, I hope the House will forgive me if I endeavour to deal with it as shortly as I can and as simply as I can, without any of the adornments of speech which might be appropriate to the introduction of a Budget or Bills of another nature. As I say, it is a short Bill in itself, but the history of unemployment insurance, though also short, is complicated, there being a number of enactments year by year during that short history bearing upon one another and amending one another, and it would be perfectly impossible to understand any of these Measures except in the light of those which have preceded it. This afternoon I do not propose, except occasionally by way of very brief reference, to weary the House with any long historical account, but I feel it would be impossible to understand this Bill unless I referred to one or two features in last year's Act passed under the Ministry of my predecessor, the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Preaton (Mr. T. Shaw).
  Under that Act, together with other important provisions, such as the question of the rates of benefit, there are four points that I am quite clear ought to be borne in mind by hon. Members of the House if they wish really to understand both the provisions of this Bill and the reasons for them. The first is the action taken in last year's Act with regard to the waiting period. The waiting period last year was reduced from six days to three. Just in parenthesis may I guard against a misapprehension that has often occurred, and that is the confusion of the
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  waiting period with the 'gap'? The waiting period and the 'gap' are entirely different things, and, therefore, to confuse the two, as is often done, is a mistake that should be avoided. Everyone who is familiar with the system of unemployment insurance knows quite well that the waiting period, whatever its length, is the period at the beginning of a spell of unemployment before the claimant is entitled to draw benefit, whereas the gap, as it was regularly understood, was a fixed period, at a later time during unemployment, during which benefit ceased, and I will ask the House to distinguish quite clearly between these two.
  The next point in last year's Act which I would ask the. House to bear in mind is the question of the Minister's discretion. The right hon. Gentleman last year thought that he had instituted extended benefit as a right, and abolished the Ministerial discretion, but I am afraid he was a little like the Prince in Tennyson's poem; he had mistaken the dream for the reality. In fact, he never instituted it as a right apart from any Ministerial discretion at all, and I will deal with that, if I may, a little later. The third point which has to be borne in mind is that among the conditions under which anybody can obtain extended benefit under the Act of last year was the condition of 30 contributions since the beginning of the last two previous insurance years. That was laid down as a statutory condition, though the Minister was given power to waive it, and one of the primary reasons for this Bill—the primary reason—is the fact that his power of waiver under the Act of last year comes automatically to an end on 30th September next.
  The last provision in last year's Act to which I would call attention, which is also of importance, as I hope to show in a minute, is the date—which I quite agree was not a voluntary date on the part of the right hon. Gentleman opposite, but was pressed upon him—of 30th June next year. The right hon. Gentleman will realise that I try always to be accurate and always fair, and I hasten to anticipate any possible criticism as to facts by stating at once that that provision was forced upon him. If I wished, I could point out that the provision of 1st October

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  of this year was put, on his own initiative, in the original draft of his own Bill, and I distinguish this from the 30th June which was pressed upon him. On 30th June of next year there will have to be further legislation, because otherwise the whole system of insurance will come to an end. Of course, further legislation was contemplated by everybody who was a party to last year's discussion. That is the reason, which I will develop later, why I call this a stop-gap Bill. If the system has to be extended again as from the 30th June next year, it is obvious that one cannot have a complete Bill now if one wishes to make any inquiry in the subject meanwhile, but, at the same time, while the Bill now cannot be complete, it is a necessary measure for reasons which are known to everybody, namely, that unless it is passed the whole of the 30 contributions condition, which was instituted by the right hon. Gentleman, will come into force on 1st October, and, if it were to come into force, a large number of persons at present in receipt of extended benefit would be automatically cut off.
  Now, therefore, this is the present situation: You have this condition of 30 contributions, which can at the present moment be waived, but, unless this Bill is passed, cannot be waived after 1st October. I would ask the House to realise what that means. This condition which we are waiving, and the date of 1st October, was an integral and organic part of last year's Act. It was in it from the beginning, from the first time it was printed, and what is the effect' The effect is this, that from the point of view of the solvency of the fund, for which everybody is anxious, it would have meant that from the 1st October onwards there would have been an addition to the revenues of the fund, or more accurately, an absence of drain on the revenues of the fund, of £10,000,000 or more annually. On the other hand, with the present state of unemployment, the fund is going into insolvency at the rate of £8,000,000 a year.
  Therefore, two points are quite clear. The first is that the fund would have been solvent if no Act at all had been passed last year. That is one thing. It is equally clear that the fund would still be solvent if the Act of last year were to be allowed to take its whole
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  course unamended. That is also perfectly clear. In either case the fund would have been solvent, but as things are— and I am sure hon. Members opposite, as well as on this side, will not quarrel with our action—if we are asked to suspend the operation of last year's Act as regards the 1st October, we have under present conditions changed the whole underlying financial basis of last year's Act. If we have to change it so as to prevent the hardship to the people that would be involved, quite obviously we have to safeguard the financial soundness of the system as a whole. What will happen if we leave last year's condition to take effect on 1st October? If it takes effect on 1st October, between 200,000 and 250,000 people who are at present in receipt of extended benefit will be cut off benefit at once, at one stroke. I am pretty certain that there is no Member of this House, whatever his views in regard to benefit, who can conceive that as a contingency which we ought to allow to come to pass. But if you admit that, you have to admit, as I say, that the whole financial structure and foundation of last year's Act has been changed, and, therefore, you have to deal with the finance of last year's Act in addition to this part of it as well.
  4.0 P.M.
  Let me deal now with the provisions of this year's Bill. I take, first of all, the question of discretion. I have seen it stated in some papers that the re-introduction of the Minister's discretion means that he is going to have and, apparently, from all that I can sec, to exercise a perfectly arbitrary control over those who are going to have benefit and those who are not.
  Mr. BATEY: Hear, hear.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: The hon. Member says "Hear, hear." Then all I say is that his historical knowledge of what hag happened during the last three or four years is miserably inadequate to the occasion. He knows that this discretion, except for a very brief interval, was in existence right up to August of last year, and he knows perfectly well that up to August of last year there was no arbitrary treatment of this or that or the other individual claiming benefit any

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  more than there was afterwards or will be in the future. Those who take that line do not seem to recognise that up till Augu6t of last year, with a very brief interval at the end of 1921, there was precisely the same discretion on the part of the Minister with regard to extended benefit, not standard benefit, and they never detected any of its arbitrariness with regard to individuals of which they now profess to be afraid. That is perfectly clear. I see an Amendment down in the names of certain hon. Members of the party below the Gangway. The effect on the rates is infinitesimal, although the hon. Member for West Middlesbrough (Mr. T. Thomson) shakes his head. I am sure he would be very agreeably surprised if he were to go into the calculations. These are two provisions the effect of which on the rates is quite infinitesimal. They either take effect with regard to persons who would not come on the rates in any case or who, in the case of the waiting period, have been in employment and, ex hypothesi, are not likely to come on the rates during the first week's un-employment.
  Let me take the question of principle on which my predecessor used to lay stress. I know that he set great store by the fact, in his own perfectly sincere belief, that he gave extended benefit as a right and not subject to a ministerial discretion. I do not know whether now he would say, but at any rate other people say, that it is to be made a question of discretion. If hon. Members will really consider the facts, they will find that neither of those assumptions are justified, and I hope I can make it quite clear. In the first place, the discretion of the Minister never was, in fact, abolished by the right hon. Gentleman's Act. It was there afterwards as it was before. It took on a different shape, but there it was. It was, so to speak, swept out at one door, but it came in at the other door. Let me show how. Before, the grant of extended benefit was quite openly and candidly subject to ministerial discretion. What happened afterwards? In order to try and make it a right, what did the right hon. Gentleman do? He laid down the conditions under which it was supposed to be given, and he said, practically, from now you have got it as a right, but you have got it subject to
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  certain conditions, one of which is the 30 contributions. That is a condition on which, again, I have got to exercise my discretion by means of a waiver. You may call it a discretion or you may call it a power of waiver in the Minister, but it is precisely the same thing in the long run, because, just as the Minister could stop it by discretion in the one case if he wanted to be arbitrary, so it could be stopped in the other, and in no case have we really got away from the ministerial discretion.
  I hope to show that in the very essence of the case you cannot do it when you try. I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman hoped to do it, and believed that he had done it. I remember him making a speech in which there was a sentence which I did not understand at the time—I do not wish simply to quote sentences against any hon. Member—that if he ever wanted to fight politically he wanted to fight with facts. It was a rather cryptic statement on the part of the right hon. Gentleman, bat I think I understand it now. What he was doing was to try to make the extended benefit a right as apart from any discretion. He was really fighting facts, and he was trying to overcome them. No doubt he wrestled with the facts just as Jacob wrestled with the angel. The only difference was that, because we did not obstruct his Bill, he did not have to wrestle until break of day. At the same time, the result was the same. He could not prevail. He was put out of joint, so to speak, and in came the ministerial discretion as before. That is the actual fact with regard to the existence of the discretion at this moment. We may call it a discretion or a power of waiver, but it is really inherent in the nature of the system. I do not think that it can be properly got away from, and I think, if Members will really examine the system on its merits, they will see that it is due to certain palpable reasons. When you have a statutory of standard benefit, then a person has a definite and clear right. He has the same right to that insurance benefit as a person who has an accident policy on his motor car has a right, provided that certain conditions are fulfilled. If he does not search for work, of course he docs not get his insurance benefit. If he does not fulfil

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  the conditions of his motor car policy, he does not get his insurance benefit in that case. But, subject to those conditions, he has a definite and clear right with which nothing interferes.
  When you come to the extended benefit the whole of the circumstances are really different. The type of illustration by which I think I can best convey the difference is this: A man goes into a shop to buy goods. He takes the money in his hand, and he has a right to have the goods —I am not now talking about a legal right—handed to him over the counter in return for the money which he brings. That is parallel to the standard benefit. That is, where the person has paid in his insurance contributions, he gets his standard benefit because he has paid enough; he is drawing, as a right, insurance benefit in respect of those contributions. But the moment a person goes beyond that he is really then much more in the position of a man who goes into shop and asks to be supplied with goods on credit. He says to the shopkeeper, "I am a solvent person; I am a person of substance and of character, but I cannot pay you the money at once. I need the goods, and I will pay for them afterwards." That is, I think, an exact comparison with the person who needs extended benefit. [HON. MEMBERS: "No!"] If Members will analyse it, I think they will see that I am arguing quite fairly. Therefore, they are getting insurance on credit.
  The whole basis of the Insurance Act, from the first moment that extended benefit was started, was that it was given in anticipation of future contributions by that same individual. It was said so in so many words by the late President of the Board of Trade. It was admitted by him and by others on the other side of the House as well as on this, and consequently extended benefit is a form of credit just the same as in the illustration which I have given. In that case, you still have the insurance principle, but you do also take into account other considerations entering into the matter before the credit is supplied. The body or the person who supplies it has to look to the substance and to the character of the person and also the means that he has got. In both cases, the insurance principle is there but with additional
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  risks when it is given on credit. That is quite clearly the case, and therefore, I say, when you get that type of extended benefit it is impossible to have the elasticity that is necessary unless there is a discretion of some sort. It does not mean that it is given of charity. It is nothing of the kind; it is given on credit; it is given on certain, principles, and it has not involved arbitrariness before and will not involve arbitrariness in the future.
  I have dealt with the first Clause of the Bill with regard to discretion, and there is no need to dilate upon the second Clause with regard to the waiver. I have already said that between 200,000 and 250,000 men and women, recipients of benefit, would otherwise be cut off from benefit on 1st October unless this extension is given. Now let me go on to the question of the waiting period. We propose to increase the waiting period from three days to six.
  Mr. SEXTON: A week.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: From three days to six for the purpose of counting.
  Mr. SEXTON: A full week.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: A week for these purposes is six working days. I would only point out one or two considerations in support of the measure which we have taken. As I say, some economies are essential if you knock away the foundation of the whole of the preceding Act with regard to the extension of the waiver under existing industrial conditions. I would only further point out that this particular question of the waiting period was not one on which even my predecessor laid so vital stress at that time as apparently he may do on this occasion, because the proposal to reduce it was not in the original draft of his own Bill. It may have been inserted afterwards, after a chequered period in. Committee upstairs, when he voted against it; but, whatever may have happened during that period, it was not even among his own original proposals. Whether he had other dates forced upon him or not, this at least was not a question of force majeure. The waiting period, again, was six weekdays, or the whole week of working days during the whole history of unemployment insurance, with

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  one brief interval, right up to August of last year. Again, just let me clear the way of some misapprehension. The hon. Member for St. Helens (Mr. Sexton), I know, has from time to time expressed his own opinion very strongly indeed with regard to the desirability of a short waiting period, especially as it affects unskilled labour.
  Mr. SEXTON: Casual labour.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: I would only point out to him that, even from that point of view, it is probable that the effect of it all will not be quite so severe as he himself anticipates, because of the ordinary operation of the continuity rule. That is to say, from the point of view of the waiting period any three days out of any consecutive six days can be grouped together, and if you get two groups 'of three days within a period of six weeks, they are linked together to count as one, in order to form the waiting period of six days. I hope hon. Members on no side of the House will think I am trying either to overstate or understate anything. I have endeavoured to put the thing perfectly clearly as I see it myself, and I think, from the point of view of ca6ual labour, it is quite clear the effect would not be so severe as some people, who do not know the operation of the continuity rule, would be otherwise inclined to think.
  This I would say also, with regard to the scheme as a whole, in the first place it has always been considered that if anyone has to make a choice, then this limitation of benefit in the way of an extension of the waiting period is the least burdensome form of limitation that there can be. It is less burdensome, I think, than any limitation of benefit which would take effect at a later period in the stage of unemployment. I think it is quite clear that when a person has been ex hypothesi in employment for a given period, that it is at the end of that period, when he has been in employment, that a limitation of this kind is Jess burdensome than any limitation would be at a later period when he is out of employment, and I think that this is so is borne out by the regular trade union practice. I do not wish to give any inaccurate idea of what the trade
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  union practice may be, but you get, for example, in certain of the quite considerable trade unions, when people are temporarily suspended from work, a waiting period of the whole six days without any payment on account of it. I quite admit that other unions who have got a waiting period of six days repay it later in whole or in part, but I would only point out that, in a case like that, if you take trade unions you have two points to consider. In the first place, those who have a waiting period of six days, as a number do, realise that that first interval is not an excessive one, and when it comes to paying back afterwards, then, as I say, the difference between the trade union benefit and benefit under the State scheme with the gap abolished, is very material. A trade union in the end comes to the limit of its weeks of payment, whereas if a man fulfils the other conditions in this case, he goes on receiving benefit. From the point of view of finance of trade unions, it really comes to the same whether you pay up for the preceding waiting period when it has come to an end, or whether you use the money thereby saved in order to prolong the weeks of payment further than otherwise would be the case. The fact remains that some substantial unions—I think in the dyeing and bleaching trade, for example—do have a waiting period of six days. I would say, therefore,' quite confidently, that it is in accordance with trade union conditions, and it is the least burdensome form of limitation, and I think the operation of it, even with regard to unskilled labour, is one which is not so severe as some people have been led to apprehend.
  Mr. SEXTON: I would like a further explanation as to whether this continuity period for three days in one week and the following three days within six weeks would create the necessary qualifying period?
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: The answer is quite distinctly yes. Supposing a person be unemployed Tuesday, and Thursday, and Monday of next week, that is three days: supposing that he waited for five weeks and was then unemployed on a Wednesday, Friday and Tuesday, those two groups of three days would be added together and would form a proper waiting period, and satisfy the

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  Regulation. [An HON. MEMBER: "Even although spread over six weeks?"] Within a period of six weeks.
  Mr. LANSBURY: You are going to save money?
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: Yes.
  Mr. LANSBURY: That means you are going to take something away from somebody.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: I have never for a moment, as everyone will admit, attempted to conceal it, and, in fact, I have put it perfectly straightforwardly. Those are the general conditions, with one addition, and that is in Clause 5 we deal with a smaller point, and yet an important point from some points of view, which is the payment by trade unions acting as agents for the State. There is a provision, I think it was in the Schedule of last year's Act, under which a relaxation up till the 1st October is given. That relaxation comes to an end on the 1st October, and, unless we renew it, it would mean that where trade unions have paid benefit, so to speak, as our agents, they would in many cases not be able to do so after 1st October, whereas, by Clause 5, I propose to continue that relaxation so that they can go on doing so as before.
  Those are the contents of the Bill so far as unemployment insurance taken by itself is concerned, and I have dealt with it by itself, because, as I say, this Bill has got to be considered both by itself and also in relation to the other social services. But I have kept this latter consideration to the end, so as not to confuse the two principles. I come now to the question of its relation to the other social services. Those who have been present throughout the Debates in this House are now well acquainted with the finance of widows' pensions. It is impossible to keep the whole of the social provisions in this country in watertight compartments. They all act and react upon one another, both in effect and in the matter of contribution. It has always been the expectation, perfectly clearly stated, that ultimately the contributions to unemployment insurance should be reduced to 6d. all round, that is, 6d. from employers, 6d. from men, and 6d. from the Exchequer. That has always been the expectation as soon as the finance and
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  the circumstances warranted. Under the scheme of widows' pensions, an additional burden has been laid upon employers, and an additional burden has been laid upon men. I have been enough in this House in the Debates on widows' pensions, even although I have been mostly occupied with work outside, to realise the emphasis that has been laid upon the extra burden on industry on the one hand and upon men and women on the other. Therefore, treating, as I say, all these systems of social insurance as part of one whole, and as acting and reacting on one another, it is perfectly right, legitimate and proper, where possible, to give some easement to both. Therefore, it is proposed to reduce the contributions, both of masters and of men, by 2d. each per week from the present very high level of 10d. on the part of masters to 8d., and of 9d. on the part of men to 7d., with corresponding reductions in the case of women and children. That has been rendered possible by the fact that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is prepared to contribute, during the period of deficiency, so long as the debt remains as high as at the end of this year, a sum of £3,900,000. That is the contribution on the part of the Exchequer in order to enable reductions of 2d. to masters and 2d. to men, bringing their respective contributions down to 8d. and 7d. respectively.
  Sir FREDRIC WISE: Is that sum per annum?
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: Yes, £3,900,000 per annum. It is quite clearly stated in the White Paper. Therefore, the finance of the Bill is as follows, putting it quite briefly: There is a sum gained of £6,500,000 on the part of the Insurance Fund.
  Mr. LANSBURY: That is from the poorest of the poor.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: The Exchequer contributes a sum of £3,900,000, making between them a total of £10,400,000. The relief in the way of 2d. to masters and 2d. to men is £6,800,000, leaving a credit on that account of £3,600,000, and the debt in that case, on the basis of 1,300,000 on the unemployed registers, would increase at the rate of £4,400,000. The rate of increase will of course be less if the register falls.
  Mr. WALLHEAD: It is a clever piece of heartless jugglery.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: This is neither clever, nor heartless nor jugglery. I am putting forward a perfectly straightforward statement, but I say quite clearly that this is a stop-gap Bill, and I will now give my reasons for stating it. The whole system under the Act of last year is to come to an end on the 30th June, unless some further Measure be passed before then. But if we are to make a fresh start on the 30th June, it is quite clear there are other duties which have to be done before that. I have heard complaints from the other side of the House, and in papers I have read, as to the administration of the Act. [Interruption.] I am perfectly prepared to deal with the administration—
  Mr. HARDIE: Not administration, but mal-administration.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: That is what the hon. Member may think, but I am perfectly prepared for anyone to judge of the administration: for those who are competent to deal with the facts to get hold of them. There are complaints on both sides. There are the complaints that many people are getting benefit who ought not to get benefit. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw), my predecessor, was one of those who stated that he was the first to wish that no one should get benefit who ought not to have it.
  Mr. SHAW Mr. SHAW indicated assent.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: I have the right hon. Gentleman with me in that ease. [HON. MEMBERS: "We all agree to that."] Then we are all agreed that there are some people, as has been stated, who have been too easily getting benefit, while other people who should have had benefit, as has been said, are not getting it. [An HON. MEMBER: "That is true!"] It is quite clear, then, that I was accurate in stating that there were at least some persons in those categories. What I propose to do is to try to see, when there is this difference of opinion, that we have a really careful inquiry made and that we have the result of that inquiry long before 30th June. I desire that the truth should come out. I have tried to make it clear that I make no allegations of one kind or another. I
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  have administered this Act as fairly as I possibly could. I am not in the least deterred by misrepresentations either one way or the other. I am anxious to get at the truth. I want to know what the best administration ought to be. If, in an immense machine of this kind, there are faults, then we want to have the faults out. We want to know the truth and to find a remedy.
  Consequently I propose to set up this autumn a Committee that would go into the principles, the administration and the finance of the whole system. That Committee is to be composed of representatives from all the three parties who are most affected, the employer, the man and the public. In the light of that Committee's report I trust we shall see exactly where we are in the matter of all these various complaints. I should like to say that on investigation into some of these complaints I have never found more than the shadow of foundation for them, speaking generally. I have heard this kind of complaint from both sides. Of course, there is a mistake here and there—as there is bound to be. To administration can be literally inspired in every single sentence or thing that has been done or uttered, but the mistakes so far, wherever I have tested them, have been surprisingly small.
  Mr. LAWSON: There are some thousands in Durham County.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: I, for one, should be exceedingly glad to have the whole thing tested, and I trust, if we can get the inquiry through, we may be able to deal with the matter comprehensively before 30th June of next year. I trust so. If not—
  Mr. MACLEAN: If this Committee is set up and pursues its inquiries, will a Report be submitted to this House for discussion? Will it be a public inquiry?
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: The Inquiry will be one of the ordinary kind by a Committee. I have no wish to burke the discussion on a single point before this House, and never have done. This I can say, that, while for this reason it-is perfectly necessary to have an inquiry, the Bill cannot be a complete one under the circumstances. In recommending this Bill to the House, I do so because I consider it is animated by those principles, at any rate, which have animated

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  all the greatest men of the Unionist party from the days of Disraeli to him who died so lately, Lord Milner. I am quite certain that there are two principles which they had in their minds in these matters. The first was a perfectly genuine sympathy with the conditions of those who were not so happily placed as themselves, and a wish to make those conditions better, and at the same time a determination that, if you really wish to improve conditions, you have got to base your action on sound administration at the same time, other wise your effort will, in the long run, only fail in its object.
  Mr. T. SHAW: I beg to move to leave out from the word "That", to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof the words
  "this House declines, especially at a time when unemployment is showing an alarming increase, to assent to the Second Reading of a Bill which, in order to reduce the number of persons in receipt of unemployment benefit, reinvests the Minister of Labour with wide power to withhold payment of the benefit on the ground, that it is not a right but a form of charity; which, by lengthening the waiting period, further curtails the opportunity for obtaining unemployment benefit; and which, by compelling an ever-increasing number of unemployed persons and their dependants to seek assistance from the Poor Law, will throw an added burden upon local authorities already heavily in debt."
  In rising to move the Amendment which stands in my name, and that of several of my hon. Friends, I want to congratulate the right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Labour on producing the first concrete proposal to deal with this matter. [An HON. MEMBER: "Rabbits!"] I will deal with the rabbits in a moment. After nine months of travail, this Government, with all the powers, all the virtues and all the abilities and apostrolic fervour of the Prime Minister; the great ability of the right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Labour, and the spangled imagination of the Home Secretary, have produced this abortion. I am sure the right hon. Gentleman must have been ashamed of his task when he brought this Bill before the House. I want to call attention to the very astonishing fact that is set out in his statement, which, I am sure, my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary will subsequently deal with. We have in connection with this Bill one of
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  the most extraordinary actuarial reports I think the House has ever seen. We are told that £6,500,000 is to be saved from benefits, and this without a word of explanation either from the actuary or from the Minister as to how this money is to be taken. I think never in the history of Parliament has such an actuarial statement been made, or have ever such a Bill been introduced to Parliament!
  This £6,500,000 is to be taken from benefits for unemployed people without a word of explanation. The House, I think, is entitled to know exactly where this money will come from. How is it calculated? We are entitled to an explanation as to what the unemployed have done to be mulcted of £6,500,000. There is another part of the actuarial statement that I cannot understand. The Government actuary makes on his own account three hypotheses. I want to ask the Minister or the Parliamentary Secretary, on what ground did the actuary make these hypotheses? Were the figures supplied to him by the Department? Are they out of his own head? How did they come into being? The House ought to know, because in dealing with a matter of this importance the greater the clarity we can have the better, of course, for our judgment.
  We are opposing this Bill because, in our opinion, it tends to take £6,500,000 from people who ought to be receiving more and more. The Government are escaping a liability in a question with which they cannot deal, and in which they show themselves hopelessly incapable. They are robbing men who ought to be paid in order to cover their own iniquity and their own incapacity. That is the way I look upon the Bill the Minister has presented. Let me quote just a few figures, the last figures I have been able to obtain as to the state of the unemployment register. These show an increase on last year, during a. similar period, of 285,900. The Prime Minister a few days ago called attention to the fact that 70,000 were to be taken from these figures by virtue of the fact that they were added by me to the Register. I think the Prime Minister knew the facts as well as anyone why the 70,000 were put on. Now it pleases the Government to tell the truth. It did not please them to tell the truth when they sent out their statements during last

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  election. If you take the 70,000 you find there an increase in unemployment of 25 per cent. over this time last year, and the Government sits helpless and hopeless like a litter of puppies waiting to be drowned, without a positive suggestion— with one exception—which is to take £6,500,000 from the unemployed to cover up their own shortcomings. That is the position. It is worse than robbing a blind man. When we discuss this question the Prime Minister blandly turns round and says: "It is really up to you to suggest remedies, it is not up to us, you were responsible for defeating us when we wanted to help unemployment, now you must make suggestions." All I can say is this: that the party opposite said they had a remedy, and the country refused it. Then they said: "Give us power and we will swallow our principles." They have swallowed their principles in order to have power, and they turn round to us with the bland way of the Prime Minister and say: "Really, it is up to the Opposition to supply remedies, and we with our majority will sit here, and do what we are doing to-day."
  We have to deal in this Bill not merely with the proposition that the Minister has put down, but to deal with the mass of prejudice that has been raised in the country, and the change of opinion made in a matter where prejudice ought not to exist. The truth has not been sought with quite the diligence with which the truth ought to have been sought. Any stick was good enough to beat the Labour Government. A lot of the prejudice against the Unemployment Insurance Act is due, not to irresponsible men, but to men sometimes of Cabinet rank. During the time of the late Government, I remember the Home Secretary himself writing an article which showed his keen imagination. He made statements that had not a basis of fact. In fact, were I not to credit him with imagination, I should have had to describe his article by two short English words that would be unparliamentary. [HON. MEMBERS: "Go on!" and "Have a try!"] These things have prejudiced the case in the minds of the public. I know of no people on earth who have been so sorely libelled as the unemployed. Why, the Chancellor of the Exchequer only a few days ago let
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  out a suggestion which was equivalent to saying that workmen considered how to qualify for unemployment benefit instead of getting work. A more miserable libel—
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: May I, on behalf of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, quite deliberately deny that?
  Mr. SHAW: I say quite as deliberately that I heard the statement. I say that it is a base libel on the working people of this country to say that they deliberately try to get unemployment benefit instead of getting work. The official figures, as given in reply to questions, prove conclusively that there is no truth in the allegation generally made that there is a great deal of fraud under the Unemployment Insurance Act, and if in the spirit of the same kind of class struggle, class war if you like, we were to try to libel people belonging to other classes we could quite easily say that, because there are a certain number of divorce cases among the aristocracy, the aristocracy is frankly and rankly immoral. We should have just the same justification. [Interruption.] I am calling attention to the fact that grave libels have been made, and drawing an illustration of the grave danger of uttering these libels, because we might get the same type of libel from the other side, and with much move justification.
  We take our stand on principles quite different from those of the right hon. Gentleman. He has based his principles largely on the solvency of the Fund and on questions of finance. We base our principles quite as frankly on the right of the unemployed to live, and we say that the money can be found to allow the unemployed to live, and we have far more respect for them than we have for the question of borrowing another £2,000,000, or £3,000,000, or £5,000,000 or £10,000,000 from the Treasury. We start out with that object, and we criticise this Bill from that point of view—that the unemployed have a right to live. After all, why have we this phenomenal unemployment? Is it or is it not a direct result of the War? Were the workers, or were they not, promised that they should not suffer as a result of the War? Are promises made to them to be of no avail? Are the only people—I have repeated this in the House over and over again—to whom our

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  promises are to be kept the people who lent money during the War? Are we going to tell these men, when the time of difficulty and danger is over, as Lord Derby did, that things are different now from what they were when the time of danger and difficulty existed? That is the fundamental point on which we base all our arguments.
  The right hon. Gentleman has carefully refrained from saying what his "discretion" means. He has skated over thin ice very beautifully by using the argument of "you are another," but not a single word has been said of what his discretion is intended to mean. The actuary says—the right hon. Gentleman must have said something to the actuary, although he has said nothing to the House —the actuary says "£6,500,000." Where from? I will give the House one or two examples of where the money came from before. Certain people were refused benefits on the ground that they were un-covenanted, other people were paid, but the people who were refused had to pay contributions when they worked in order to pay off the deficit caused by the ordinary payments they were refused. Is that what the right hon. Gentleman intends to do or is it not? We had better know where we are. We had better know whether people who pay the same contributions under the same conditions are to have the same benefits or not, or whether the idea of the Minister is to give benefits to some people, to refuse them to others, and to insist that all people pay under the same conditions. Let us know exactly where we are. Single people have the same rights in respect of their contributions as any other people. They agree, everybody agrees—I do not think there is a dissentient voice—with the payment of extra benefits to men with wives and families. But, surely, in addition to single people paying towards these extra benefits, the Minister does not wish to deny to them benefits which are paid to others who are paying contributions under exactly similar circumstances. If he does we had better know where we are, and if he does not, where does his £6,500,000 come from? These are things we are fairly entitled to ask.
  Then we are told that there is no charity in this matter. I wonder if the right hon. Gentleman has read a report presented to his Department by a
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  number of very highly-skilled permanent officials—and no word of praise could be too great for them—who dealt with the whole of this subject, in which I think ho will find a phrase admitting that the method of paying uncovenanted benefits up to then had had a Poor Law tendency? Obviously if the Minister asks, and it is what he is asking, that ho should have the sole power to determine who shall or who shall not have extended benefits, then what does it mean? If three are refused and one is granted benefit, does it mean a charitable payment or does it not? Men have got to apply to the Minister and to take his answer, and he, and not the law of the land, becomes the determining factor in the lot of hundreds of thousands of the unemployed. In the 1924 Act I tried, as far as a man could try, to lay down the principle that benefits should be paid as a right. Under the circumstances it was impossible to fill up every hole and make the scheme absolutely watertight, but does the Minister suggest that if I had been sitting in his place now I should have brought forward a Bill like this. The Minister knows perfectly well that a one-clause Bill would have given him another 12 months waiver, and when that 12 months waiver was put in it was put in with the intention that it could be extended. In every year since the beginning of this insurance scheme special measures have had to he taken to extend the special provisions because of the extraordinary condition of affairs. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for the Minister to have dealt with the matter, but that would not have met his book. What the Minister wants is a sum of money back from the unemployed. That is the real reason for this Bill and the only reason. He could have got what he wanted the other way with a one-Clause Measure.
  This has no personal reference for the light hon. Gentleman, but we do not trust the Minister's intentions. We have seen them in operation. As soon as he conveniently could he began, under the powers he had, to take people off the register, so we on our part are scarcely likely to vote for giving him the powers he seeks when his intentions are already open and declared. It may be that per son-ally the right hon. Gentleman—of course, I do not need to pursue the subject, because everybody knows that the

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  right hon. Gentleman is full of the best intentions, but so is the pavement to Hades, and the right hon. Gentleman's Government has laid a fair share of that pavement during the last few months. We object to his putting another flag into the pavement. We do not want this Bill, and for that reason we are objecting to it.
  The Bill will inevitably throw a burden on the local authorities. It is of no use for the right hon. Gentleman to minimise it. We know it is so. The information in his own Department will tell him, as plainly as figures can tell anybody, what the extension of these benefits meant to various municipalities. The meanness of this Bill is that it is to take away certain moneys for the State, and it is throwing the responsibility on precisely those authorities that are already most heavily burdened. That is the meanness of the proposal. Instead of saying, "We have failed miserably in our task of dealing with unemployment, we have increased the number of unemployed by nearly 300,000 instead of decreasing it, and we will see that the unemployed are better provided for," the Government come along and intend to make the position of the unemployed worse. That is the broad position of affairs. I am surprised that the right hon. Gentleman is in the position he is.
  Let us consider the question of the unemployed. Not only the right hon. Gentleman but other people are saying that we are passing the bounds of safety and of prudence. What is the position now? A man with a wife and three children gets 29s. a week—assuming he gets paid without any difficulty and without any possibility of being struck off the register. Can a man in London get a house and pay rates for less than 12s., putting it at the very lowest? Is it possible to make less than 6d. per head per week do for clothes and boots, and less than 3s. 6d. do for fuel and light? Taking those figures, which are much below what they ought to be, we have the five people left with a total of 11s. a week, 3½d. per head per day for food. No amusements, no insurance, no possibility of putting by for a rainy day. Threepence halfpenny per head per day —and a pint of milk for a child costs 3d.! Those are the conditions that the
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  Minister asks power to deal with, "if it is in the national interest so to do." It ought not to be in the national interest or in the Minister's interest to touch a penny of the payments that are now being made to genuine unemployed working men, although they have not 30 stamps, and we shall oppose him to the best of our ability in his attempt to get the power he seeks.
  5.0 P.M.
  I think we should get much nearer to a realisation of what unemployment is if all the critics of these benefits, all those who want to take them away, were put on 3½d. a day. I would willingly be a party to putting every man or woman who talks about our overstepping the bounds of prudence, and about people wanting money for nothing, preferring the benefit to work, I would willingly put them on 3½d. a day, and give them six months of it. Afterwards they would come back and help us to make a better Insurance Act than we now have. It would teach them sympathy with the unemployed, it would teach them what unemployment means, it would give them an idea of what they were talking about, instead of their living in the clouds, talking of theories and talking about things that they either do not understand or appreciate in the slightest degree. We suggested to the Government, before the Prime Minister's appeal, a better way of dealing with the unemployed than taking their money away. We suggested, for instance, that the right hon. Gentleman should be the head of a committee to provide employment. We suggested giving him funds with which to do it. and all we got from him was, "£10,000,000 a year you ask for, for four years. That is £40.000,000. What you want to do is to give it to the Russians." It is unworthy of the right hon. Gentleman, it is unworthy of the House, it is unworthy of the problem he is dealing with. It is below him to use that kind of argument, and I hope he will not use it again. To sum up we stand for the right of the unemployed to live without anything in the nature of charity. We object to the Minister's discretion in this matter which makes the thing a charitable concession. We hold that the Government is responsible for the condition of the country, and they ought to shoulder the burden instead of attempting to throw it upon other people.

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  We hold that the length of the suffering of the unemployed should lead to more generosity on the part of the Government and not to more cheese-paring. We shall endeavour in Committee not to give the right hon. Gentleman power to fleece £0,500,000 from the unemployed, but we shall try to give him increased power to give them further sums of money. We hold that the Government ought to be ashamed of themselves to try to deal with unemployment by reducing the figures at the expense of those who are unemployed. The men who are unemployed need broad and not speeches, and you cannot feed them on the very picturesque and big declarations of the Prime Minister. You cannot feed them with Actuary's reports, because beef-steaks are what they require. The best policy is to feed them first and argue with them afterwards. We demand that we should have a plain straight deal with the unemployed, and we shall resist every tendency to make matters worse. We shall fight this Bill so far as we can, line by line, and passage by passage, and we shall try to demonstrate to the Government that what is required is more generous treatment, and we shall try to show that this Bill is a miserable apology for neglected opportunities.
  Mr. TREVELYAN THOMSON: The Minister of Labour in his opening remarks referred to the Amendment standing on the Order Paper in the name of my right hon. Friends and myself dealing with this Bill, and he suggested that we were wrong in thinking that it would throw any considerable burden upon the rates. I was not convinced by his argument, I would rather take the figures of the Actuary's report, which show that there is going to be a saving of £6,500,000. The question I ask is, from where is this £6,500,000 coming? It is undoubtedly going to be taken from those who would otherwise receive it as unemployment benefit. However much the Minister of Labour may be prepared to see this reduction made, I am sure the local authorities are not willing that the burden should fall upon the unemployed individuals themselves. The unemployed will undoubtedly go to the local guardians for succour to the extent to which they are denied by the Unemployed Insurance Fund.
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  The evidence of the White Paper is conclusive that if you are to save £6,500,000, it must come out of the pockets of the unemployed who must be maintained, and those unemployed will undoubtedly go to the guardians for additional relief. Therefore, the Government are not merely doing an injustice to the unemployed, but they are perpetrating an added injustice to the local authorities and particularly to industry.
  The suggestion was made that, in reviewing the question of pensions and unemployment insurance, we ought to balance one against the other. It seems to me that the balance is heavily weighted against local authorities and against industry. We protest against this burden being added at the time when industry is so depressed. We have already been told that industry is being throttled by heavy rates and charges, and yet the Government are seeking to relieve their own responsibilities by placing upon the local authorities a burden which they are quite unable to bear. I have been told, when pressing the Government on behalf of the necessitous areas, that what was done under the Insurance Act of last year brought relief to the local authorities, but now the Minister of Labour is seeking to undo a large part of what was done last year in the way of relief. On the broad principle, I would like to ask the Parliamentary Secretary what there is in the condition of unemployment to-day which warrants the big cut he is making in unemployment benefit? Surely he knows that things were bad a year ago when it was necessary to pass the Act of 1924. The conditions to-day are infinitely worse. The resources of the local authorities and individuals have long ago been dissipated, and the actual position facing them is infinitely worse than it was before.
  At that time, I believe all parties made a great deal of the necessity of bringing security into the life of the worker, and the Act of 1924 did a great deal in that direction. Now that security is going to be undermined at the arbitrary whim of the Minister of Labour. The right hon. Gentleman has not told us upon what lines he is going to use his discretion. Certain conditions were set forth in the Bill of last year which guaranteed that there should be no abuse as long as the Act was faithfully administered in

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  accordance with the conditions laid down. Four conditions were laid down, and it is much better that this House should lay down the conditions under which unemployment benefit is to be given than to leave it to the discretion of the Minister, because Ministers of Labour may come and go, and their standards may vary. But, after all, this question should be settled by Parliament and it should not be left to the idiosyncrasies of any individuals.
  Parliament in 1924 laid down conditions to protect us against abuses, and provided that a man could not get benefit unless he was normally employed in an insured trade. In the second place, he had to show that for the two preceding years he had been employed to a reasonable extent, and he also had to show that he was making every reasonable effort to obtain employment. What reason is there for changing those conditions? Were not those conditions satisfactory? There was also the further test as to whether a man was genuinely seeking work, and anxious to take it. What reason is there now to bring in this Bill, which is entirely opposed to the statutory provision laid down in the last Act? Has that Act worked badly? We have had no information from the Parliamentary Secretary or the Minister of Labour to show that last year's Act has been a failure. What I have heard is, that the local authorities have not acted too sympathetically towards many claimants who have come before them, and, therefore, there is no ground for removing the statutory right which Parliament has given.
  Then there is the proposal for increasing the waiting period from three days to six days. The Minister of Labour said that it would be better to have the waiting period at the beginning rather than at the end. But why have a waiting period at all? Under normal conditions, if a man has been in regular work for years, he may have laid up his resources and means whereby he can tide over three or six days or a week before he comes on to the Insurance Fund, but when a man for four or five years has been on and off the Insurance Fund, and has had no regular work, and has no resources to fall back upon, when he falls out of work, he is absolutely on the rocks and on his beam
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  ends. Therefore, I say it is cruel after five years of almost uninterrupted unemployment to make this additional hardship, and compel men to wait for six days before they can draw what is necessary to keep the wolf from the door.
  Is this done because they have not satisfied these conditions? Is it a fact that only the men who are deserving can get this benefit? I submit that it is indeed an insult to the unemployed workers at this particular time, after suffering so much, to add to the terrors which unemployment brings upon them in this way. For the reason that you have destroyed the security to which the worker is entitled, making his hazardous life one of greater insecurity and hardship; for the reason that the Government proposals are throwing a burden upon the local authorities to the extent of the amount which they are seeking to save, I say it is unworthy of the Government to shelve their responsibilities in this way. Why do they not increase the deficiency fund? The intention was that this fund should be increased because, when trade recovers, there would be no difficulty in paying off the big deficit. Therefore it was considered a sound policy to allow the fund to increase instead of adding further burdens upon industry or upon the individuals. Why could not the Government use for this purpose some of the millions raised by the last Budget which are being spent in other directions?
  Mr. KIDD: The right hon. Gentleman who moved this Amendment does not seem to be so much concerned about the sufficiency or insufficiency of the dole, but what he is concerned about is why the dole is necessary at all. He referred to the question of the industrial workers. The anxiety on the part of the worker becomes all the keener when he discovers that the equivalent of the dole in Germany is rapidly disappearing, and when he also knows, as he does to-day, that the dole in America is non-existent. Only yesterday the President of the Board of Trade, in a particularly able review of our trade, dealt with the comparative conditions of industry in Germany on the one hand, and in America on the other, and I had hoped that the right hon. Gentleman who moved the Amendment would, in answer to his own question, have told the House why in Germany the dole is disappearing.
  Mr. COMPTON: On a point of Order. Is the word "dole" an expression that ought to be used for unemployment benefit by a Member of this House? Is it a proper expression to apply to benefit for which the recipient has already paid?
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER (Mr. James Hope): That is a matter of merit, and not of order. It may be argued that it is an improper expression, but it is not unparliamentary.
  Mr. KIDD: I quite agree that the word "dole" is a terminological inexactitude; it is a mistake on the part of one more distinguished than I am. I had hoped that the right hon. Gentleman who moved the Amendment would have inquired into the conditions in Germany which have led to their unemployment insurance rapidly disappearing, and also into the conditions in America which render either unemployment insurance or the dole, one or other or both, unnecessary there. Since the right hon. Gentleman has not offered an explanation, I think I might —in perfectly good taste, I hope, certainly in no acrimonious spirit, and certainly not with any lack of sympathy for those who are the victims of the industrial conditions here—offer some suggestion as to why the conditions are so different in Germany and in America from what they are here. We may object as we like to the military spirit in Germany, but I presume that, if we had not enjoyed the security of an insular position here, we might have developed a military spirit also; but, whatever may be said for or against the military spirit, it brings in its train a sense of discipline which is particularly valuable in a time of industrial distress. The German worker to-day, in obedience to that sense of discipline, instinctively follows the recognised leaders of industry. He does not take his views on industrial difficulties from those who give no proof of their qualifications to put forward such views; he instinctively follows the leaders of industry who have proved their ability to be leaders of industry, and, through his following that lead, there is constantly going on in Germany to-day an absorption of unemployed people, with the result that unemployment insurance in Germany is fast disappearing. But the illustration afforded by America—
  Mr. LANSBURY: Had we not better bring the Kaiser over here?
  Mr. KIDD: The illustration afforded by America is infinitely more valuable. No one can talk about America restricting the liberties of her people; there is no German Kaiser there. Why are the conditions in America such that neither unemployment insurance nor dole is necessary? There, of course, the trade unions are not only entirely divorced from politics, but are becoming in a most emphatic way a great auxiliary to industry. You have the trade unions acting as the investment society of the workers, and you have the worker following in the wake of his particular union in the matter of individual investment, with, as the final result, the establishment of the Labour banks. Lest, peradventure, the large financial institutions, dealing with hundreds of millions, might have no temptation to cater for the investment of the individual workers' money, and lest, again, the worker might object to dealing with such large institutions, you have the Labour banks established in America, where the worker who, it may be, wants to buy 1,000 dollars' worth of stock and has only 200 dollars available in his pocket, borrows the balance from the bank and takes an investment. What is the result of all this? It means that the economic sense is spread in America-over a very largo area, and with that spread of the economic sense comes an appreciation by the worker of the difficulties attending industry. He does not worry there as to whether this or that particular wage is satisfactory to the minds of certain political trade union leaders; the test is—
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: The Debate on Second Reading is a very wide one, but it appears to me that the hon. Member is going away from the subject of unemployment altogether, and addressing himself to labour conditions generally.
  Mr. KIDD: I shall observe your ruling, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I admit that I was trying to take advantage of the scope allowed on Second Reading. The point I wish to make is this: The answer to the question asked by the right hon. Gentleman who moved the Amendment, "Why this unemployment?" is, I submit, that our conditions in industry here are too rigid. There is a lack of elasticity in industry, due to artificial interference

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  with industry owing to the fact that our trade unions are so immersed in politics. In America, on the other hand, where the trade union is divorced from politics and pursues the line of investment, you have a perfectly elastic industrial system; you have industry thoroughly adaptable so that the test always is, what can an industry afford in the matter of wages? Therefore, you have no dole, but you have this position, that there is such individual and national wealth in America that, when it comes to widows and orphans, they can exhibit towards the widow and orphan a generosity which we can never emulate. I had hoped that, the question having been put, not from these benches but from the Labour benches, "Why this unemployment," the answer also would have come from the Labour benches, and, if that answer had been faithful to facts, it could not have avoided reference to Germany on the one hand and America on the other. If the answer had reflected the condition in America which relieve America of doles and unemployment insurance, then you would have the explanation of the individual and national prosperity of America, which is in strange contrast with the situation here. The only complete explanation is that there the trade union is pursuing, on behalf of the workers, the line of investment, and is avoiding politics and Labour parties.
  Mr. HAYDAY: I do not desire to be drawn from the main point of the discussion by the most extraordinary speech to which we have just listened. According to that speech, it seems that we are suffering from unemployment because we are not Imperialistic enough, because the trade unions of this country indulge too much in political questions; and that, if they would leave political life and the making of the laws that control them to their masters, and let the masters fix the conditions both by law and in fact industrially, there would be plenty of work for them if they did not bother their heads beyond the word "work." I can only imagine that there was running through that extraordinary speech one little strain which I cannot help believing is bothering a large number of Conservatives in this country to-day—the lack of a supply of recruits driven by necessity into the Imperialist Forces. If that is to be one of the underlying principles that prompt
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  the tightening up of the administration of unemployment benefit, then I think it is time this country as a whole cleared out the Conservative Government, and expressed in a proper manner the will for no more war, if your armies can only be recruited out of poverty and suffering from amongst the people.
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: The hon. Member is following the bad example of his predecessor.
  Mr. HAYDAY: I am sorry if I fell into the same error. I wish now to return to some of the remarks made in introducing the Bill by the right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Labour. He tried to assure us that this was just a stop-gap Bill, that it was not a Bill which had anything to do with the gap question as we understood it. So far as I am able to understand it, however, it reimposes a gap system which is unregularised and controlled solely by the whim of the Minister himself, expressed through regulations issued by him from time to time. The old gap system gave fixed periods when benefit would not be available; this Bill gives to the Minister the right to give intermittent periods without benefit, at any time or for any period as he may from time to time determine. That is a most pernicious and unsatisfactory re-imposition of the denial of benefit through the introduction of a gap. The Minister also said that the primary reason for introducing this Bill was to extend the waiver right, and thereby help those who would be automatically thrown out at the end of September this year, but that he had also in mind the question of the solvency of the fund. I want to suggest that, as I hope to be able to develop in a moment or two, this Bill is not solely in the interest of extending the waiver right of the Minister to the 200,000, but it is to extend his power over a number of, approximately, 500,000. I shall be able, perhaps, to develop that a little later.
  So far as the solvency of the Fund is concerned, it is very strange that 'this question should crop up at this moment. Have we already forgotten the powers that Ministers of Labour took in connection with the solvency of the Fund? We must remember that there was a time when there was a deficiency of approximately £15,500,000. That deficiency is much less now; the Fund is more solvent

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  now that it has been. I think its highest peak of deficiency was £15,500,000. Is it forgotten that successive Ministers of Labour came to this House, firstly for power to get advances from the Treasury up to £10,000,000, and then to increase that amount to £20,000,000, and that their present powers, obtained in April, 1922, enable them to draw on the Treasury up to £30,000,000? The significance of these figures is that the Governments of the day realised that unemployment, and the distress consequent thereupon, would be with us for a, long time in such volume that current contributions would not enable the Fund to meet its current obligations. They still have about £20,000,000 odd upon which they might draw from the Treasury, so that the question of the solvency of the Fund is hastened now as an excuse, I suggest, for cutting down that very unhealthy number that is registered on the live registers of the Employment Exchanges.
  The right hon. Gentleman said that in many respects an unemployed person on extended benefit was very much like a person who goes to a small trader and asks for certain goods on credit. That comparison is not worthy of a Governmental Department. The person who to-day is unemployed has surely some service standing to his credit in the State. Surely there are some accumulations towards which he has contributed that stand to his credit and that ought to be available for him in accordance with the distressed circumstances in which he finds himself placed. In that respect he is different. He did not come to the nation to beg of the nation. He came to the nation and, when he was able to work and work was available, he was employed. He received certain wages that did not represent the full equivalent of the service he gave, and consequently he calls now for some part of that reserve to be paid to him to help him to tide over the very difficult period he is passing through.
  The Minister, of course, says, as if the extra three days of qualifying period was nothing, that after all it is best to have that stopped at the commencement, and that will prevent the individual from going to the Poor Law guardians or anyone else. But will it? Tell me of any industrialist threatened hourly with discharge because of bad trade who has a sufficient reserve to his credit in money
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  wealth, Post Office Bank or elsewhere, which will enable him to live a week. There are not any. What can your engineer's labourer, on 36s. 6d. a week, save to provide for a week of waiting? I saw a cartoon which I think very aptly reflects the present position. It was a cartoon of the Prime Minister looking at a drowning couple and saying, "Swim about for six days and I will throw you a life-line." It seems to me that after the long period of distress that many of these unemployed citizens have passed through, to say, "Now you must starve for six days, you must not go to the guardians, you must not go anywhere, the Minister says you will not do it," is only fooling with a very serious situation.
  So far as the Government themselves are concerned, I cannot help but think that they will go down to posterity as the Government that produced a Budget for the rich order and an early funeral for the struggling, distressed, unemployed people. I am not going to accuse hon. Members opposite of being wilfully more brutal than any other humans, but in many instances their very surroundings bring an atmosphere of semi-callousness in their train. They cannot appreciate to the same extent that many of us do the very serious indications that, after four years of harassing trouble and travail, with increased sickness brought upon them by reason of loss of vitality, with their bad housing conditions, it is no idle threat to say there is a train of discontent and rumbling which compels men and citizens to commit acts that no sane, healthy person would ever think about. I do not know whether many of you have followed some of these individuals who for years have been on and off unemployed. I do not know whether, in meeting them, you watch the brooding, almost give-up-life kind of atmosphere that surrounds them. You select this as the very moment to save money from this in order to satisfy the glamour of your political supporters and in order that you might make good money that otherwise ought to be provided in the direction of your other branch of social service in the form of your widows' and orphans' pension fund. Does it not seem a little bit out of order with ordinary things that Ministers, and the principal speakers of the Conservative party, are

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  urging the workers to encourage Empire production by purchasing Empire imported goods? You put them right outside their reach, not that they are desirous of the cheap block ornament material, such as is exhibited in many of the poorer quarters, but you tell them in a very cynical way, "Build up your Empire by encouraging Empire produce," and at the same time you withhold from them the very purchasing power that they are anxious to use in order to promote this increase of industry and production from the Empire. The Prime Minister recently went to Dundee to receive the Freedom of the City. He inspected some of the conditions under which the workers live. He expressed something approaching disgust at the slum conditions that he saw and the Dundee Corporation, anxious to do something, undertook, if they could get some grant from the Secretary for Scotland towards the capital cost of works, to manufacture concrete blocks in order to build houses for these people. The Government Department, who want to find employment, or say they do, refused the financial help which would have absorbed many of these unemployed workers.
  If we turn to the White Paper that has been issued, there are one or two very enlightening points. It first of all talks of the saving of that £6,500,000 under two heads. One question has already been put. I put it again. What are the separate savings? One is a saving as the result of extending the waiting period from three to six days, and the other the saving anticipated by the abolition of what up to now has been the right to benefit and putting them under the power of the Minister of Labour. I am rather of the opinion that that figure of £6,500,000 saving is intended to represent the immediate cutting off from unemployment of not less than 150,000 persons, and that the remainder is anticipated savings as the result of extending the three days to six. But if you go further you will find that there are three kinds of forms upon which the estimate has been based—one, £1,300,000; another, £1,200,000; arid another, £1,100,000. I think you get at the truth of the Minister's intentions if you take the first example in conjunction with the third, bearing in mind the desire to place this
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  fund in a state of solvency, and if you do that you find that the aim is to take 200,000 off once. It may not be a serious thing to some Members, but it is a very serious thing to the 300,000, when we remember that there are about 500,000 of the 1,300,000 at present on the live register who are drawing extended benefit, so that it is quite clear that if you wipe, out, as a right, those incidents that the 1924 Act created outside the 30 stamps within the two years previous to the last financial year, you will find 500,000, I believe, on extended benefit.
  That 500,000, not alone but with their dependants, if this Bill passes in its present form, will immediately come under the control of the Minister through his Department. In a word, this House is being asked to give the Ministry the power and the right, by regulation issued from time to time if it deems it essential in the public interest, to deal with 500,000 present time recipients of unemployment benefit together with the whole of those who may be dependent upon them. Are you going to face that with cool equanimity? Are you going to look upon that as though it means nothing at all? Is this House going to deal with it in its cold-blooded financial aspect, allowing their little bitternesses to run away with them to such an extent that after four years of hard suffering and providing for a possible deficiency of £30,000,000—and you have only reached £8,500,000 by this time—you should cut away from benefit that large number of very deserving citizens? No one can say a word against them. You may say here and there someone dodges through. My goodness, come up to the other end and find the number that dodge through and get away with the goods, with reams of newspaper praise for their success in being able to get away with it. You look after the small pilferer and allow the big plunderer to get clear away with the goods. I would rather administer this Act to a few hundred undeserving cases, from your point of view, than I would miss one deserving case and thereby inflict unjust suffering upon him.
  It certainly is a huge problem when you remember that, according to the last census, there were 17,500,000 persons in the United Kingdom engaged in various occupations and 12,500,000 of these, roundly speaking, come under the Unem-

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  ployment Insurance Act. I should like the Minister either to upset an estimate that I have done my best to make as accurate as possible, or to confirm it, or to tell us, if he can, the exact position. Out of the 12,500,000 coming under insurance, I suggest that 5,000,000 have been unemployed at one time or another since 1020. The amount of distress cannot be measured by the live register figures. For the past five years this suffering has been there, in consequence of trade depression, and there have been 5,000,000 persons insurable under the Unemployment Insurance Act who have been unemployed for some period or another, short or long. When we get to the 1,300,000, it is the residue. Three quarters of a million may be classified as having been unemployed for a period of anything from six months up to two and a half years. These people have long outrun their established stamp rights. They are drawing extended benefits, and the weaker they are the more powerful is the blow that is to be delivered at them
  Take the position of the boards of guardians, West Ham, Poplar and any of the East End boroughs. Take the hard hit districts of Sheffield, Newcastle, Glasgow and Nottingham, where they have already run up very heavy financial responsibilities as a result of trade depression, and where they have large bodies of unemployed. By striking people off the unemployment benefit, you are not throwing them into the lap of some body that has wealth to give out to ease their sores, salve to dispense in the form of food to assuage the hunger of the body, the nerves and tissues of which are getting towards the breaking point. You are going to throw them back where the poverty is the keenest. You will throw them on to those who will be the least able to help them. Even if their hearts were as big as their bodies, they would have to say to these poor people, "We have already emptied our pockets. Take all that we have, but that cannot be much." These authorities come to the Ministry of Health and ask for powers to incur greater financial responsibilities, through State help and assistance, and they are turned away. They are told, "We cannot do anything unless you bring your scale down somewhat; unless you go in for economy and allow us to
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  use an instrument still further to beat down those who are suffering." That is unworthy of the traditions of the British race.
  The Government will be judged rightly if they are judged as I am forced to judge them. They are in the position of a big, beefy bully. You have a large majority in this House. You can force your will. You can get a body of the best of our citizens in a weakened state and you can get them down in the gutter. You kick them while they are down, and the weaker they become, the more violent is the spleen that is vented upon them, and the harder are the kicks. It is no mere figure of speech to say that. Hon Members opposite should go into some of the hovels where these people live. Do not forget that a large number of these men served this country during the War, and they were promised homes fit for heroes. Many of us know of cases where five people are in the one-room tenement, and cannot get out. These men, who were good enough to fight for the nation and to create multi-millionaires by the score while they were fighting, will not in their plight readily forget the fighting instinct that was put into them, if they are driven to a state of desperation beyond human control, owing to their weakened physical frame and their black outlook, brought about by bad trade conditions; and in some mad moment they may make it more difficult for this country to get to a state of peace and prosperity. Help them, and do not tempt them with such pieces of legislation as that introduced to-day.
  Sir MERVYN MANNINGHAM-BULLER: After listening to the speeches which we have heard from the party opposite, one would hardly think that the Bill which has been introduced to-day is one which will prevent something like a quarter of a million of men on the 1st October ceasing to receive unemployment benefit. Unless this Bill passes into law, and if the wishes of the party opposite to destroy the Bill are successful, the result will be, in spite of the sympathy we hear expressed from the opposite benches, that something like a quarter of a million of men will no longer be able to receive benefit as unemployed people.

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  When I listened to the speech of the right hon. Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw) I could not help admiring his energy and vigour, but, at the same time, I realise that a great deal of that speech was directed against something quite apart from the proposals in this Bill. I was irresistibly reminded of a certain Spanish gentleman, who was famous in history as being a man who tilted at windmills, but there was this difference, that the windmills at which he tilted did exist, whereas the one at which the right hon. Member for Preston was tilting was a windmill which had no existence, because he was attempting to confound a statement which was never made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Surely the arguments against the Bill cannot be so very strong when he thought it necessary to spend a considerable portion of his speech in an effort of that sort, instead of trying to show the real weaknesses, if any, which exist in the Bill. If I may quote again the speech of the right hon. Gentleman, he said it was his intention, line by line and word by word to oppose the passage of this Bill. May I again call the attention of the House and of the country to what will be the result if the right hon. Gentleman and his friends succeed. He is obviously determined, and the party to which he belongs are determined, at all costs to stop this Bill becoming law, and to insist that something like a quarter of a million working people in this country shall become disqualified from drawing unemployment benefit on the 1st October. When that fact is realised in the country I have perfect confidence to leave it to the people of the country to choose on which side of the House is the real sympathy for the unemployed.
  The right hon. Gentleman devoted another portion of his speech to an attack on the Government for the number of unemployed at the present time. The number of unemployed is a matter of deep regret and concern to all parties in this House, and I protest against the whole blame for the number of unemployed being attributed to those who sit on this side. I would remind hon. Members opposite that you do not sow and reap the harvest at the same time and that to a considerable extent we are now reaping a harvest the seeds of which
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  were sown by the party opposite when they were in office last year. I do not say that those seeds account to a very large extent but they do to a considerable extent for the present amount of unemployment. As an example, I would call to mind the act that, in some measure, the unemployment might have been less in this country if last year hon. Members opposite had not opposed Imperial Preference. Further, if they had not opposed or turned down what are known as the McKenna Duties last year, there might have been some improvement in the unemployment figures. Hon. Members who jeer and disbelieve the results of the McKenna Duties, are blind to facts. Only a week or two ago many of them must have seen going up the river, barge after barge laden with foreign-made motor-cars. They will not see so many going up now.
  Mr. SPEAKER: That argument is leading us away from the question before the House.
  Sir M. MANNINGHAM-BULLER: I am sorry. In passing this Bill, as I have no doubt we shall pass it, it is obvious that we shall very largely increase the expenditure. If by passing the Bill we allow something like 200,000 or 250,000 men to continue drawing unemployment relief, from which they would be disqualified were this Bill not passed, we are increasing the financial burdens of the country. Whilst we are doing that, and assisting the unemployed very largely in that way, is it not a sound thing to see whether we can save a certain amount of money in a direction which I think is a wise one. Surely it is a wise course to allow these people to continue drawing unemployment benefit instead of, as hon. Members opposite would do, causing them to cease to draw benefit, rather than extending the waiting period from three days to six days. We are increasing the amount spent on unemployment benefit in this Bill, and it is a sound measure to see whether along other lines we can economise without doing serious injury to those who are interested in getting unemployment benefit. We shall succeed in doing that by passing this Bill. For these reasons, and realising that it is to the interests of the bulk of the unemployed that this Bill should go through, I shall support it to the best of my ability.
  Mr. TINKER: I object to the hon. and gallant Member saying that we are opposed to the whole of this Bill. If the Bill were confined to Clause 2 we should be agreed upon it, but we are opposed to Clauses 1 and 3. The Bill has to be taken as a whole.
  Mr. R. S. HUDSON: That is not what the right hon. Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw) said. He said he was going to oppose every word and every line.
  Mr. TINKER: I say that if it had been a one-Clause Bill, we would have agreed to it.
  Mr. NEIL MACLEAN: The right hon. Member for Preston said that.
  Sir M. MANNINGHAM-BULLER: The words of the right hon. Gentleman were, "Word for word and line by line we will oppose the Bill."
  Mr. MACLEAN: Did he not say that had the Government brought in a one-Clause Bill extending the period, it would have received the support of hon. Members on this side? Try to remember what you hear.
  6.0 P.M.
  Mr. TINKER: I think hon. Members opposite have misunderstood the right hon. Member for Preston. We would have supported a one-Clause Bill. I would like to draw attention to what the Minister of Labour said when he spoke on 15th May. Ho then pointed out that he intended to bring in a Measure to carry out what is proposed in Clause 2, and we understood that that was all that was to be dealt with. He said that the further points would be dealt with by a Committee, who would go into the whole circumstances, and later, if necessary, he would introduce another Measure. Therefore we never expected on this occasion that he would propose Clause 1. I sit at present on the Unemployment Committee for St. Helens. We have been informed by the Ministry that the work which we do at our meetings, dealing with what is called the extended benefit, meets with his approval, and I was rather surprised when I found that he is going to alter that. In June last a pamphlet was issued to every member of the, committee. It was not confidential, and I would not read it if it were. It states in paragraph 3:
  "as will be seen from what is said below certain specific conditions must be fulfilled before extended benefit and dependants
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  benefit can be paid. It is of the utmost importance that every care should be taken to see that these conditions are satisfied by claimants. The object of referring cases to the local Committees is to use the local knowledge which the members of these Committees possess and to insure the advantage of a personal interview with the claimants. The assistance rendered by the Committee in the past has been of the greatest value and the Minister is happy to place on record his appreciation of their services and trusts that he may continue to receive the benefits of their services."
  It then follows by saying that it is not absolutely certain that what the Committee recommends will he passed, but there have been so few cases in which objection was taken that he is satisfied with the work which is being done. If those local committees are doing their work so well, what is the reason for an amendment which goes far to rule out many of the claimants who go before them; Can the real object be that he wants to save money? If he rules out some of these claims he will inflict a hardship in many of the most deserving cases. When we review those cases we are as strict as ever we can be to see that nobody gets through the net. Of course we have every sympathy with these people, and many times I wonder who is the more embarrassed, the claimant or myself, when I have had to put certain questions as to whether he has been searching for work, which suggest doubts as to the claim. When that condition arises the man who examines feels more embarrassed than the claimant.
  Everyone can say what is the right way to deal with the matter, yet the Minister of Labour says that he is going to review these claimants and the awards, and I can only take it that he will rule out many cases because he says here that he is going to save £6,500,000. Some of it will he on the three days, but more of it will be by ruling out many of the cases passed by local Committees. How can he expect men like myself, and others on these benches, who give their services to local Committees, to be satisfied when they decide that the claimants deserve benefit, to have the claims ruled out? It will not happen very often in my case. If I am ruled out more than twice I shall tell the Minister of Labour to get somebody else to do his work. The result will be that all this voluntary labour given at present will be left entirely to the Department of the Minister of Labour to

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  do. Whether he wants that or not I do not know.
  I hope that the Minister of Labour will review that particular point. It is putting undue hardship on many people who cannot stand it at present. The unemployed are at the bottom, and this extra burden upon them will have to be borne in many cases by the local authority. These people cannot starve, and in many places they will have to seek relief from the board of guardians. If that is the intention it is not fair to the community to be told that there is a saving of finance in that direction, for the purpose of bolstering up what is called the widows and orphans fund. It is entirely unfair to attempt it in that fashion.
  Now as to the three days per week. By the agitation of the miners, before the last Bill was passed we managed to get the three days put in instead of six because the miners have suffered more by the covering period of six days than any other section of the community. The miners have to work according to the demand for coal. They are not like men engaged in other kinds of work, who can work a week and knock off a week. They have to work strictly according to the demand, with the result that they have not been able to qualify for the six days' period. We managed to get the period made three days, and now we are told it is to be changed back to six. It is unfair to save money at the expense of the people, who are so much in need. We are opposed to Clauses 1 and 3 of the. Bill. We shall oppose every line of those Clauses, and try to get the whole Bill defeated so that a one-Clause Measure can be brought in covering Clause 2. If that can be clone the whole of our support will be given to Clause 2.
  Mr. HARNEY: I propose to support the Amendment. I am not at all deterred by the threat made by an hon. Member opposite, that by defeating the Bill we should deprive some 250,000 people of benefit. There is, I hope, ample machinery by which, if we did succeed in defeating the Bill, we could have another Bill brought in that would be more honest for the purpose which prompts these Bills. My recollection is that last year we were told that a new Bill would be necessary because the unemployment was so likely to continue that it was
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  unthinkable that the waiving of the condition as to contributions should come to an end in the period then fixed. The principle that justified that waiving is as much present to-day as it is when that waiving was introduced, and it is only common justice that Clause 2 should form part of the Bill. That was the sole purpose which prompted this legislation in the first instance. Why should we have tacked on to it anything that defeats the good of the Bill, and then have threats that if you do not put up with the bad part of the Bill hon. Members opposite will say to the country that you are working against the people?
  There is another point which makes me think the action of the Government is not very worthy. When the Widows' and Orphans' Pensions Bill was brought forward there was, so far as the Government was concerned, no suggestion of anything but this: "We are going to do this generous act, and use it, of course, as propaganda throughout the country." On this side of the House, some of us said, "It is a very big burden to place at this time both upon the poor worker and also upon industry. "No notice was taken of that, but when the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Hillhead (Sir It. Home), in a rather minatory tone, said, "Industry cannot stand this now contribution," I suppose that there was some wire pulling going on, and then the Minister said. "We have been considering this, and I can assure the House that we will bring in proposals that will have the effect of allowing these benefits to go without breaking the back of industry." Now the mountain has been in labour, and this is what is brought forth.
  I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will follow me in the figures which I worked out when he was making his opening statement. If I am right the Government are now guilty of the exceedingly mean act of pretending to the country that they are generously coming to the help of industry from the Exchequer, when what they are doing is a camouflage of an Exchequer grant. They are taking from one class of unemployed that which is necessary to pay some of the new pensions. I take it that these figures are right and they are very significant. The Unemployment Fund, we are told, is to be increased from two sources, one by £2,200,000 representing

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  the pennyfarthing and the threefarthings additional contributions from me Exchequer. It is also to be increased from the end of the year by a further Exchequer sum of a penny and a halfpenny, by what the Bill says will be given in case the deficiency fund has not been reduced by that time, which, of course, it will not be. These two sums, together, mean that the Exchequer pours into the Unemployment Fund £3,900,000. On the other hand the Unemployment Fund is depleted by the twopence that the employer is relieved from paying and the twopence that the worker is relieved from paying and these, together, come to the sum of £6,800,000, so that £3,900,000 flows in and £6,800,000 flows out, leaving the Fund at this point poorer by £2,900,000.
  Now what happens? Having regard to the less amount that the industry pays in and the lower contributions, there is still a. hole to be filled, amounting to this £2,900,000. They are going to fill it in this way. They are going to say that these is to be a further restriction placed upon extended benefits. Under the old Act once you are able to show that you had a reasonable amount of employment during the period, and did your best to find work, you were entitled to this extended benefit. Now we are told it is to be left to the discretion of the Minister, and by some arithmetical gymnastics, which I certainly cannot understand, the actuary has succeeded in saying that a thing, the amount of which depends on how the Minister is to exercise his discretion, can be estimated and reduced to figures. The result of all this, the result of extending the gap period from three days to six days, undoing the work that was done last year, is that there would be a saving to this Fund of £6,500,000. The result of the extra contributions paid in by the Exchequer, as against the lack of contributions paid in by industry, leaves a deficit in the fund of £2,900,000, and the Government say, "We will withdraw the benefits now being given to the poor person to the tune of £6,800,000 in order to pay this deficit, but so far from making any contribution by our generous act, we are making a gain in fact of £3,600,000." That squares with the figures.
  It does not stop even there. This Bill was originally to be introduced solely for the purpose of continuing the benefit
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  to the unemployed, in the next instance it was to be introduced in order that the Government could do a generous act. This has been taken to do the things I have said, and the Government are then to say that at the end of the deficiency period, instead of the Government continuing their contribution, which was originally agreed upon, of half the aggregate amount of employer and employé, they are in future to contribute only 3/7ths. I cannot help agreeing with the observations that were made by the last speaker. He said quite truly that the effect of this Bill is simply, in the first instance, to take out of the pockets of the unemployed the money which the Government is pretending generously to give; and, secondly, to make the rates supply the deficiency that is created in the pockets of the unemployed. Therefore, it all comes down to this, that the generous act of the Government, for which they are claiming credit throughout the country, is simply to relieve industry, not at the expense of the taxpayer but at the expense of the rates, notwithstanding that we are told that the ratepayer is far more important than the taxpayer, when we are really thinking of industry. I have been puzzled as to why we should have this jumble of figures and this complication. I have been a lawyer for many-years, and there is one Clause of the Bill that I do not understand now. The whole thing is a tangle of verbiage, and I cannot help thinking that it is so because the Government do not desire to be perfectly straightforward and open as to the course that is being taken.
  I put this to the House as a suggestion of my own. When you established your unemployment scheme, it was based on a principle of insurance. When the unemployment became abnormal that principle was threatened with breakdown. Someone had to come to the rescue by pouring money into the unemployment fund until it was able to work on its original scientific lines. The proper thing to have done then was to have said, "What has brought about this breakdown of the unemployment machine? Is it the fault of a particular industry, or a particular locality?" Is it the fault of my constituency, which happens to be an industrial one, in which the unemployed are very many? No. it was the fault of

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  the whole community; we are all responsible. The proper thing to have done was to have said that if it was necessary to keep the unemployment insurance scientifically going by making grants, they should come from the Exchequer and not from the particular industries that are affected. That was not done. But a deficiency fund was created into which the Government poured the necessary money, which was to be wiped out by an extra contribution from those engaged in industry. That is how it stands.
  Surely the simple and straightforward remedy is this: If industry cannot stand the contribution that is necessary to give these new benefits—it cannot—and if we would save industry, and at the same time give the benefits which I for one want to do, the right course is to let the Government here and now make a grant to wipe out altogether this £8,000,000 deficiency fund. Let the Government now do what they should have done in the first instance, and say "In future, as that, deficiency fund grows, if it does grow, let the burden be upon the taxpayer." In that way you would bring this about —that all of us then would be shouldering the responsibility of keeping our unemployment insurance machine working, and the Government could give the new benefits to the widows and the old men, and the orphans and children, without exacting a penny more from the people. I submit that that is the straightforward way to act. I do not believe that the Government can gain any credit with the country by endeavouring to tinker with the difficulty in the way that they are doing now, especially when the country is made aware—it will be. made aware, as far as I am concerned—that, while pretending to give something for the relief of industry, the Government are really robbing Peter to pay Paul.
  As regards £6,000,000 a year, they are almost directly going to the poor men who are now standing round the Employment Exchanges, and who otherwise would get benefits, and are saying to those men, "Go away and do without your benefit, in order that in time we may thus get money to give to the widow and the orphans and take the credit for being generous ourselves;." For these reasons, I shall vote against the Bill, though if, as has been said, everything is
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  omitted from the Bill except Clause 2, I shall vote for the Bill. If we are lucky enough to defeat the Bill, I would be with those who brought in a single Clause Bill.
  Lieut. - Colonel HENDERSON: The opposition to this Bill, I gather, is based on two Clauses which relate to the extension of the waiting period from three days to six, and the question of restoring the Minister's discretion in regard to cases of extended benefit. The hon. Member for Leigh (Mr. Tinker) said he could not understand why, if the local committees were working well, and the Minister was pleased with the way they were working, the Minister should require to take this discretion to himself. Surely the hon. Member is under a misapprehension as to what the Minister is attempting to do. The Minister, in the first place, is not, by the restoration of his discretion, attempting to interfere or deal with individual cases at all. That was not the position before the Act of last year was passed. The position then was that certain classes of cases which might otherwise have been entitled to extended benefit, were, by the decision of the Minister, ruled out of the benefit. All that the Minister is proposing to do is to take upon himself again that discretion, so that if he thinks fit in the interests of the scheme or in the interests of the country, he may rule out certain classes—not individuals—so far as extended benefit only is concerned. There is no discretion so far as standard benefit is concerned, because it does not come within the scope of his discretion. Before the Act of last year was passed, what classes were ruled out by this discretion of the then Minister? Let us look and see where the great hardship, which hon. Members opposite anticipate, will arise.
  Mr. HARNEY: Did I understand the hon. and gallant Member to say that the meaning of the Clause was that the Minister had not a complete discretion?
  Lieut.-Colonel HENDERSON: I did not use the words "complete discretion." I say the discretion did not refer to individual cases. In other words, the Minister-would not send down to a committee and say, "Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith is not to receive an extended benefit." The point I was making was that this discretion, when exercised, was exercised so far as

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  specific classes of people were concerned, and only in that way. The local committee's discretion has never been interfered with. My point arose because of something which the hon. Member for Leigh said. Under that discretion the classes that were excluded from extended benefit were, in the first place, single persons, juveniles, who were residing with their parents, and who, having regard to all the circumstances of the case, could reasonably look to their parents for support. Hon. Members opposite may argue that there were cases where juveniles were denied benefit when their parents were not in a position to support them. Those arguments could possibly be supported in certain cases on inquiry, although possibly they could not be supported in every case. But if the provisions in these words are carried out, there is no reason to say that hardship will necessarily arise.
  Take another class of people who were excluded—married women living with their husbands who were in employment and whose earnings were sufficient to justify the withholding of uncovenanted benefit. There is no reason to say that any hardship will arise, provided that that section is administered as it is suggested it should be. Again, there were certain classes of aliens excluded from uncovenanted benefit. Others were allowed to receive benefit. Lastly, there were certain people excluded who were working short time, and whose earnings were of such an amount that it was considered justifiable to withhold uncovenanted benefit from them. Some Members of the House may remember the case of the Bradford dyers, which went before the umpire and details of which wore published in the Press. In that case it was shown that the men were working three days a week and 12 hours a day, or a total of 36 hours. For that they were receiving 57s., and they claimed unemployment benefit for the rest of the week. The umpire decided that cases of that kind should be judged on the eight hours a day standard. He, therefore, said they were working 36 hours—working four days a week—and he gave them unemployment benefit for two days. That is to say, they were receiving unemployment benefit for two days plus 57s. a. week for the period which they worked, and yet to-
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  wards that benefit there were contributing men in employment such as, for instance, labourers in the iron and steel trade, who were only earning 39s. a week for a full week's work. That is only an illustration of the fact that the Minister should have discretion in eases of that kind to decide whether extended benefit ought to be given. Nobody could say in a case of that kind that those men would necessarily undergo hardship if deprived of the extended benefit.
  A great many people are apt to forget, when discussing this question, that, apart from the man out of employment, there is another man to be considered, and that is the man who is in employment and who is contributing all the time towards the scheme. He is entitled to a fair deal, and to have the fund properly administered, and to have the assurance that only those people get on to the fund who ought to get on, just as much as the man who is out of employment is entitled to receive benefit. Because of that, I think it only reasonable that the Minister should have discretion in regard to extended benefit. I can understand some people arguing that, whether parents are in a position to support their children or not, if those children are out of employment, they should receive assistance from the State, but that is pure Socialism. It is encouraging people to get rid of their parental responsibilities as soon as they possibly can, and I do not believe that the right way to prosperity in this or any other country is to encourage the idea that, however many children people may have, they never need be responsible for the upkeep, maintenance, upkeep or upbringing of those children. I believe it is necessary, particularly at the present time, to assist people—as we do to a greater extent than any other nation in the world—in the education and upbringing of their children, but I do not believe it is right to encourage people to think that they have no parental responsibility. It is only fair to make people realise that, if they bring children into the world, they are primarily responsible for those children.
  Mr. MACLEAN: Take away your Royal grants, then.
  Lieut.-Colonel HENDERSON: The real argument behind the opposition to this Bill is that the party opposite, to a very

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  large extent, do not believe in the principle of contributory insurance. In the first place, contributory insurance, if eventually established on an all-round basis, as we hope to establish it by the Widows' and Orphans' Contributory Pensions Bill, will be in itself one of the greatest bulwarks against the achievement of Socialism in this country. Therefore, hon. Members opposite are anxious to undermine and weaken the contributory principle in any way they can.
  Mr. MACLEAN: Have you the contributory principle in the Army?
  Lieut.-Colonel HENDERSON: I can understand that hon. Members opposite are opposed to this Bill and I can understand the statement made last week by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Shettleston (Mr. Wheatley) that if they had the opportunity, they would make the Widows' and Orphans' Pensions Scheme a non-contributory scheme. Incidentally, the right hon. Gentleman did not remark that it would cost in a full working year £60,000,000, nor did he state where that money was coming from. When one utters pure Socialism of that kind, it is not necessary to follow it up with any explanation as to how it is to be carried out. I can. however, understand from that attitude that hon. Members opposite will oppose this Bill and do their best to misrepresent it over the country, but from my knowledge of the electorate I do not think those efforts are likely to have the big effect expected by hon. Members. So long as we can maintain the contributory principle we have always the point of view of the man who is in employment and contributing, as well as the point of view of the man who is out of employment, and if this Bill is properly explained to the electors, as I hope it will be, we have no reason to believe that it will do any serious harm in the country or weaken the position of those on this side of the House. I congratulate the hon. and learned Member who last spoke on maintaining that Socialistic attitude which has distinguished the Liberal party for the last two years and has largely led to their extinction. I feel sure that if he maintains that attitude during the lifetime of
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  this Parliament, there is a very strong likelihood that he will not appear in the next one.
  Mr. MACLEAN: As you did not appear from Tradeston.
  Lieut.-Colonel HENDERSON: That certainly was not for the same reason as the reason which will lead to the defeat of the hon. and learned Member.
  Mr. MACLEAN: It was because the Socialist beat you.
  Lieut.-Colonel HENDERSON: I am quite aware of that, but it was not because I voted for Socialism.
  Mr. MACLEAN: Do not talk of other people going out of the House.
  Lieut.-Colonel HENDERSON: I hope, for the reasons I have stated, that the House will give the Bill a Second Reading. I certainly am prepared to support the Bill and all its provisions through all its stages.
  Mr. SEXTON: I must claim the indulgence of the House, because I am suffering from severe throat trouble, and I speak under that disability. I would not have risen at all were it not for the fact that this is a Measure of great importance, particularly to the men whom I represent, and I would not be doing my duty to them if I did not intervene. The Minister of Labour, in his opening statement, made a very peculiar remark. He described this Bill as a stopgap. It appears to me it is all gap from beginning to end, and that there are in it unbridgeable gulfs so far as benefits are concerned. During the past 20 years we have had no fewer than 15 Acts of Parliament dealing with this question. None of them have attempted to solve it; all have suggested dope, dope, dope in order to lull the unfortunate out-of-work into political unconsciousness. There have been some good points in some of the pass Bills, but so far as this one is concerned it is rotten to the core. This is not an Unemployment Insurance Bill at all. It should be called a Bill to ensure the Chancellor of the Exchequer against the risks of his callous Budget, and in order to shift the burden off his shoulders on to someone else's shoulders. I was rather pleased to hear the statement which the Minister made in answer to my interjection, but I tell the right hon. Gentleman quite

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  frankly that I came here to bury Caesar, not to praise him, and I am not so sure yet that Caesar does not deserve to be buried very, very deep. The right hon. Gentleman, however, certainly disarmed me by the definition of the continuous unemployment for six days which is necessary to qualify in six weeks, but may I point out that it is apparently not in keeping with the Bill. How does he reconcile his statement with the wording of the Memorandum attached to the Bill?
  "The waiting period which must elapse before unemployment benefit is payable is increased from three days to a week."
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: I think I can make it clear to the hon. Member. The continuity rule, as it is called, applies to the waiting period, and the effect of the continuity rule is this. To start with, any three days of unemployment in a continuous period of six days are grouped together so as to form a whole. You may get a second of these periods of three days, and it may be a full five weeks or close on six weeks after the first. There again the period of six weeks is allowed. That is the case now. Therefore, by a second application of the continuity rule, these two periods can be grouped together, and, therefore, those six days do form a valid waiting period. I have tried to make it as clear as I can.
  Mr. SEXTON: I am very much obliged to the right hon. Gentleman for his explanation, and it certainly does ease the situation a little. [HON. MEMBERS: "No!"] I am only speaking of the class with which I have been associated all my life. I worked with them in my early years and I know the conditions under which they work and suffer. Measures of this kind were never intended originally to cover the condition of the casual labourer. The genesis of the difficulty is to be found in the No. 2 National Health Insurance Act, which only legislated for men in constant employment. It was never anticipated that it could apply to anybody who was not engaged in constant employment. It was on the basis of constant employment with the same employer, but the casual dock labourer has no employer, or rather he has one employer to-day and another to-morrow, and is in a situation altogether different from that of the men for whom this legislation was originally intended. I
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  may describe him as the modern Autolycus, "a picker-up of unconsidered trifles," who does a day's work here and a day's work there, wherever he gets the chance. Therefore, when it is sought to bring him into legislation of this kind, difficulties crop up. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for helping me to meet the particular difficulty to which I referred, but this Bill as it stands nearly lands us back into the same Slough of Despond as we were in before.
  Let me give the right hon. Gentleman a case. Suppose a man goes to work on Monday, and that is the only day's work he gets in the week. Our week, I should explain, is not a six day week, but only a five and a half day week, and therefore it will be seen how ill fitted these schemes are to apply to men who do not come within the proper meaning of their provisions. His contract only lasts for half a day, and he is subject to dismissal at dinner time. We had some difficulty in getting the right hon. Gentleman's predecessor to recognise even the Saturday half-day, but at last we did get it, with a lot of trouble, and I am afraid that under this Bill that would entirely disappear.
  Let me ask the right hon. Gentleman about three points that I want cleared up. The abolition of the three days and the extension to six days is going seriously to handicap the man who is engaged in what we call short sea traffic, the coasting traffic, the week-end traffic. He may not get anything but for the Saturday afternoon. He may not get anything the next week, and the difficulty in that man's case is how he is going to qualify at all under this extension of the six days. The next point is that this man may only get one day in the week, and out of that he has to pay 1s. 4d. out of a day's wages for National Health Insurance, for unemployment benefit, which he will never get, and for old age and widows' pensions. A great point is made of the fact that the contributions for unemployment insurance have been reduced by 2d., but the man has still to pay 2d. out of a full day's wages. He has got to pay the lot, I believe, for if he does not pay directly he pays it indirectly, in the shape of Imperial and local taxes. The best illustration of this juggling and shifting of the burden is the amusing cartoon which appeared in the "Daily News" the other day, called "The other

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  end of the world." He has got to pay either directly or indirectly.
  Could not some special arrangement be made to meet the case of these men who only work for one day or half a day—and there are many of them? If the right hon. Gentleman could give us any promise that the special case of the casual labourer would be met, there might be something to be said for this particular attempt of his to do it. So far as I can see, the provisions of this Bill are going to make it impossible for 30 per cent. of our men to qualify at all. During a very troublesome period the staff of the right hon. Gentleman has assisted us very materially, but that docs not alter the fact that, if this Bill goes through as it stands now, all that work will be love's labour lost, and they will go back again to where they were previously. Another point I want to emphasise—and I suppose it will be styled King Charles' head again—is that in addition to the burdens that our men have to bear, they have to sign on twice a day where other men have only to sign on twice a week, in exactly the same kind of occupation. I know that is a matter of administration and, perhaps, rules, but I bring it to the attention of the right hon. Gentleman in the hope that he will do something in regard to it.
  There is another great burden, and that is the question of "genuinely seeking employment." I understand now that that rule is to be most rigorously enforced. I have a letter in my hand from a man who has been a victim only lately of this question of "genuinely seeking employment." This man worked in a firm in my own constituency of St. Helens for 35 years. He started a small business, which failed in six months, and he went to look for a job, and could not get it being physically unfit and, therefore, severely handicapped, because to-day, as always, it is the survival of the fittest that applies in every case. He could not find work, and he signed on at the Employment Exchange, and received benefit from the beginning of this year till eight weeks ago, when, without any explanation, he was struck off the list, although day and night that man has been seeking employment. The powers possessed by the right hon. Gentleman may or may not be rigorously enforced, but here is a case in point, that while the local Employment
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  Exchange gave favourable consideration to his case, when he visited them again the reply was that the Minister's orders must be rigorously and strictly carried out.
  SPEAKER: I am afraid that that particular class of question is a matter of administration, which would be in order to-morrow on the Estimates, but not to-day on the legislation.
  Mr. SEXTON: I will endeavour to avoid any transgression of your ruling, Mr. Speaker. I am dealing with the question of casual labour. The greatest part of my life was spent in casual labour, and I had very painful physical experiences in connection with it which I do not intend to deal with now. I want to point out that the bulk of these men from whom you are taking this £6,500,000 are ex-service men, men who fought and were promised a country fit for heroes to live in, but they returned only to find that it is only a hero that can exist in this country to-day. I believe this House will give me credit for Favouring constitutional action, but there are moments at the present time when the limits of human endurance are almost reached. This House and Government after Government have thrown sops to the working classes, but every Act of Parliament intended for the benefit of the working classes has been minimised by some penalty which deprived, a man of that which he ought legally to get. The Employer's Liability Acts, the Workmen's Compensation Acts, and even the Factory Acts and these Acts have done that. Whatever good was in the last Act is wiped out under conditions imposed in this particular Bill. Under the existing system we pay these people enough wages to keep them alive while they are producing wealth for this country. The stores and warehouses are full, and the walls are bulging with the products of their labour, and then, when there is no demand for their labour, they can sit down and starve. I am not surprised at the unrest in the country, and I suggest to the Government that if they have any respect for their political existence and for the safety of this country, there is a feeling going abroad to-day—and I am sorry to say so—that is gradually eating into the heart of constitutional action, and Bills of this kind make it more difficult for

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  those of us who wish to carry on by constitutional action. Let me again say that every condition we put before the workers is accompanied by some other condition. "Too old at forty" used to be the cry, and even to-day the older man is pushed aside to make a job for the younger man, because he is more valuable to the employers. I hope that when we shall have a chance in Committee of moving Amendments to better the Bill, the right hon. Gentleman will give them his most careful and, I hope, humane consideration.
  Mr. BOOTHBY: I do not desire to make a speech on this Bill at all. I only want, now that we have an opportunity when we are considering fresh legislation in connection with unemployment insurance, to ask the Minister of Labour to direct his attention very carefully to the conditions which are obtaining at the present time in the fishing industry. I am perfectly satisfied that the law as it stands at present is being properly and fair y administered, but I think that in this connection a certain Amendment might well be introduced by the Minister, because I am satisfied that, especially as regards the casual workers in the fishing industry, such as those engaged in coopering, and the women workers particularly, who are employed during the herring-fishing season, they are at the present moment not in a position, however hard they try, to qualify for the uncovenanted benefit. It is simply a question of the movement of the herring and the herring season, but it is their only form of livelihood at the present time, and I ask the Minister of Labour most earnestly to consider whether he cannot: introduce into this Bill some Clause which will give him power to apply to those casual workers, who are solely dependent on the herring fishing for their means of livelihood, uncovenanted benefit, if it can be proved to his satisfaction that it is quite impossible owing to the method by which this industry is carried on, for them to qualify for uncovenanted benefit, even if they make every effort to do so.
  7.0 P.M
  Mr. STEPHEN: I wish to support the Amendment which has been moved by the right hon. Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw), and I want to do so because I think this Bill is one of the most mean and pettifogging Measures that has ever
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  been introduced into this House. The Minister of Labour stated that we had to understand that this was a stopgap Measure, and that the complaints that had been made with regard to unemployment administration, and also the position that was being taken up in regard to the general development of social insurance, made it impossible to bring forward a permanent Measure at this time. Yet he has taken advantage of the. fact that there is the necessity for introducing a stop-gap Measure to introduce into that stop-gap Measure something that is going to militate in the most terrible way against the conditions of the unemployed. There was no reason why he should not have produced a one-Clause Bill. Members of his own party on the back benches who have taken part in the discussion have been most apologetic with regard to the Measure. The Member for Bootle (Lieut.-Colonel V. Henderson) did try to introduce some little justification, but the Member on the back benches who preceded him simply stated the fact that there was the necessity for the Minister being given an extended time in which he could waive the conditions, and tried to defend the whole Rill on the necessity of the 200,000 people who might be out of benefit. From these benches there is not the slightest opposition to that section of the Bill, but we do certainly oppose those other two Clauses which have been introduced and which are going to mean additional suffering for the unemployed.
  I cannot but think that the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Health are in a very unfortunate position in their dealings with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Widows' Pensions Rill was a necessity in the politics of the party opposite. There had to be some social justification for their existence, as a party, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, it seems to me, has put intolerable burdens upon his two colleagues, the Minister of Health and the Minister of Labour. The Minister of Labour has got to make provision for keeping those 200,000 people on the live register, and to do so money has got to be found. The Minister of Labour is put into the extraordinary position of finding that money from the unemployed people. In the actuarial statement, there is a paragraph which states

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  that the actuary estimates that the relief to the fund derived from the new restrictions upon the grant of extended benefit and the extension of the waiting period is equivalent to £6,500,000 a year, with a live register of 1,300,000. I want to put it to the Minister that that means that this Measure is certainly making the unemployed pay for this extension of waiver that he is taking under the other Clause. I cannot see that there is any way of escape.
  There has been the extension of the waiting period. If the Minister knew a little bit more of working-class life; if he himself had passed through the experiences of these people who are unemployed; if he had passed through the experience in a working-class home, he would never for one minute have consented to make this alteration with regard to the waiting period. A matter of three days a week is a tremendous amount in a working-class home, and, when that comes again and again say in the case of an individual who has possibly a year's unemployment, either that individual has to get relief from the parish council or from the board of guardians, or else, he has to go without a certain amount of money. The absence of the amount of money for three days in a working-class home accounts for a tremendous lot of suffering. It will put that family into difficulties with regard to finding the rent: it will put them back with regard to finding the money they have to pay if they are going to keep a shelter over their heads at all. As one who has had a great deal of worry in connection with evictions in the City of Glasgow, I protest against this Measure as adding to our already existing difficulties with regard to housing in Glasgow.
  Then, again, I do not think it is fair, and I do not think it is going to please the business critics of the Government, that this is going to mean a big increase in the rates which will have to be levied under the Poor Law. I do not think that this Government will get off with it, because it has been made plain again and again in this House that this burden upon industry in the form of rates is considered by the business men to be just as great a burden as that which they have to contribute through national taxation, if not a greater burden. The
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  £6,500,000 has to be found somewhere. It has either to be found by the Poor Law authority, and, if so, it is going to be a burden on industry, which the Minister has been trying to avoid, or it is going to be found by the unemployed people themselves. I submit that that also is going to produce just as great an agitation and as great difficulties as would be produced if it is going to increase the rates and the burden upon industry.
  I would like to bring to the recollection of the House what the unemployed person has got to do in order to get benefit. The Minster is taking to himself a discretion, and I want to put it to the House that there was no need. Conditions are already sufficiently onerous, because, in addition to the ordinary covenanted benefit, he has got to prove:
  (a) he is normally employed in such employment as would make him an employed person within the meaning of the principal Act (in this Act referred to as 'insurable employment')and WILL normally seek to obtain his livelihood by means of insurable employment;
  (b) that in normal times incurable employment suitable to his capacity would be likely to be available for him:
  (c) that he has during the two years immediately preceding the date of the application to benefit, been employed in an insurable employment to such an extent as was reasonable, having regard to all the circumstances of the case and in particular to the opportunities for obtaining insurable-employment during that period;
  (d) that be is making every reasonable effort to obtain employment suited to his capacities and is willing to accept such employment."
  A man who has go to prove all that has surely satisfied sufficiently onerous conditions, and I say that it is extremely shameful of the Minister to have brought forward such a Measure, and to take discretionary power to rule out, not individuals, but classes of people who have been able to satisfy those onerous conditions. In the country this Measure will take a lot of justifying. Personally, I am very glad to believe that this Uriah Heep Government, this Government that has one individual who gets up and addresses us with P.S.A. addresses, or sermons, and then has another individual who brings forward a Measure to inflict cruelty upon the poorest of the poor, will at no distant date meet some

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  similar fate to that of Uriah Heep. I believe that the working classes of this country will put an end to this Government, and not in any constitutional fashion. This sort of legislation will produce its fruit, and members of the Government will end their days on a lamp-post, and that will be a natural ending for such a, Uriah Heep Government.
  Viscountess ASTOR: If this Government be a Uriah Heep Government, and is to end its days on a lamp-post, even then I should not tremble. It seems to me that the real position of the unemployed man is so tragic that no Government could afford to do anything except try its best to find means of getting him work. The hon. Member for St. Helens (Mr. Sexton) took the case of his friend who had been in work 37 years and then went out and tried to start private enterprise and saw how difficult it was and failed, which, I think, was an interesting point of view coming from a Socialist. There is nothing too much that any Government could do to help him over that ghastly time. I myself have seen men unemployed for years who have spent every penny of their saving rather than go on to what they call the "dole." We have another lot of people in the country that have never been in work. [LABOUR MEMBERS: "Hear, hear! "] There is not much reason why ever they should go to work because they are told by hon.Members opposite that the State should support them. There are young men who were in the War and who have never had a job. and in the meantime they have to listen to this very pernicious doctrine of Socialism which says, "Why should you work: the State will support you?" The most thoughtful of hon. Members in the late Government certainly realised that it was having A lamentable effect on the younger people of the country.
  Mr. MACLEAN: Is the Duke of Northumberland one of the young people?
  Viscountess ASTOR: When hon. Members speak of the tragedy of these young men they are more responsible for it than any Government which has ever been in office You cannot go on preaching that doctrine to young people. However, I am not going to get out of Order, Mr.
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  Speaker. I want to bring this point to the notice of the Minister of Labour. I hope, in dealing with this question of unemployment, he will urge upon the Government to look into the question of the young men—there are not so many young women, because young women get married—between the ages of 18 and 25 who are hanging around. They are the tragedy now. Some of us who had a little more foresight warned the Government six years ago that unless something was done for the juveniles they would be incapable, when the time came for them to work, of doing anything. That is before the country just as much to-day as it was six years ago, and it is increasing every day. We on this side are very much concerned about it, and hoping the Government will think about it far more seriously than any Government has done before.
  Certainly, if I thought this Bill would make it more difficult for the genuine unemployed to get this uncovenanted benefit, I would not touch it. There is something which is not very popular to say, but I will say it. I know, and hon. Gentlemen opposite know, we have had cases in the country, I do not say often, but cases where a woman marries, and her husband is in work and she decides to go to work. too. That is all very well, but if her husband has a regular wage to support her, and she afterwards applies for the dole, I do not think any section of the House wants that. [Interruption.] Hon. Gentlemen opposite know exactly what I moan, and to what I am referring. There are certain cases where nobody wants the uncovenanted benefit to be given. That is what, is seems to me. the Government are trying to tighten up, as they ought. I am perfectly certain the more they look into it, they will sec the dole is not being abused except in very few cases, but where it is. I feel certain every party in the House wants it stopped. I was very much amused by the right hon. Member on the front bench when his party behind complain about the three days' extension to six. He seems to forget what happened. Last year, in the House, the very thing about which they are complaining was put in without being discussed at all on a Friday afternoon. I do appeal to the right hon. Member if he wants what he

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  is always talking about, honesty in politics, to get up and explain that.
  Mr. T. SHAW: Will the Noble Lady explain what she means? I have not the faintest idea.
  Viscountess ASTOR: The right hon. Member knows perfectly well it was in Committee upstairs. I was not on the Committee, but when we wanted to extend the time from three days to six, the right hon. Member himself voted for it. I suppose pressure was put on, and they changed it. Is that clear to the right hon. Member?
  Mr. SHAW: I am sorry to say to the Noble Lady that it is more confused than ever.
  Viscountess ASTOR: The right hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well what I am talking about, and he knows of the pressure brought against his judgment by his party. I do maintain that, when you are discussing a thing so important as the unemployment problem, all parties ought to be quite straight and quite honest, and the Front Bench cannot afford to allow its back bench to get up and make speeches with which they do not agree, and yet have not got the honesty to say so. Before sitting down, I do beg of the Minister to consider this juvenile unemployment, which is getting no better. I hope the Committee he has set up will deal primarily with that, because these young men, who have never worked, are led to believe, by the speeches of hon. Members opposite, and through all the propaganda put forward, not only from the Communists but from the Socialists, that there is no reason why they ever should work. Yet there is nothing more pitiful or tragic than a young person, who has never been taught a trade, and who has had no chance at the very critical time of his life, of learning not only steadfastness in his work, but steadfastness in his character. I hope the Minister will bear that always in mind, and I would say to hon. Members opposite, do not preach what you know is not true.
  Mr. TINKER: On a point of Order Can the Noble Lady point to anyone on this side who has told young people not to work?
  Mr. SPEAKER: It has nothing to do with this Bill.
  Mr. DUNCAN: May I ask whether the Noble Lady is addressing the children of a family?
  Viscountess ASTOR: The last hon. Member who spoke sat down with a terrible threat to us on this side of the House as to what will happen. I only want to say what actually does happen through the pernicious preaching of Socialist doctrine.
  Mr. ROBERT YOUNG: There are several objections that we have to this Bill. The first is in regard to the waiting period for benefit. The second objection we have to this Bill is that it extends the discretion of the Minister. From my point of view, and, I believe, from the point of view of many others, it is not the Minister's discretion that should be extended, but the powers under the Insurance Act. The third objection we have is that, while we are in favour of reduced contributions when they can possibly be effected, we are opposed to the way they are effected in this Bill to supplement the finance of another Bill. The fourth objection I have to this Bill is that it is a departure altogether from the principles of insurance. When the Insurance Acts were introduced, they laid down certain benefits for those who were covered by insurance. The Minister of Labour had very little control over the operation of those Acts. The power was invested in the Committee or Court of Referees to which the men could appeal, and from that Committee could appeal to the umpire. Those who came after the original promoters of the first Act under the exceptional circumstances of unemployment departed from the strict principles of insurance. Ever since, we have been going on the wrong lines in dealing with insurance in relation to the unemployed. My right hon. Friend the late Minister of Labour made an attempt to get back to the principles of insurance lessened his own discretion, and in that way made an improvement on the departure of his predecessors.
  An Insurance Bill should give to all who are covered by it the opportunity they need of receiving the same benefit under the same conditions. That was the original principle. When we commenced to talk about uncovenanted benefit we departed from that principle. It was

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  evidently forgotten that those who were entitled to the strict standard benefits were those who had paid their contributions for those standard benefits, and that those who were going to receive the uncovenanted benefit or the extended benefit in the process of time were practically the same people who would have to repay the moneys they received. In other words, the State came to the assistance of the unemployed because their funds in the Insurance Act had run out, and it practically said to the unemployed men, as well as the men in work, "We are going to lend you this money, strictly on the condition that when you go back to work, out of your contribution, out of the contributions of the employer and of the Government, as they will be paid in the future, all you are how receiving will be returned to the Fund to make it solvent." Not only that, but at the same time they were to pay interest for the loan of the moneys they were receiving for that purpose. I believe some is at 5½, some 5, and another amount 4½ per cent.
  I do not see why there should be any difference, and the sooner we get back to the original principle the better. They are all unemployed men, and the first duty of any Government should be to keep these unemployed men, provided they are willing to work, in a physically fit condition for the day when employment may come their way. This Bill will not do that in any way at all for large numbers of people, but will render their position worse than it is. In relation to the extension of the period from three to six days, the Minister of Labour said that, so far as the boards of guardians were concerned, it would put an infinitesimal charge upon them. I am at a loss to understand how he came to that conclusion. If he were dealing only with men who for the first time had become unemployed, who had been regularly employed, and had said to them, "You are not to get any benefit until you are out of work six days," there might have been some force in his argument, but he himself, in answering questions, or, at all events, in a previous discussion, said that the unemployment was scattered over a far larger number of people than are actually out of employment at the moment. In other words, there is such a large amount of intermittent unemployment in the
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  country, these men being in the position of working a short period and then being thrown out of benefit, that this extension to six days will be a great hardship to them, and will not enable them to recover their position.
  For that reason, I hold that this six days' extension will cause great hardship, and will also mean a very heavy charge on the boards of guardians and charitable institutions which help these men in many ways. There is another reason. At this moment we should not be reducing the benefits at all; we should be extending them. The original benefits were given in full knowledge that these men were getting help from other quarters. When they were introduced and paid, Ministers of Labour, one after another, knew the benefits the men were receiving were in addition to the benefits that they were drawing from their trade unions. It is well known to-day that many of the trade unions have expended their funds in relation to unemployment benefit, and there is little or no help coming from some of the trade unions in that direction. That being so, the Minister of Labour and the Government should be doing something to keep these men physically fit, by extending benefits rather than by reducing benefits, which this waiting period will occasion.
  It is all very well to say that the actuary says that £6,500,000 will be saved by the operation of this extended period, but why should not account be taken of the circumstances that exist to-day? The unemployment question is too patent to the sight, and what we have to do is to see that those definitely out of employment nowadays and making a demand for the necessaries of life should get them. It is all very well to deal with figures, to engineer the figures, but it will be, time when we get to normal circumstances to look into them. We, of the trade unions, never bother with actuarial figures in that way. We find ourselves at present in the same boat as the Government, in relation to these matters. Our funds or those of the Government may both of them be called upon to pay far more than can possibly be covered by contributions over a certain period of time. Therefore, it is no use bothering us with actuarial figures, unless it bo to prove that 6½ million pounds ought really to be

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  transferred, to be used by the Government in its financial obligations under other Bills. That is the only reason that I can see why the figures should be put forward at the present time. It would be far more honest, generous, and beneficial to the community, on the whole, if the Chancellor had come down to the House and said: "You are not paying your way in the finance of unemployment; we want assistance for our other Bills, therefore, we will give sufficient into the fund," or that the Government should follow the advice given by several hon. Members by paying off the unemployment fund deficiency, if you like. If the right hon. Gentleman had said that they were going to increase the Government grant sufficiently to enable the reduction in contributions, that would have been an honest and a beneficial way to help in this matter.
  This question of unemployment, as every one of us knows, is the most serious problem that is before us to-day, it matters not on which side of the House we sit. We ought to recognise that unless this problem is solved, and until permanent provision is made for the unemployed there is no possible chance of dealing adequately with any other problem that the House is called upon to deal with. You cannot deal with housing, with public health, with education, or other necessary problems in any practical way so long as you have a situation in which there is one and a-quarter million people out of work; people without adequate means of subsistence and without proper purchasing power.
  So far as the question of Ministerial discretion goes, I do not want any Ministerial discretion to come either from this or that side of the House. I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman the late Minister that he got rid of some of that discretion, which ought to be with the court of referees or with the umpire and not a matter for the Front Bench. Hon. anil right hon. Gentlemen on the Front Bench have got to see that proper legislation is passed; that proper conditions are inserted in the Bills that are put forward. The court of referees and the umpire are sufficient to determine whether or not a man is entitled to benefit. A man should be entitled to unemployment benefit on the same conditions in relation to
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  extended as to what we call standard benefit, and that should be a willingness to work. If a man or woman is covered by insurance and willing to work, by virtue of their contributions they should get the standard benefit until that benefit runs out. Benefit should be paid in relation to uncovenanted benefit or to extended benefit in the same way. Until we tackle the problem, as I see it, you will be creating greater discontent, dissatisfaction, and revolutionary tendencies by the throwing of other and ever-increasing numbers of men on to the scrap heap, as this Bill will assuredly do.
  Those of us who are in the trade union movement know very well that if we put in these restrictions about three days and six days in our rules, it would be a mistake. We do not do the thing in that way. We say to the man: "You will not get benefit unless you are three days out of work," but then we give him the benefit from the beginning of his unemployment. Another trade union may say that there will be six days before a man gets benefit, bat then, when he does get it, he gets it for the six days, if he has been out that time. In another case a man may have to wait six days, and if he is out of work five days he gets nothing for the five. But if he is out of work the sixth day, he gets six days' out-of-work benefit. The Minister ought to have introduced a provision of that kind in order to safeguard the interests of the workers, because a man may be thrown out of work one, two or three times, owing to the erratic course of employment in our country at the present time.
  For these reasons. I am opposed to this Bill. It is all very well to tell us, as hon. Members opposite have told us, that we are trying to throw large numbers out of benefit altogether. They know perfectly well that is not our intentior. That is the furthest thought from our mind. If the Minister had not been prepared to do something for the workers who are out of work at all events he should have left the position as it is by introducing a small Bill to extend the period for what is covered by the last Act. I sincerely hope that when this Bill goes to Committee the Minister will take into consideration the relation of the waiting period to the payment of benefit, and see to it that when unemployment begins that he is not going to stick

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  to the six days' period. I also trust that something will be done to throw back the responsibility of determining who is entitled to benefit upon the court of referees and umpire. These are the people who ought to determine whether a man is or is not entitled to benefit. I know, of course, there is the committee before the court of referees and the umpires, but I say that where those concerned are legitimately entitled to it, and legitimately unemployed, they should be entitled to their benefit.
  Sir GERALD HOHLER: I unfeignedly welcome this Bill. There is no ground for saying that hon. Members on this side of the House do not support it. I think I could give reasons to the House, and to hon. Gentlemen opposite, suggesting what really an important subject it is with which we are dealing. May I remind hon. Gentlemen—I will not go back to 1911, but I think I am accurate in my recollection about the Act of 1920. I think the contributions by the workmen— I will not trouble about the women and children, but will use the workmen as an illustration—I think under that Act the contribution of the workman was 4d. and of the employer 5d. Now we have seen it grow under further Acts of Parliament, and we have now got, to my mind, the impossible position of 9d. from the workman and l0d. from the employer. I venture to remind hon. Gentlemen opposite about how much we have heard from them recently on the Pensions Bill being a tax upon industry. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear! "] I am only pointing out to them that they should try to be consistent. In the discussion on this Bill we have heard no reference at all to the endeavour, the active and valuable endeavour, to remove that tax from industry. Why have we heard no reference to that? Under this Bill the contribution payable by the workman is to be reduced to 7d., and by the employer to 8d. That is 2d. on each side taken from industry. To illustrate: An industry employing 1,000 men will by that reduction benefit to the extent of £800 per year, which is a very substantial sum. People who speak of these small sums do not view them in the aggregate. Clearly it is time that subject was dealt with when we are talking on this Bill.
  I have never doubted—I have said so in the country and on the platform—that I believe in this Bill thoroughly. I ask
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  hon. Members to bear this in mind: that they are asking, I do not say for charity, I use the word "benevolence," for the people who are unemployed, but at whose expense? Hon. Gentlemen opposite claim to be the working classes, but this will come out of their fellow men. Do they not see that in the proposals put forward on this side the Government are trying to relieve their fellow men? I ask hon. Members to be consistent. I am not in the least impressed by what they say in my constituency, and I do not think in any other. The hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for South Shields (Mr. Harney) argued about finance, but I recommend him, if he wishes to carry his audience with him, not to make that speech before a public audience.
  The point I want to make is this: that these proposals are not only an immense advantage to the man, but to his employer. The Bill is going to do another thing for which we have heard so much argument in this House, particularly from the party opposite. All these insurances are very splendid, but they all put up the cost of living and the cost of production. Take the employer. His payment is 9d. That must come out of the article that he is producing, and the buyer has to pay the price. It is the same thing in regard to the workman. So long as hon. Members allow these things to continue—these contributions to rise steadily—they are burdening industry and not assisting it. I want to see something done to assist industry. I am fully in sympathy with what has been said, I will not say believed in. I am just as sympathetic on unemployment as anybody, and as to the contribution being paid, but I say you are increasing the trouble by the burdens you are putting on. That is why some of us want to relieve industry.
  Having dealt with that point, which, it seems to me, is all-important, may I remind hon. Members opposite that this fund is in debt to the extent, if I am right, of about £15,000,000. May I remind them as to who has to pay a large proportion of this debt? It is the working man. He has to pay towards it as well as his employer. The greater you increase this debt, the more you are increasing the burden on industry, and intensifying the position we are in. Therefore, I welcome this Bill, and I am surprised that hon. Members opposite

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  have not said something about Clause 2. I would just say nothing more than to kindly remind them that they seem to have forgotten Clause 2 when they put down this Amendment. I think it would have been wiser to have accepted Clause 2. To my mind unemployment insurance is all very well. The main principle of it I entirely and absolutely approve. I approve of the original Act, but whether we are wise, in a time of this great depression, to deal in this manner and cast the whole of this burden in the direction we are is quite another thing. That is not a point which hon. Members have been dealing with in this Bill at all. Hon. Members never gave a word of blessing to the Clause which reduces the contributions of the workmen and the employer. Not a bit of it. They forgot all about it, but if they had taken the view I am putting we should never have heard that speech with its reference to the Uriah Heep Government and all those other lovely literary references which the hon. Member was pleased to give us.
  I approve of the principle of giving the power to the Minister of Labour. We can always discuss the Ministry of Labour Vote when it comes up. Hon. Members will be there next year, and if they do not like the way in which the Minister has administered this Act they can ask for the Vote for his Department to be put down, and move an Amendment to wipe out the whole of his salary, if necessary. Not only do I believe in that principle, but I am bound to say, and I say it quite convincedly, that I am in favour of the period of six days. I am not afraid of anything I say. They can hear it in the country if they like-that is, in my constituency, for nobody else cares about it except them. I am not going into the rather complex way in which the continuous periods are calculated under the other Act that we are amending. Possibly hon. Members will think that is because I do not understand it, and that may be one possible reason. The hon. Member for St. Helens (Mr. Sexton) gave us an admirable illustration of why the six days is right. As I understand it, he spoke for the casual workers, the dock workers, more particularly—I do not say he confined himself to that class, but he referred more
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  particularly to the dock workers. Their labour was ever casual. A man may earn a good sum at casual work, and yet draw unemployment benefit. I do not say that he does, but if the Act is so drawn as to admit of that it ought to be amended. That is my view, and I am entirely in favour of the six days.
  There are in industry a lot of skilled men, a great many of whom, I dare say, have never been out of a job in their lives because of the steady character of their work, and their own excellent characters, too—they are the sort of men the employers would be the last to part with. We are putting all the burden upon these men, amongst others, of finding the necessary funds to pay people who may or may not be bad workmen, or indifferent workmen, who may or may not have many failings to which all human nature is liable, and, in addition, may not be very skilled at their job. To throw the whole burden on those steady men is wrong, and I think the Government are making a great step forward in bringing up this Bill—as will be seen when it is fairly and honestly examined —to relieve the great load resting upon trade and the men who are in work. The hon. Member for St. Helens said that, including their sickness benefit contributions and trade union contributions, men at present are paying something like 18d. a week. [HON. MEMBERS: "More! "] I should have thought it was more. That is a very heavy burden. Let hon. Members reflect how that depresses the spending power of those men. In the present great depression In trade we should be very glad if anyone could see a way of lightening that burden until the whole world gets back to work again. I have heard no proposal put forward that will see us through, but, alt the same, we ought to try to relieve as far as we can the men who are keeping industry going, both employers and employed. Let the men retain as much of their wages as possible to spend. Some amendment of this Bill may be necessary, and I am sure any proposals put forward will be dispassionately and carefully considered by the Government, but do not let us condemn a Bill the whole object of which is to try to improve the position of those whom hon. Members: opposite have ever claimed to speak for, and claimed alone to have the right to

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  speak for—though I doubt the justice of that claim. This Bill will have my cordial support, and I am very glad that it has been introduced.
  Mr. LANSBURY: I would like to say, first of all, that the hon. Member for the Sutton Division (Viscountess Astor), whom I am sorry has gone, is quite wrong in thinking that anyone on these benches desires to perpetuate a system which makes legislation of this kind necessary. We would very much prefer that the Government, with their great majority, should settle down to the task of finding how to provide work instead of unemployed pay. None of us has ever tried to teach the people that able-bodied people should live without work. We want all the able-bodied to work, from one end of society to the other; and the only objection we have to the sort of statements we have heard to-night is that the proposal is applied only to the people at the bottom and of the social scale. The first thing that struck me when I read the actuary's report on this Bill was, where is the £6,500,000 coming from? Although there have been a lot of speeches from the other side, more than we have had during the last few weeks, not one hon. Member opposite has attempted to answer that question. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw) asked that question at the beginning of his speech, and I thought someone on the other side would have dealt with the point. The hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Gillingham (Sir G. Hohler) talked about removing the burdens from the shoulders of the workers. We want to do that, and if you ask us where the money is to come from, we say the Chancellor of the Exchequer ought not to have reduced the Super-tax or have taken the 6d. off the Income Tax. Then there would have been plenty of money to relieve this burden and provide for widows' pensions, without the sort of jigsaw puzzle arrangements we have under this Bill and the other arrangements the Chancellor is going to make. The fact of the matter is, when we go into this financial juggle—I cannot call it anything else—
  Sir G. HOHLER: I believe the hon. Member thinks he is replying to my
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  speech, but really I did not say anything about this at all.
  Mr. LANSBURY: Those who are listening to me, and those who happen to have the misfortune to read what both of us have said, will be able to judge whether I am replying to his arguments or not. I understand the purport of his speech to be that he and other hon. Members opposite desire to remove burdens from the shoulders of honest working men, who are being pressed down by the contributions they have to pay, and that they desire also to relieve the contributions which the employer has to pay and which are a burden on industry. In answer to that I was saying that the Chancellor of the Exchequer ought not to have taken 6d. off the Income Tax or reduced the Super-tax, and that if he had not done so we should have had sufficient money with which to carry on, without recourse to any legislation such as we are discussing to-night. This Bill is not designed primarily to reduce unemployment contributions from employers and workmen, but to ease the cost of the contributory scheme of widows' and orphans' pensions.
  How are we going to get the 6.500,000? I maintain that we are going to gel it at the expense of starving the most defenceless portion of the working-class. The hon. and learned Gentleman, in talking of casual labourers, said a man might earn a lot of money in, perhaps, one or two days. Even if he does, he and his wife have a great deal to make up, because there are days and days when the man does not earn anything at all. I do not know whether hon. Members realise what a terrible scourge casual, intermittent work is to the working people in certain districts. When I first went into public life as a poor law guardian, 33 years ago, the late Charles Booth was making his investigations in East London. He investigated the conditions in the borough of Poplar, and he recorded that 25 per cent of the male wage-earners of that district never knew from one day to the other when they would got work of any sort or kind, and he said, what is perfectly true, "How can you expect a people to be thrifty when they do not know from one day to another what money they will have to be, thrifty on?" I am speaking in the presence of my colleague

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  the hon. Member for South Poplar (Mr. March), who will agree with me that the condition of things is worse to-day than it was 30 odd years ago; and then people wonder why we get impatient, and especially get impatient when a Bill like this is brought in.
  I do not want to say hard things about the right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Labour. We have known one another very many years. He undertook part of the inquiries that were carried on under the late Poor Law Commission, and he knows the facts. I suppose he knows the facts about casual labour better, probably, than any other Member on the Front Bench, with the possible exception of the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I cannot understand how he can stand at that box and defend this proposal to alter the 3 days to 6 days. I asked the Clerk of our Board of Guardians yesterday what effect the reduction of the waiting period a year ago had on conditions there. Without being able to give me a great number of figures, he was able to show that the number of men coming to the Guardians for relief immediately dropped. Many men were able to carry on without coming to the Guardians at all. It is said that 70,000 men were put on the unemployment benefit through the lowering of the waiting period. It must be admitted equally, that 70.000 will go off again if the period is increased to 6 days. Hon. Members opposite cannot have it both ways. They cannot say that by lowering the period from 6 days to 3 days we put that number on the unemployment fund, and that they will not go off when the waiting period is enlarged. The right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Labour, in answering my hon. Friend the Member for St. Helen's (Mr. Sexton) in that bland manner of his said he hoped the hardships would not be so very bad, but he cannot get away from the fact that what is proposed will hit those 70,000 men.
  8.0 P.M.
  There is another side to this Bill. If this Measure passes you are going to give the Minister of Labour power to issue Regulation. It is admitted that the right hon. Gentleman in using his discretion will do so in regard to classes and not individuals. Before the Labour Govern-
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  ment came into office, and before the present Minister of Labour took office, young people were not allowed to have unemployment payment if they were living at home with their parents. Here we had the old doctrine of the family income business brought in. Some hon. Member opposite earlier in the Debate said that people who had children ought to accept the responsibility for them. I take the case of a man who gets married and lives with his father and mother. I have known cases before August last where a father living at home with his son's family, because of his son's earnings, has been refused unemployment pay. What is going to happen, Where you are going to get this £6,500,000 from is partly from the people who will have to wait for six days, partly from the people of the character I have just mentioned, and also from the young men and young women. In some cases they do not get this benefit until they are 25 or 30 years of age. I have known of a working carpenter living with his son or daughter, and they have paid into the insurance fund, and when their benefit has run out and they have gone up to get unemployment pay, investigations have been made as to the family income, and because some committee or some umpire thinks that they have enough to maintain the family as a family income, they deny unemployment pay to these people. You may think that is a very good principle, but I maintain that is is a bad one, because this is what you are doing and this is what you are giving the Minister power to do.
  We shall have Regulations issued which will bring back this old condition of things, and what happens? You at once lower the standard of living of the whole family. You put on to the father, working hard, the responsibility, in addition to feeding himself and his wife and any young children, what, I maintain, is something that the community ought to bear, and not that man and his family at all. It is for that reason that I am against this iniquitous proposal to give this power to the Minister. I respect the right hon. Gentleman very much as a man, but I would not give him this power because of the tremendous pressure which is being put up against him on this sub-

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  ject. I am sure this provision would not have been in the Bill had it not been for the Press campaign for economy. Is it not unworthy of a great historic party, when you are crying out for economy, that the only place you can start it is right down at the bottom of the social scale? It seems to me that the only thing you can attack is the unfortunate people who are victims of conditions over which they have no control whatsoever. I think that these propositions are the meanest that this House has ever had to discuss. I cannot for the life of me understand how the present Minister of Labour has summed up courage enough to bring forward such proposals. There is no hon. Member sitting on the benches opposite who does not know this question through and through. It is often said that this is an insurance scheme, and that when people are out of work year after year you cannot expect that insurance scheme to go on maintaining them. Lord Derby once told us that when the War ended, in order to avert civil war and revolution, it was necessary to put big sums of money into the unemployment insurance fund in order to keep the people quiet. I want to know if hon. Gentlemen opposite subscribe to that doctrine. If you do not, then you should not vote for this Bill, because it is simply dotting the i's and crossing the t's of everything Lord Derby said. You would not have dared to do this on the eve of the Armistice, but you are now sending ex-service men out into the street
  Down in Poplar, although we are a red borough, and although I was against the War and did everything I could to get it stopped, yet Poplar sent more men to that wretched war in proportion to its population than any district throughout the metropolis. To-day you are making them understand that when their children were sacrificed, and when they themselves made sacrifices, they were doing it for a nation that is now paying them back in this fashion. I would be ashamed if I had held up my Sand for any single man to go to the War, and I should never have been able to face them after such legislation as this. Down on the Floor of the House I will fight this Bill through to the end as far as I can. You may go out and misrepresent what we are doing if you like. If
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  this Bill is thrown out and nothing is done to restore the power we want restored under Clause 2, there will not be so much hardship as if the Bill goes through as it is. This Bill is going to perpetuate dire miserable poverty in a way that you ought to understand. It is for these reasons that I hope my hon. Friends will go on fighting this Bill, and if it gets into Committee I hope we shall do our best to obstruct it and prevent it becoming law in any shape or form.
  Sir PARK GOFF: I rise to make a few observations on the extension of the waiting period from three days to six days. I think the proposal in the Bill will prove to be a most serious hardship for those whom I have the honour to represent, who have been the hardest hit of all through no fault of their own. You have only to consider the position to be convinced what a hardship this will be to the thousands of people who have been out of work for so many years in Cleveland. There we have 19 ironstone mines and only five of them are working, and some of those are only working one, two or three days a week. That is a very serious hardship to these men. As regards this extension from throe days to six, they do not want even a gap of three days. A great number of these men have been out of work since the 11th February, 1921. For this area I had some statistics sent me this morning from which I find that there are 95 blast furnaces, and only 30 of them are working now. There are over 22,000 people out of work in Cleveland, and they have been unemployed since the 11th February, 1921. The ironstone miners have done everything they could to assist the mineowners, and they have accepted throughout the whole of that period without demur all the reductions that they were asked to accede to. Our men there are only too ready and willing to help those who wish to help them. They do not want unproductive or palliative employment at all. What they want is not so much the relieving of unemployment as the provision of employment.
  This is the only staple industry in Cleveland. They are always the first to come out when work stops and the last to restart when work commences again. Out of 22,000 unemployed in this district during the last 4½ years, I have only known of three cases of alleged fraud.

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  Since November last, as my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary knows full well, I have introduced on many occasions several deputations from Cleveland on this very subject, and also on the subject of unemployment generally. The proposed dock at the mouth of the Tees which was going to give work to thousands for several years would be of enormous benefit to the shipping of the port, and an enormous advantage to all the seafaring elements on the north-east coast of England. When you consider that all we want there is a subsidy to assist that dock, when you consider that there is only one stumbling block in the way, when you remember that you are going to employ thousands of men, what a relief that would be when you remember that one union alone is relieving distress to-day at the rate of £3,000 a week, and in some parts it represents 3s. 9d. per capita of unemployment on the rates.
  Here is a great opportunity for a great Minister to take advantage of relieving the rates, and finding remunerative employment on works which will be a local, national and even an international benefit. We have 22,000 people out of work and they have been unemployed for 4½ years with all the misery and poverty which that brings in its train, and that is enough to break the stoutest heart. I have taken deputations to four or five different Ministers. They admit that we have a great grievance, and appreciate the courage and fortitude of all the Cleveland unemployed. I think my hon. Friends opposite will not deny that we are in a unique and exceptional position, because I represent the greatest industrial area of its kind in Great Britain, famous throughout the world for its ore and iron and steel. If the Minister agrees that it is in a unique and exceptional position, I think I am justified in maintaining that it deserves special consideration. On these grounds I appeal most sincerely and earnestly to my right hon. Friend to do what is in his power as far as this district is concerned. I ask him to exercise his power of discretion, or his power of waiver, and not to break the backs of those who cannot continue to bear this intolerable burden.
  Mr. MACLEAN: I am one of those who, having read this Bill, having read
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  the Actuary's statement affecting the Bill, and having heard the Minister's explanatory speech when he moved the Second Reading to-day, intend to vote against the Bill, in spite of the many explanations and expositions we have had from Members on the other side. There is one thing that I should like either the Minister of Labour or the Parliamentary Secretary, when he replies to the Debate, to make clear to the House, and that is with regard to the Actuary's statement at the beginning of the second paragraph on page 4, where he says:
  "I estimate that the relief to the Fund derived from the new restrictions upon the granting of extended benefit and the extension of the waiting period is equivalent to £6,500,000."
  I want the Minister of Labour to tell the House why he did not state what those new restrictions are. They are not in the Bill, but the Actuary must have known what they are to be before he could estimate the saving. What are they?
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: I can only speak again by leave of the House, but, if the House will allow me, I should like to say that they are the same restrictions as to classes which have been stated for many months, and there is no intention of going beyond them. They are exactly the same classes, namely, young men living with their parents who are able to support them, married women living with their husbands who are in work, certain classes of half-timers, and also aliens, with exceptions, who have not been resident in this country before the 1st January, 1911, or, as the discretion will be exercised, a date that proceeds as the years go on, so that it will apply to those who have not been in this country for a sufficient length of time to make it quite sure that they have become members of the population like ourselves. Perhaps the hon. Member will forgive me if I just explain that the last thing I wished was to withhold any information from the House, and I have on my notes a note to mention these classes, but it escaped my eye as I was passing along, because I did not want to take up too much time.
  Mr. MACLEAN: I am certain that the House will accept the right hon. Gentleman's explanation. I want now to put this question: Is it the intention of the

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  Minister of Labour to put any restrictions upon the section of workers who are thrown idle owing to a trade dispute?
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: There is no intention in the Bill of dealing with that section.
  Mr. MACLEAN: I am glad that we are free of this matter as far as it has gone, because it was quite evident, both from the contents of the Bill and from the speech of the Minister earlier in the afternoon, that the House had not been made acquainted with the restrictions which he intended to put on certain classes of people, and with which the actuary himself must have been acquainted before he arrived at his estimate of the saving. Consequently, in my opinion, it was necessary that the House should have the facts that were placed before the actuary when he made his calculations.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND indicated assent.
  Mr. MACLEAN: There is one thing that I should like to know when the Parliamentary Secretary comes to reply, and that is the amount of saving from the two sections—from the waiting period and from these classes which have now been enumerated. The amounts are lumped together at £6,500,000; how much is it estimated will be saved from, each section —how much on the waiting period and how much on the classes? I do not mean how much on any single class, but the summing up of all the classes that the right hon. Gentleman has mentioned. I trust that that information also will be given to us later in the evening, because I think it is necessary that the House should know it.
  With regard to some other points that have been raised during the Debate, the Minister of Labour, in a very frank speech, stated his reasons for seeking this saving. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury), I am not putting anything personal into what I am saying; all those on the Front Bench, when it is full, come under the ban. I consider this to be one of the meanest Bills ever introduced into this House. I consider that for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to take credit to himself for bringing in a Bill to give contributory pensions to widows,
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  orphans and aged people, upon the saving of £6,500,000 of which the poorest of the poor who are unemployed and in a most defenceless condition are going to be robbed, is not only financial juggling, but actual dishonesty to the people of this country who have paid their insurance contributions. It is actually tricking the people of this country.
  Mr. T. HENDERSON: On a point of Order. Would it be in order to ask you, Sir, to agree to the adjournment of the House until the different parties assemble in greater numbers? There are no Liberals and only eight Conservatives present while we are discussing this very important Bill.
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER (Captain FitzRoy): Between the hours of 8.15 and 9.15 a count cannot be taken.
  Mr. HENDERSON: No, Sir, but I am asking that the House be adjourned.
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: I could not take a Motion of that kind in the middle of a speech of an hon. Member.
  Mr. WESTWOOD: On the same point of Order. May I ask if you would be prepared to accept a Motion for the Adjournment of the House after my hon. Friend's speech is finished, so that we could discuss the absence of the Tory party and the complete disappearance of the Liberal party from this Debate?
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
  Mr. MARCH: Are we to take it that they are very much interested in the subject that is before the House?
  Mr. MACLEAN: I am no party to these interruptions, although the Liberal party has continued the process that commenced two elections ago, and now has disappeared entirely. Whether that will be to their credit or discredit, in a discussion of this kind, will remain for their representatives in this House to explain to their constituents. As I was pointing out, the circumstances that have led to the introduction of this Bill to effect a saving of £6,500,000, and to give to the Minister of Labour further discretionary powers in addition to those he already possesses, are, in my opinion, such as this House ought not to agree to. We ought to agree, and I

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  am certain that we should agree, and that the House would give unanimous approval, to a Bill of only one Clause to give an extension of the period as stated in Clause 2. I am certain that that would receive the unanimous support of all Members of the House. When the Bill goes into Committee I suggest to the Minister of Labour that he should endeavour to amend it, to make it a one-Clause Measure, to cut out the part extending the waiting period and the part that gives him further discretionary powers. These things, I am certain, would make it an agreed Measure, but it cannot be an agreed Measure on the lines on which he has introduced it and on which some of his supporters evidently want to assist him in carrying it through. What, after all, are the circumstances of the situation? You are trying to take away £6,500,000 from people to whom that money will be a perfect godsend, and you are placing those same individuals from whom you are going to take this large sum upon the rates of their parish council and the boards of guardians, who will require to pay them the exact £6,500,000 that you as a Department are going to save. You cannot get away from that.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND indicated dissent.
  Mr. MACLEAN: It is no use the Minister shaking his head. If you are going to refuse these people unemployment benefit where are they going to have the benefit? They can only get it from the parish council or the board of guardians or starve. [An HON. MEMBER: "Steal!"] There again the Home Secretary will be after them hot and fast, and I have no doubt he will blame the Minister of Labour for the increase in the number of criminals. This is one of those hastily conceived Measures that come from any Government which has within it as a Member of its Cabinet the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Epping (Mr. Churchill). They are all wooden down there. The fact of the matter, of course, is that it is a sanctuary for him to go to and he has found sanctuary in the bosom of the Government, after himself telling the country 18 months ago at Manchester that Britain without Liberalism was Britain without its soul. He has shed his Liberalism and given up his conscience and gone to the Tory
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  party. I suggest to the Minister of Labour that he should abandon this attempt to prey upon the poor people of the country. This is a national question. It is still a war question. You are still paying interest upon War Loan, because you look upon it as part of the indebtedness of the country owing to the War. You have to-day this vast mass of unemployed men and women, the result of the War, every bit as much a national obligation as the payment of war interest I am certain that no Member of the Cabinet, and no Member on the Tory benches, would be agreeable to a reduction in the rate of War Loan interest, much less the repudiation of that part of the National Debt which was taken for the last War. If you are prepared to recognise your national obligations to the financiers you have to recognise this obligation to the human flesh and the brains and brawn of the country. You cannot escape your obligation. As long as you continue this method you cannot tell the amount of friction that is likely to arise. You cannot tell the amount of unconstitutional movement, as you think it, which may arise.
  The Noble Lady the Member for Sutten (Viscountess Astor) was gravely concerned about the young people. The Minister of Labour knows perfectly well that in every big industrial constituency to-day there are boys who, in normal times, having left school, would have gone into the shipyard, into the engineering shop, into a workshop of some kind, and there been trained in some useful trade, going through the various stages of apprenticeship. He knows perfectly well that thousands upon thousands of these boys to-day, at 18 or 19 years of age, have never done a day's work, have never served an hour's apprenticeship, and are becoming a problem not only for the Minister of Labour, but for every Department of this Government and every civic authority in the country to take in hand. These are problems that the Minister knows. They produce this Bill, taking away from the unemployed £6,500, 00, cutting down, by placing additional restrictions upon certain classes, the number of people who are going to get unemployment benefit, making the conditions mere rigorous to obtain employment than they are to-day, and making it more difficult for them to

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  obtain unemployment benefit. The Prime Minister hopes that by a Bill of this kind you are going to promote peace in the country and co-operation in industry. You can grind the people of the country down to a certain depth. They will submit to a lot for the sake of the children and for those who are dependent upon them, but I warn the Minister of Labour and the Prime Minister, and those who sit with him, that they cannot crush the people down too far. There may arise the conditions that arose in ancient Rome described by Macaulay:
  "Lest when the latest hope is fled
  Ye taste of their despair,
  And learn by fear in some dread hour
  How much the wretched dare."
  Do not drive the people down into a wretched condition. Do not drive them down to the lowest depths of despair, or you may find out, when it is too late, that your maladministration has brought about conditions such as those of us who are lovers of peace would gladly wish had never come into our midst.
  Lieut. - Commander BURNEY: The speech of the hon. Member who has just spoken is somewhat characteristic of those he gives the House. The first parts are always logical and reasonable, but towards the end he gives us a pyrotechnic display of sentimentality. I am certain he does not believe the Prime Minister, of all men, is endeavouring to grind the faces of the poor. I suggest we should consider the Bill on its merits. I congratulate the Government on endeavouring to deal with this question, because they are endeavouring to deal with two very important matters. Firstly, they are endeavouring to relieve industry, and on that we have heard very little so far, and, secondly, they are endeavouring to prevent persons obtaining the benefit of the dole when they are not really entitled to it. In so far as their endeavours are concerned, I think the Government are to be congratulated.
  I am not so certain, however, whether we are dealing with this question upon the basis or in the manner in which it should be dealt with. In so far as any Government has to tackle this question from the practical point of view, I think it would be very difficult to conceive measures more practical, and, perhaps, more efficient, than those which the Government are now producing.
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  But I only look upon them purely as a temporary expediency to deal with a very pressing matter. I doubt whether we ought not entirely to recast our ideas in regard to the whole of our unemployment insurance policy. To begin with, it is not an Insurance Bill. The beneficiaries are paying one-third of the total contributions which are to provide the benefit. The other two-thirds are coming, one from certain selected sections of the community, in the sense of industry, and the third portion is coming from the State as a whole.
  I think we ought to consider whether or not we ought to deal with our unemployment insurance upon two grounds. Firstly, upon the ground of insurance. If it is to be dealt with purely on an insurance basis, I am in agreement with a great deal of what has been said from the other side, because it is very difficult to defend any of these measures if the question is dealt with purely upon the basis of insurance. The whole business is complicated by the fact that the benefit accruing to the beneficiaries is very much greater than that which they have themselves paid for; greater to the extent of one-third from industry and one-third from the State. Therefore, we may ask whether the time has not come to reconsider our whole policy in regard to the question of insurance.
  I am not one of those who agree either with the President of the Board of Trade or with the Minister of Labour in regard to the way in which they look upon this unemployment problem. If I am wrong, I hope the Minister of Labour will interrupt me. I had not the privilege of hearing his speech as I was detained. I believe it to he the fact that both the President of the Board of Trade and the Minister of Labour have stated that they do not believe that the present unemployment on the scale we now have it is anything but temporary. Neither do they believe that the causes underlying that unemployment are anything but temporary, and due to the War. I take a very different attitude.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: I hope my hon. and gallant Friend will not think I want to interrupt him; but I do not think I ever expressed such an opinion. I do say, frankly, that many of the causes of unemployment are, I think,

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  ultimately due to the War but whether they are of a temporary or more permanent character I have never expressed an opinion.
  Lieut.-Commander BURNEY: I am very glad to hear the Minister of Labour say that, because I think it is very necessary that not only the Government but Government Departments should thoroughly investigate and come to a conclusion as to whether these causes of unemployment are temporary or whether they are likely to be permanent. Whether they are temporary or whether they are permanent has a very great bearing upon the finance of this Bill. If we take unemployment as being in certain industries permanent, then, surely, the relief to that industry should be national. If, on the other hand, unemployment in any industry is sporadic, then I think it should clearly be said that the relief to that industry should fall upon the industry. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to separate the consideration in this Bill as to how we not only propose to deal with our whole problem of unemployment, but as to whether we are satisfied in our own minds that the causes are temporary or permanent.
  I believe that we in this country are going through one of those great periodic changes in the history of nations, and that it is due to scientific development and advance that we are in the condition that we are to day. The Minister of Labour, in a speech which I did hear a week or two ago, and which I should like to criticise, said that if the cost of coal could be cut down by 2s. 6d. per ton, there would be no unemployment in the coal trade.
  Mr. TINKER: Because we should be able to recover our foreign markets.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: Part, not the whole.
  Lieut.-Commander BURNEY: He said that we should recover the bulk of our foreign trade, and that therefore there would be very little unemployment in the coalfields. I think that is a fair expression of what was said. So far as reducing costs by cutting down wages in the coal trade are concerned, how does that alter the fact that invention has caused great hydro-electric power stations to be
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  erected in Northern Italy, permanently reducing the demand for coal from our mines. How does it alter the fact that Scandinavian countries do the same thing? How does it prevent the development of methods for burning brown coal and other types of low-grade coal, with the result that the brown coalfields in Brazil and in Australia are being developed, and to-day are permanently taking away coal markets from this country.
  That state of change is taking place, not only in the coal trade, but in many other trades, and it is occurring because we are going through a great change in our development as a nation. I made a speech on unemployment a few weeks ago in which I made an appeal to the Leader of the Opposition to work upon this problem in conjunction with the Prime Minister and to try, purely as a non-party committee, to find some common grounds and some common policy between the parties under which this problem could be dealt with. It is useless for each party in turn to endeavour to deal with these various problems of unemployment, unemployment insurance and the like, if we feel that the next party coming into power, by the change of luck at the Election, is going to reverse the policy which has been brought in. It is a great waste of national effort, and that is the sort of thing which every sensible man wishes to avoid. In this great crisis of our national existence— in my opinion it is a great crisis of our existence—I may be wrong, I hope I am wrong, I believe the condition of this country is going to grow steadily worse, that the unemployment figures are going to go up and that an increased burden will be placed upon the community as a whole because our unemployment figures go worse, so will our position again be more difficult. That is why I say at this crisis of our national life it would well become the Leader of the Opposition, and it would well become the Leader of the party which is not in existence at the present time in this Debate—
  Mr. MACLEAN: Make your appeal to the Liberal party.
  Lieut.-Commander BURNEY: I do not make much appeal to the Liberal party, for the reason that they are mainly composed of doctrinaire and academic persons. I want to appeal to practical

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  persons on each side of the House who are not hero as professional politicians, but who are here because they have businesses to run and men to employ, and because they feel the responsibilities and the troubles with which the country is now faced. I believe that the country would welcome any move by the Leader of the Opposition to have a non-party conference with the Prime Minister to see in what way these great questions could be dealt with by an inter-party Committee.
  Mr. BECKETT: Is the hon. and gallant Gentleman aware that I asked the Prime Minister to have a conference of this sort and that he refused?
  Lieut.-Commander BURNEY: If the hon. Member made that suggestion, I congratulate him on having put forward such a proposal.
  Mr. BECKETT: Do you congratulate the Prime Minister on his refusal?
  Lieut.-Commander BURNEY: Perhaps the Prime Minister did not appreciate what was said. I believe what I am saying and I propose to say it. If the Prime Minister does not agree with what I am saying probably he will not take much notice of it, but it would be a very bad thing for the Conservative party if Back Bench Members did not say what they thought. But I do not want to be put off my line of argument. It is difficult to pursue a consecutive argument when one is continuously interrupted. I come back to the question of dealing with unemployment insurance and unemployment as a whole. If we take it as a fact that many of our industries are undergoing a great change, owing to the changing position of the country and that the changing position of this country is due to the fact that a certain new value is being put upon raw materials in various parts of the world, then we come to this conclusion that many of our industries, such as the coal trade, the steel and iron trade, and the shipbuilding trade, are likely to have permanently very large figures for unemployment until the persons in those trades have been reduced to the number required for those industries in this country.
  If that be so, it is obviously unfair to tax those industries with the upkeep of the men out of employment in those
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  trades, because it is a national charge, just as the War was a great national charge. This charge, which is being introduced into this country and imposed upon this country because of the re-orientation of values, is just as much a national charge as the War or any other great enterprise of that character. Therefore, if we deal with trades which have an unemployment figure of more than 10 per cent., and on the figures for those trades come to the conclusion that one of these great charges is taking place, then it is unfair, and goes to the root of the stability of unemployment insurance, if you leave those industries to be dealt with as if the unemployment were merely sporadic unemployment.
  Then I come to the other industries in which the unemployment is sporadic, dependant on various minor stages. In these cases I think it only right that the industry should support those persons who are out of employment. There is one further fact. Human nature is no better in the labouring classes than in any other class. [HON. MEMBERS: "And no worse! "] Therefore, if public money is being doled out, a very large number of people will try to get as much as they can for as little work as they can. Accordingly, it is in the interests of all parties that, when public money is being doled out for any purposes, the cases should be vetted and considered with great care, and we should devote great care to our administration. There again, there is a great difference between a true insurance policy, under which people are entitled to insurance, and a policy by which we supplement what they are getting with benefit from the State or from the employer.
  Then we must consider the difficulty of getting these numerous eases. I think undoubtedly that they are numerous. I would not like to express an opinion as to the percentage, but many persons in this House will recollect having brought to their notice cases of people who draw benefit who are not entitled to it. There-tore, I should prefer those industries in which the unemployment may be termed sporadic to be put upon the local rates, and not upon the State. I suggest that for this reason. In reference to the contributions which come from the public it makes very little difference to the taxpayer as a whole whether they are what

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  is called borne by the State or by the locality [HON. MEMBERS: "No! "] But there is a very urgent desire on the part of those who live in a district, and have to contribute to the rates, to see that those persons who are not entitled to draw the benefits do not draw them. Therefore, it seems that there are very good grounds for reconsidering the whole of this unemployment insurance business.
  I think that the Minister has done what he could in the Measure which he has introduced, but I think that it is a thoroughly unsatisfactory one. I think that it will undoubtedly cause considerable hardship in many parts of the country. But from the practical point of view again it is very difficult to introduce a great change in a series of Bills like those which govern the whole of our policy of unemployment insurance. Hon. Members will agree that, if we are to upset the whole basis of our unemployment insurance policy, it is not a matter which can be dealt with in a few weeks or months, but is a matter which has to be very carefully considered by the Government and the Department. Therefore, when we consider this Bill, if it is a Bill which is presented as a purely temporary expedient, I am prepared to support it, but I would like to obtain from the Minister of Labour an expression of opinion to whether it would be possible, thoroughly to investigate the whole of our policy in regard to unemployment insurance. I do not believe that consideration will be of any value to this House unless, when the matter is considered, it is considered in conference with the Labour party, because we do want continuity of policy in those matters.
  In conclusion I should like to draw attention to a matter which the House should seriously consider, as I believe the effect of the financial policy pursued by foreign countries upon unemployment problems over here is very considerable. What has happened in foreign countries such as France, Germany, Belgium and the like has been that all the money that has been lent to the State has been largely written off, and not only have the internal loans been greatly reduced, but the loans to industry in the form of debentures have shaved a like result. It is pertinent to consider what has been the effect upon our labour market of this
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  inflation policy in those countries and from which we import many of our manufactures. Owing to the inflation policy, the number of persons who are left without having to work is very much less than in this country, and for that reason the competition in those countries for employment is very much fiercer than it is in this country. The result is that not only can those countries get their men and get better men for the same rate of wages as is paid here, but also, owing to that much fiercer competition, there is a considerable decrease in the salaries and wages which persons will take. That, again, reflects upon this country, and make? it much more difficult to compete in our manufactures. One result of this has been the effort made by this Government to reduce the burden upon industry in this country, and one method of so doing has been the introduction of this Bill. I suggest that the whole matter should be reconsidered, because all unemployment insurance is bound up with our unemployment policy as a whole. I hope that there may be some possibility of the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister meeting and endeavouring to find out some line of common advance which pan be taken by the two great parties in the State, in a common attack upon what I believe to be a vital danger to this country.
  9.0 P.M.
  Mr. CONNOLLY: The hon. and gallant Member for Uxbridge (Lieut.-Commander Burney) generally makes a fairly valuable contribution to the Debates, and I was glad to hear him express the opinion that unemployment was as much a national responsibility now as it was immediately after the Armistice. I regret to say that that opinion is not general upon the benches opposite. That was fairly apparent this afternoon when the ex-Minister of Labour was replying to the present Minister. My right hon. Friend was dealing with the £6,500,000 which is to be saved, according to the actuary's report, under this Bill, and when he claimed that that money belonged to the unemployed, several Members opposite indulged in laughter that was both loud and long and derisive. I want to remind hon. Members opposite and the Minister of Labour in particular, and my own colleagues, what actually

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  took place in 1918. I am glad to see that one Member of the Liberal party has arrived. He complained about the House being very tame when he was speaking this afternoon. I would remind him that the benches of the whole of his party have been empty for the last couple of hours.
  I want to remind the House of what took place in October, 1918, in regard to unemployment benefit, when the national responsibility was realised. Eight general secretaries of trade unions were summoned to London. Two of them are on these benches now, one the hon. Member for Newton (Mr. E. Young), who spoke this afternoon, and the other myself representing my own society in place of our general secretary. There was no request then on the part of trade unions for an increase of benefit. There was no unemployment in October, 1918. We met the representatives of the War Office, the Admiralty and the Board of Trade. We never asked for any increase of unemployment benefit, yet there were proposals put before us to increase the benefit to 25s. per week, and that sum was ultimately increased to 29s. Why? Because the country fund responsible Ministers then were of the same opinion as is the hon. and gallant Member for Uxbridge to-night, namely, that it was a national responsibility and there was a national danger. The boys were coming home from the Front. We were told that the War was about to end. It was recognised that if men who had been for years engaged in the. exercise of arms were to come home and were compelled to walk about the streets for a sustained period, there would be trouble of a very serious kind. I signed the Government proposals and so did the hon. Member for Newton. These sums were paid to the men for a very considerable period.
  Now there is a change of opinion. National responsibility is not realised. I would warn the House and hon. Members who laughed here this afternoon, and the Minister of Labour himself, that although the danger may not be so palpable or so obvious, it may be none the less real now. If the first Clause of this Bill goes through unaltered, I warn the Minister that there is real danger, just as there was in October, 1918. I read a speech delivered quite recently by a prominent man, who, speaking of the danger of
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  revolution in this country, said, "There is as much revolutionary tendency in Englishmen as there is in a plum pudding." There is not much revolution about a plum pudding when it is outside, but when it gets in side the case is sometimes otherwise There may be danger. I hope there may not be. I am not an alarmist, but going about my own constituency of East Newcastle I realise that simmering beneath the surface is a feeling of extreme discontent. Men are on the margin now, and if they are pushed any further there may be trouble. The hon. Member for St. Helens (Mr. Sexton) and the hon. Member for Rotherhithe (Mr. B. Smith) have dealt very ably with the question of repair work and unskilled men. I only remind the Minister that in addition to the unskilled labourers there are many skilled men who, when they are engaged at all, are engaged on casual work, and that in the shipbuilding and ship-repairing industry particularly we have a large number of men of all trades who are practically engaged upon casual work. I ask him to realise that the first Clause of the Bill is going to bear harshly on these men. They are at present going through a very difficult time, and, if there is to be a reversion to the six days, their difficulty will be to keep within their societies and keep within benefit under the Insurance Act at all.
  The Minister in his speech illustrated the difference between the Bill and the Act of 1924 by an analogy. He was drawing the distinction between standard benefit and uncovenanted or extended benefit, and he said the man entitled to standard benefit was like the man who went into a shop with ready money and who was entitled to buy and to get what he bought, whereas the man entitled only to extended benefit was like a man with no money who went into the shop and asked for credit. That analogy, however, breaks down. As has been said already, this is an insurance scheme and the member who enters in the manner indicated by the Minister without money and asking for credit may not get the credit, but under this Bill he will have to pay for it. I will be interested if the Minister in his reply deals with that point. The first Clause of this Bill, I notice, contains the exact wording of an instruction issued to rota committees

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  three years ago. That wording which it is now sought to incorporate in the Bill is as follows:
  " the Minister may, if, having regard to all the circumstances of the case, he considers it expedient in the public interest so to do authorise that person to receive benefit."
  That was an instruction to rota committees three or three and a-half years ago. At that time I became chairman of one of these committees, and I asked the manager of the exchange how I was to know what was ''expedient in the public interest." I asked what was the determining factor, the guiding principle; what was I to do to mete out justice in conformity with this instruction? He gave me a very simple rule. I do not know whether the Minister knows of it or not, but it was mentioned by the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury). It is a question of the family income. We not only had that as a guiding principle, but we had the exact figure on which to go. We got the figure of 14s. per week per head, and if the family income was at or above that figure, then we were to turn down the applicant. Is that fair under conditions such as prevail? Is it fair when a man comes before the rota committee that the chairman should reckon up the family income, and if it comes to 13s. 9d. per head per week to give benefit, but if it comes to 14s. 1d. per head per week turn down the applicant? Is that insurance or is it charity? I say that going back to the provisions of the 1920 Act, which Clause 1 means, is reverting from an insurance policy to that charity which is condemned by hon. Members opposite.
  The Minister, at considerable length, pointed out to the ex-Minister of Labour that what had been claimed for the Act of 1924 had not been justified. He said extended benefit was never paid as a right and that the Act of 1924 had not conferred that right. If there is no difference between the 1924 Act and the right hon. Gentleman's proposals then why produce the Bill at all? There are only two real proposals in the Bill—one to revert back to the 1920 provisions and the other to extend the waiting period from three to six days. That is all the Bill contains, and when that has been said about it all has been said about it. I draw the atten-
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  tion of the House however to the fact that the men recognise that the 1924 Act did give them the right to extended benefit and took away that aspect of charity which is rightly condemned on all sides of the House.
  I desire to touch upon the injustice of making unemployed men and women pay for the widows' and orphans' pensions and for old age pensions at 65 Is it not a singular thing that the actuary's report shows a saving in contributions amounting almost to the identical sum that will be got in relief under the Bill? The two figures are £6,800,000 relief to industry and £6,500,000 saved by the Bill. These figures taken together mean that the unemployed men and women are going to pay for the pension scheme. I have in mind that the Chancellor of the Exchequer said he anticipated that the unemployed figures were going to be reduced to 800,000. This Bill indicates that to be the settled policy of the Government; that they are determined by hook or by crook to have the figures down to 800,000. I conclude my remarks by emphasising what I said at the outset. The national responsibility is here; the national responsibility exists as it did in 1918, and I warn the Government, if they persist in this course, the danger may not only be real but may become very apparent and very obvious.
  Mr. REMER: I do not propose to follow the numerous speeches of hon. Members opposite as to the seriousness of unemployment in the country at the present time, for the very good reason that I do not think it is a subject of debate at all. I do not think there is any party, whether on the benches opposite, on this side of the House, or even among the remnants of the Liberal party which exist at the present moment to the extent of one member present in the House, who does not feel deeply on this question of unemployment. That problem has baffled all political parties, and it has baffled probably the Labour party when they were in office more than it has baffled any other party, and I think it is rather unbecoming of those hon. and right hon. Members whom we have heard speaking to-day on the subject of unemployment insurance to have dealt with it at such length and forgotten the basic facts of the Bill which we are discussing to-day. If we come to this question of unemployment insurance, it provides an

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  instance of a vicious circle. Unemployment itself causes the insurance benefit to be paid, the insurance benefit causes higher taxation, higher taxation causes in itself unemployment, and there we have the vicious circle, and I feel very strongly that we should come down to realise what are the basic facts upon which we, who are sitting on these benches, and the hon. and right hon. Members opposite, are divided as a matter of principle.
  I heard the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury) speaking tonight at great length about the sad and difficult situations which arise in the everyday life of the working people. We all know about these things. The hon. Member who has just resumed his seat has also given sad stories of what exists, but do hon. Members opposite not realise that we in this matter are acting as trustees, that we are dealing as trustees with the money that has been subscribed by the working people and the employers of this country, and that we have no moral right whatever to allow people to have these benefits unless they are entitled to them? The right hon. Gentleman interrupted the hon. Member for Govan (Mr. N. Maclean) in the course of his speech, and if you deal with the two specific points which he mentioned, namely, the eases of a wife living with her husband and of a son living with his parents, there we have two cases where we are not entitled, as trustees for this fund, to distribute this money until we are perfectly sure that people who have not subscribed anything whatever or who have subscribed insufficient to secure benefits under the original Act, are entitled to receive benefit.
  I should like the attention of the Minister of Labour for a moment, because I feel a little misgiving on this question of unemployment insurance. Since I have been in Parliament we have had 14 Bills dealing with unemployment insurance. I know that the time is difficult in which to get comprehensive Bills through dealing with the whole subject, but in my view, instead of doing as the right hon. Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw) did when he was Minister of Labour, and instead of doing what my right hon. Friend is doing now, that is, having a patchwork dealing with this problem, I feel that it is necessary to deal with it on a far more com-
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  prehensive scale, and it is my view that this problem cannot be dealt with on national lines, but that the reform of this unemployment insurance question must come on local lines. If we take the boards of guardians, which are distributing a very large amount of relief to the same class of people who are receiving unemployment insurance, there seems to be a great lack of liaison as between the Ministry of Labour, which gives the unemployment insurance, and the boards of guardians, which give outdoor relief, and I think one of the greatest reforms possible is to see that there should be close liaison as between the boards of guardians and the Ministry of Labour.
  I do not know whether I am entitled on this Bill to discuss the wider aspect of it, and I do not propose to do so at length, but it is my view that this country has sooner or later to come to the question of trying to find some means whereby this problem can be dealt with through insurance by industry, rather than on a broad national basis. The right hon. Member for Preston will know that this question was one upon which his Government was defeated, during the life of the last Parliament, on the Report stage of his, I think, No. 4 Bill, but as there were so many Bills during the last Parliament, I am not quite sure of the number. His Government, I say, was defeated on this specific point on the lines of keeping insurance by industry alive as a principle, instead of, as he wanted to do, killing it, and I would impress on the right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Labour that this question of getting more local administration of the Unemployment Insurance Fund will, I am sure, be economical in principle and will prevent fraud, for what we are all really out for is to prevent the fraudulent receiving of the Unemployment Insurance benefit.
  I would now like to come to what is really the dividing line between the party opposite and ourselves. The right hon. Member for Preston will remember very well that when we got upstairs in Committee, Dr. Macnamara, who was then a Member of the House, turned round to the Labour Members, who were supporting the Government of that day, and said: "All through, you have fought the principle of the contributory basis of unemployment insurance." The right

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  hon. Member for Preston must have felt very uncomfortable at that time, because he was trying to defend the principle of the contributory insurance against unemployment, and he will remember very well the incident to which I am referring, because behind him there were the loud cheers of almost very Socialist Member of Parliament of that day. That is the real basis. The right hon. Gentleman when he was in office did everything that it was possible for him to do in order to try to kill the basis of contributory unemployment insurance by making the benefits so large that the scheme would eventually become bankrupt. I say that after consideration, because the whole basis upon which they conducted their operations when in office was to increase the benefits out of all regard whatever to what the actuarial calculations told them would be the position. I would remind the right hon. Gentleman that, when that Bill was going through Committee, Miss Bondfield, who was then Parliamentary Secretary, told us definitely that the result of the extended benefits, which were given according to actuarial calculation. would put the Fund absolutely out of credit and would increase the very serious overdraft which stood at that time. There is the dividing line between the Socialist and the Conservative parties. The Conservative party want to see, and I think also the Liberal party want to see, the continuation of the contributory basis of unemployment insurance. There is the dividing line between Socialism and anti-Socialism. They want to see the State paying the whole of those contributions, and paying them in such a way that the people receive those moneys without any calculations from the actuaries or anybody else. There is one point which the right hon. Gentleman made in his speech, and it has been re-echoed on the Back Benches, about the actuarial calculation. My right hon. Friend, if I may call him so, knows full well what the Government Actuary is. He knows that if the Government Actuary makes a calculation, it is made on the most conservative estimate. I have been in the House seven years, and never once on an Unemployment Insurance Bill have I known the Government Actuary's Report to be
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  otherwise than on the most conservative basis. If it was £6,000,000, the figure was really £8,000,000, and so on. It was always on such a basis as to be most careful and economical.
  Mr. T. HENDERSON: Does the hon. Member mean, if that is the case, that instead of £500,000, they would be taking £900,000.
  Mr. REMER: I cannot give figures and I do not put myself against the Government Actuary. But I. am certain the Government Actuary is always on the most conservative side. If there are those people who are receiving moneys which the working people have subscribed to, we are coming to the point of issue, which is this—that the working people have subscribed those very large sums, amounting to many million pounds a year, and we, as the House of Commons, have no moral right to say that those sums which have been subscribed for a specific purpose should be used for any other purpose. We are dealing with this matter in order to get rid of that overdraft at the Treasury which has existed for two months, and in order to enable the position to be rectified. The hon. Member for Bow and Bromley made a most pathetic speech just now. He has made the identical speech many times previously. He might have made some of the new Members almost cry with the pathetic story of the young man who lives with his father. We have heard that story in variegated forms from the hon. Gentleman on numerous occasions previously. What does it amount to? Those people have not subscribed their full amount under the unemployment insurance, and I say to the hon. Member, have we the right—
  Mr. LANSBURY: It is exactly the opposite. Those people have paid in and then because they are living with their parents who are supposed to be able to maintain them—
  Mr. REMER: I think the hon. Member must be mistaken. [HON. MEMBERS: "He is not!"] This only refers to extended benefit, and extended benefit is only given where the full contributions have not been paid.
  Mr. LANSBURY: And the young man directly he starts work again—or the old man—will pay in just the same as everybody else will pay in.
  Mr. REMER: The point I am raising is this, that if they have paid their full amount of contribution as provided for, they will receive their benefit just the same.
  Mr. LANSBURY: They do not.
  Mr. REMER: It is only when they have not paid their contributions.
  Mr. J. BECKETT: I suggest that the hon. Member should inquire of the Macclesfield Unemployment Committee.
  Mr. REMER: The hon. Member comes to this House with stories such as that to which I have referred. I think he may play on the minds of some of the Members of this House who have only been here a short time, but we who have been in the House for some little time think it is about time those matters were put in plain language. There is one other point that the hon. Member referred to, namely, the decasualisation—because it is decasualisation—of dock labourers. On this question I bow to no one, because I am a Liverpool man myself and I have worked with dock labourers from 6 o'clock in the morning to 6 o'clock at night, and I can claim to know something about that subject. If the hon. Member or his party can put forward any scheme which will solve that problem, I can only say they are very clever people.
  Mr. LANSBURY: Do not starve them because you cannot produce some scheme to get rid of them.
  Mr. REMER: The position is a very difficult one and when the Labour party's Bill was before Parliament dealing with decasualisation of the dock labourer it provided that they should be taken out of unemployment insurance altogether. It was promoted by the hon. Member for St. Helens (Mr. Sexton) and other people well known on the unemployment insurance question. [An HON. MEMBER: "It provided something else!"] I am quite in agreement with the hon. Member. There is what I think is the real remedy for all the difficulties with which we are faced, namely, that there should be insurance by industry rather than by a national scheme to deal with the problem. It is for those reasons it is my intention to support the Bill to-night. I cannot say I am satisfied that it is the last word or is a satisfactory way of
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  dealing with the situation in which we are placed. There is one more stage in which this unemployment insurance shall be dealt with on a national basis and which will put it on a comprehensive basis. I am quite certain this Bill cannot be left in the unsatisfactory position in which it is at the present time, but because I believe the Government's time is limited, it is my intention to support them in their Bill to-night.
  Mr. W. M. ADAMSON: I do not propose to follow the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Mr. Remer) into the very wide range and aspect of unemployment insurance which he took. He began by criticising unemployment insurance, and termed it a vicious circle, and later he was defending the very system he had criticised.
  Mr. REMER: The hon. Member has made a misstatement. I did not say that unemployment insurance was a vicious circle; I said that unemployment was a vicious circle.
  Mr. ADAMSON: It is curious that the hon. Gentleman should refer to the payments made by employers and workmen if he only meant the unemployment problem. However, the unemployment problem is outside the scope of the discussion. I want to deal with an aspect of the position referred to by the Minister of Labour. He described the extended benefits under unemployment insurance as insurance on credit. I am not prepared to criticise that statement, or to try in argue at the moment that there is anything wrong in that belief, but if it be insurance on credit, then the anticipation is that the workers in the aggregate are going to repay by contributions the benefits they receive during the period of unemployment, and it ought to be the very last thing for the Minister to introduce a Bill that is probably going to hinder these benefits being paid. There may be in this Measure Clauses to extend the Act for a further period, and, possibly, we might be able to support not only that, but even a reduction of contributions, both for employers and workmen; but the other provisions of the Bill are such that we on this side of the House are bound to support the Amendment to try to destroy the provisions of the Bill.

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  It has been remarked by various speakers during the discussion this evening that there are two sets of individuals at least that should be considered in discussing the provisions of this Bill, and the first set is those workmen who are now employed who are paying contributions. I am enabled to speak as one who for several years paid contributions to national unemployment. I was in the fortunate position that I did not have to apply for any benefit under the scheme, but I quite gladly and willingly gave up those contributions to the scheme in the national interest. But there is a section of the community which, I think, it is equally important to consider, and that is the unemployed themselves, and, from this point of view, I want the House to pardon me if I speak, probably with some little feeling upon this point, because some 16 years ago I was in the unfortunate position that, in spite of years spent in a skilled trade, I had a period of 18 months' unemployment, with only five weeks at work. There was no National Unemployment Insurance scheme in those days, and during the whole of that period I was dependent on my own resources, with little mouths to feed, and, at the end of the period, I had only 6s. a week trade union benefit coming into the home. I had no other resources whatever, and I want the House to imagine the position of a man who is described as respectable and thrifty, who has to face the world with its difficulties and defend his responsibilities, knowing that he has less and less hope to return to the type of employment in which he was engaged, with no possible initiative to which to look forward, and hope driven gradually further and further away.
  I want to ask the Parliamentary Secretary if this saving of £6,500,000 is going to be made by reducing the men who have had 18 months', two years', or three years' unemployment, to no benefits whatever? I say that these men who have fought for these things and have paid their contributions, are entitled to the benefits. No Minister of Labour ought to use the powers of a huge majority in this House to pass such legislation, and to send men, women and children to the Poor Law authorities, when they should have the full rights and privileges of the benefits to which they are entitled.
  Lieut.-Colonel Sir JOSEPH NALL: One would imagine, from the course of the Debate, that we were not discussing an insurance scheme, or its merits as an insurance scheme, but that the House was engaged in reviewing the present aspects of the Poor Law system. As the Minister said this afternoon, this Bill is only a stage in the process of bringing the present scheme to a more permanent basis. It is only a stop-gap Measure. So far as it goes, it draws attention—and very necessarily draws attention—to the way in which the present system of administering unemployment benefit, the present state of the law on this question, has drifted more and more away from the basis of insurance, and, particularly under the Act of last year, has become more a substitute or an alternative for poor relief proper. I think that tendency has been most unfortunate, because, as has been indicated in the speech of the hon. Gentleman who has just sat down, confusion exists between those who have paid their contributions week by week and year by year, are genuinely insured, and are genuinely entitled to draw benefit, and the comparatively smaller number of those who draw uncovenanted, or extended, or, in other words, unpaid for benefit. As I understand this Bill, it does not in any way infringe upon the right, or infringe upon the benefits, of those who are genuinely insured persons, who have paid their contributions, and who, quite reasonably, expect to draw the benefits for which they have contributed.
  The House should consider, should take this opportunity of considering, whether we in fact are going to restore the actuarial basis of the insurance scheme, and ultimately, when the present series of Acts fall for renewal next year, permanently to establish a sound insurance scheme, or whether we are going to drift along, as we have so far drifted along, and this great idea to become more and more another system for relief, a system of poor relief, such as it is to-day, indicating uncovenanted or extended benefit, without any of the safeguards or control which applies to a Poor Law system proper as administered by the boards of guardians. It is, I venture to say, in the interests and to the advantage of the great mass of industrial workers who pay their contri-

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  butions and are genuinely insured persons, that the Poor Law out-relief elements which have crept into the administration of this scheme should be gradually eliminated so that that aspect of the benefit reverts to its more proper sphere and more appropriate administration under the boards of guardians and the Poor Law proper.
  Personally, in the last few years I have several times drawn attention to the abuses which have crept into the scheme. I remember, I think it was in this present Session of Parliament, suggesting that in future, with the opportunities which exist for able-bodied women to obtain employment to-day, it would be quite a reasonable thing to exclude them from the operations of these Acts—all able-bodied women under 30 years of age.
  Mr. KELLY: Where is that employment to be found?
  Sir J. NALL: I think there is room for inquiry as to whether, in order to make this a real insurance scheme, the age limit for both sexes under the operation of what is called the dole should not be raised; whether, in fact, young persons under whatever age is found to be most appropriate, it may be 18 years, or 20 years, or 25 years of age, under whatever age inquiry suggests to be the appropriate figure, both sexes should not be excluded from the operation of this scheme. There is no doubt the influence—
  Mr. WALLHEAD Mr. WALLHEAD rose—
  Sir J. NALL: I do not propose to give way.
  Mr. WALLHEAD: I only wanted to ask whether the hon. and gallant Member means to exclude these people from contributions as well?
  Sir J. NALL: Oh, yes. I am not suggesting that anyone should go on paying contributions without getting benefits. What I am suggesting is that there is scope for inquiry as to whether young persons under some age to be determined shall not be excluded from the Act altogether, both as to contributions and as to benefit. In the Lancashire mills today there is a shortage of boys in the occupation of little piecers. I know certainly that in the town of Bolton, and in that part of the spinning trade where there is practically
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  no depression, where—as the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw) knows pretty well—there has not been that depression which exists on the Oldham side; in Bolton to-day and for some months past it has been impossible to obtain the requisite number of lads for the occupation of little piecers. To-day boys are taken up by train from the surrounding district into Bolton to fill these gaps. When there are known vacancies of the kind, and when these vacancies cannot be filled from the, available labour within the town itself, although it is well known that there are quite a number of eligible lads out of work, there is, I suggest, a field for inquiry which the Department should look into. I know this thing has had the attention of the trade unions concerned, and I believe is still having the attention of the trade unions. Certainly it is a matter requiring consideration from the employers' side.
  When you have there, in one of the great staple industries, a disinclination on the part of lads to take up vacancies which are waiting, and when there is open all over the country thousands of vacancies where young women could be employed, and there is a disinclination to take up the work, there is scope for focussing public opinion upon the particular fact which results from inducing people, either directly by means of the benefit, or indirectly by enabling other members of the family to maintain them whilst out of work—there is, I say, scope for inquiry with a view to inducing those who are out of work to adopt a more reasonable frame of mind in taking up existing vacancies. If hon. Members opposite will be so good as to allow speakers on this side to continue without persisting in that continual interruption —[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh, oh!"]—to which some speakers have been subjected —for you hear constantly a running interruption, not quite so audible in my case as in the case of other hon. Members on this side—I would wish to indicate to the House as to what so far as the women-folk are concerned there are still considerable openings, and a volume of vacancies into which able-bodied young women can be absorbed. In certain cases there are vacancies young ladies could take. The present disinclination to take

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  them may be, and undoubtedly in many cases is, attributable to the operation of the unemployment benefit provisions as we know them to-day.
  I welcome this Bill as a step towards bringing the present system of insurance back to a real actuarial basis. I hope that in considering the scope of the Bill for next Session the Department will be guided, so far as insurance is concerned, by a regard for permanency, and by a desire that that part of the scheme of relief which is not insurance shall be properly undertaken by boards of guardians. So far as the employment of women is concerned, there is undoubted scope for the Board of Education to render assistance. Reference is frequently made in this House to the migration from rural districts to the towns. That migration is, perhaps, no more disastrous in the case of young men than in the case of young women. The old idea that the womenfolk of the country side should find employment about the farms and holdings in the areas in which they live is not pursued in these days as it should be. There is a tendency for them to be attracted to the industrial centres, where many of these girls, after working for a comparatively short time in some insurable trade, drift on to the register of the Employment Exchange and draw benefit, as, indeed, they are entitled to do; but they go on drawing benefit with no inclination to revert to those rural occupations where there is scope for obtaining work.
  In the country districts to-day there is a shortage of female labour in poultry farming, in dairy work, and in all those other branches of farm life where a woman can help. This has an influence on the settlement of men on small holdings. Only recently my attention was drawn to the fact that young men who have been settled on small holdings since the War, and who have put up a great effort and have succeeded in their side of the work, have ultimately had to give in because their wives had had no training on the side of farm work which the wife can properly look after. The influence of their wives was exerted against continuing in this rural occupation, and they have drifted back to the towns, having lost their little all in their small holdings, and they are unemployed and
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  drawing benefit, if they are eligible for it. The Board of Education can do a great deal towards reviving rural industry.
  Mr. SPEAKER: I think the hon. and gallant Member is departing from the subject of this Bill. We are not dealing with the Board of Education.
  Sir J. NALL: I am sorry that I must not pursue that point. I merely wish to indicate that it is right and proper in this Bill, and in the reconsideration of these insurance schemes, that benefits should not unduly be paid as they are at present.
  Mr. SPENCER: How could they get benefit when they have come off a small holding and have no stamps on their card?
  10.0 P.M.
  Sir J. NALL: I say it is right and proper in considering this Bill and in reconsidering the whole scheme of insurance that steps should be taken to discourage the payment of benefit to young women who can quite properly find employment in the rural areas and in domestic life. That is one of the chief factors in making the present scheme unpopular, as it is unpopular with many people to-day, and I hope the Minister will not be deflected from his clear duty to revise the scheme and bring it back to a real basis of insurance by arguments which, quite soundly, might be applied to questions which, after all, are really questions for the boards of guardians in connection with Poor Law reform.
  Mr. DENNISON: We have listened for five hours to a series of speeches similar to the one by the hon. and gallant Member for the Hulme Division (Sir J. Nall), and I wish to put it quite clearly, and I hope without offence, to hon. Members who follow the line that he took that we on these benches do not regard the payment of unemployment benefit as a charity or relief. We desire to raise the question of unemployment benefit above the description of "doles." We say to hon. Members on the opposite benches who say that in private ownership is to be found the only method of conducting industry that those who defend that system must accept full responsibility for the defects of it, and the greatest defect is unemployment. I wish the Minister of Labour and the Government, instead

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  of wasting time on trifling with the question of the unemployment benefit, had brought forward some constructive scheme; or that a gesture had been made by the Minister of Labour or the Prime Minister, when discussing this great problem last week, with the object of raising it above party considerations, accompanied by an invitation to all sections of the House to put their brains together, so that if we cannot solve the problem, we could remedy its worst effects and minimise the suffering of the unemployed. An examination of this Bill shows clearly that the Government, instead of having any intention of relieving the poverty of the unemployed, are going a long way to increase their difficulties. Of all the times a Measure of this description should have been introduced which means a tightening up of unemployment benefit by increasing the waiting period and putting thousands off unemployment benefit, I suggest that this is indeed the wrong time having regard to the condition of the industries of the country at the present moment. What will be the position of those of us who earnestly desire not only peace abroad but peace at home when we find ourselves confronted during the next two or three weeks by people who will be entitled to say that the Government of the clay are on the side of the employers who are now endeavouring to press down wages and increase working hours. I am not saying this offensively, but it is an argument which will have to be met by people like myself who desire a peaceful settlement. I am so fond of peace that I will fight for it any time. I say that this Bill in two features is going to increase the difficulties and aggravate the position of the unemployed.
  It is nothing new for me to say that I represent the iron and steel trade, and I want to tell hon. Members the plight we are in at the present time as regards the people employed in that industry, and I wish to demonstrate how our workmen will be affected under the arrangements laid down by this Bill. I desire to make a special appeal for this particular industry, because the iron and steel industry has been more seriously affected by unemployment than any other industry in the country, because the depression has been much longer than in the coalfields. There are thousands of workpeople in the
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  iron and steel trade who have been unemployed since 1919. At Blaenavon steel works the men have been idle since 1919, and the same applies to the Jarrow and Clyde iron and steel works. In regard to the extended benefit which the Minister of Labour desires to be left at his discretion, these men will be greatly affected if that policy is pursued, besides thousands more, because of the long period which they have been unemployed, and if inquiries are made at the local Employment Exchanges, these men will be regarded as not having made reasonable efforts to find employment simply because of the long period they have been out of work. If this Bill is passed, it will give that discretion to the Minister of Labour. Unfortunately for the right hon. Gentleman and for us, we have had a taste of the discretion he is prepared to exercise, and I am opposed to giving him a continuation of that discretion, because I am satisfied that the treatment meted out to thousands of our men will be meted out to thousands more.
  With regard to the extension of the waiting period, it has been the practice, and a long established custom in the iron and steel trade, that where intermittent employment or short time is being worked the workpeople share, with the result that short time working when depression comes along is a common feature in the trade. It will be no uncommon thing. to find that when this Bill is passed that thousands of men will never qualify for benefit at all because it is a common practice for the steelworks to close clown at the end of the week or the beginning of the week, and you will find this will be repeated over and over again and these works will be working four days a week and standing idle for the first two days. You will also have the example of workpeople standing idle for six days in three weeks and never qualifying for the benefit. I think that is grossly unfair because you have no right to penalise men or women who are willing and anxious to work, as thousands of them are, in the iron and steel industry because they are unable to find work, by denying them maintenance during the period they are unemployed. These workpeople have given of their best, and they have increased their output per man by 50 per cent. since 1913. and as a reward, instead of something being done in the nature of

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  betterment, they have got to be tightened up under the administration of this Bill and denied a reasonable sustenance. I am opposing this Bill, and I trust the Minister of Labour will be able to modify these proposals, which we regard as harsh and unfair.
  Mr. RAMSAY MacDONALD: We have reached very nearly the limit of an ordinary Parliamentary day, and we have heard expressions of opinion from both sides of the House. Now I wonder what the Minister thinks of this Bill after he has heard those expressions of opinion? Hon. Members behind me, with an intimate knowledge of unemployment, both as administrators and unemployed, are violently hostile to the provisions of this Measure. I say emphatically, that so far as? we are concerned we are going to give this Bill no compromise at all. It is a thoroughly bad Bill, and it is a breach of the pledges the Government gave to the electors during the last election, and it is an open and declared confession that, so far as the problem of unemployment is concerned, the only thing the Government can do is to tinker with the register.
  Then, when the Minister turns for comfort to his own side, he finds very poor comfort. There has not been a single speech so far as I have heard—and I do not think I have missed any, except what I understand was the very delightful and reasoned speech of the Noble Lady (Viscountess Astor), who represents, appropriately, a seaport town—so far as the speeches that I have heard are concerned, there has not been one that has supported this Bill. Hon. Members have had to express excuses for voting for it, as they are going to do, but, taking the three speeches that have been delivered since the dinner hour—the speeches of the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Mr. Remer), the hon. and gallant Member for Uxbridge (Commander Burney) and the hon. and gallant Member for Hulme (Sir J. Nall)—could any Minister have received colder comfort than the Minister of Labour received from those doughty supporters of his? So far as we are concerned, we take up the position that the unemployed have claims against society, not as paupers, but as unemployed persons. They are not merely nuisances, they are not merely derelicts; they are men and women genuinely want-
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  ing employment, willing to do everything they possibly can to get employment, registered against the risks of being unemployed; and, therefore, for hon. Members opposite, like the hon. and gallant Member for Hulme, to say that people of that type ought to be deliberately cut off a register containing the names of independent—
  Sir J. NALL: I did not say anything of the sort.
  Mr. MacDONALD: The hon. and gallant Member said that they ought te be put on the Poor Law.
  Sir J. NALL: The right hon. Gentleman, I am sure, does not wish to misrepresent what I said. What I said was that the benefits under the Insurance Acts ought to be on an actuarial insurance basis, and that beyond that the Poor Law should be adopted.
  Mr. MacDONALD: I should like very much to appreciate the difference between what I said a moment ago and what the hon. and gallant Member has said now that he did say. All that he seems to me to say is that, while you can legitimately insure for, say, six months' unemployment, after that you must become a pauper willy-nilly. That is the first great contribution of a positive kind to the solution of the unemployment problem that the rank and file of the Tory party have made in this Debate. I will turn to the more substantial part of the hon. and gallant Member's argument in a minute, but what; this Bill confesses, openly, plainly and unbhishingly, is that the Government are baffled by the unemployment problem, and they propose to crown their enormity by reducing the statistics of unemployment registered at the Employment Exchanges. To knock off an unemployed man from the unemployment register and put him upon the pauper roll is one of the methods by which the Government propose to reduce unemployment.
  There are two provisions of this Bill that are good. In the first place, there is the extension of the right of waiver held by the Minister of Labour regarding the benefit to be paid to unemployed persons whose insurance cards do not hold 30 stamps. The right hon. Gentleman takes a great deal of credit for that, as though it were anything more than a

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  mere mechanical operation, provided for because, when the system was instituted first of all, it was necessary on account of the fact that everybody believed we were in an exceptional state of unemployment. There is no Member on this side of the House, I believe, who takes the view that that sort of thing should have been permanently provided for. If hon. Members opposite want a present, I will make it. I do not believe that ought to be permanently provided for, and the way to safeguard it is to treat this provision giving that power in the same way that that class of legislation is treated which is the subject of our Expiring Laws Continuance Bill. This provision, not only for that big volume of unemployment, but that extraordinary baffling continuity of unemployment, which means that thousands of people—200,000 I think is the estimate by the actuaries—have come to an end of an insurance which, when the system was instituted, was assumed, in relation to our past industrial experience, to be sufficient to meet the needs of the unemployed. Now since the crack has come, now since the bottom has fallen out of our unemployment fund, it is discovered that those calculations are all wrong, and that the new world requires a much larger and a much bolder treatment, and it was provided for, as a temporary expedient, that the Minister of Labour should be able to use his discretion and extend those benefits.
  But that was not all. Then something else happened. It was decided that if there was to be an extended benefit the money was not going to come from the State. The money was not going to come from a fund which the Minister, who is a sort of dispensing angel, really ought to have control of. If the Treasury had said, "pending a solution or a termination of this period of excessive burden, the taxpayer will provide the money for the extra benefits," there might have been logic in saying, "the Minister shall dispense the charity." But that was not what was decided. Hon. Members do not seem to be aware of the fact that what was decided was that the extra benefit should be found from the contributors who were originally insured against short time unemployment, and then the position was that all paid for the extra benefits, but it was within the Minister's
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  discretion as to who should have it. There is no Ministry on the face of this earth endowed with any common sense and with the logical faculty which will defend a system like that. If the Minister was in control of the money and found the money, if it was his own money, if it was the Government's money, he might put in a claim for being the dispenser. But the Minister is not that at all. The people whom he is going to clear out, the 200,000 people, are going to pay for the extra benefits which they themselves are going to be denied. Therefore when the hon. and gallant Gentleman opposite said, "I believe in insurance," he must be in favour of the extra payment provided by the insured persons for extra benefits being part and parcel of the insurance scheme, and the insured persons being entitled to the extra benefit by right and not by charity, as is proposed in this Bill. My right hon. Friend changed this from a charity to an insurance. The House ought not to lose its grip on this matter until we have made up our minds what is to be the statistical basis of the provision for unemployment in the future. I do not believe in the rule-of-thumb business. Until we know more definitely what is the mathematical basis on which we must calculate our insurance against unemployment, or any other means we take to meet it, it is far better that the power should be renewed once a year, instead of once in six months. It would be far better to do that, and I hope that the Committee to which this Bill will go —whether it is to remain on the Floor of the House or go upstairs matters not— will extend the six months' period into one of 12 months, and allow it to be one of the laws that expire and must be renewed once in 12 months. That is the position for which my right hon. Friend provided.
  Now the Minister reverses the insurance features of unemployment and still asks the unemployed person to provide from his pocket the extra benefit. He then says, "Although you provide it, by compulsion, and it is your property, I am going to take it from you." I am here tempted to reflect upon an argument used by a respected Member of this House—the hon. Member for Exeter (Sir Robert Newman)—who, when we were dis-

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  cussing widows' pensions took a very strong point, that the pension was her property. I repeat that statement to-day on this Bill. This benefit is the property of the people, who have earned it in the form of wages; but the Minister comes in and says, "I am going to take it compulsorily from you. The House of Commons has decreed that extra benefits should be paid and must be paid, but I, the Minister of Labour, will decide who is going to get them." The position is preposterous.
  Another point made by those who are very anxious to support this Bill, in good grace, is that it is actuarially sound. I do not know. I have been in terrible difficulties sometimes to make ends meet, but if I was no more actuarially sound than this scheme is, according to the White Paper, then I am afraid that my place in this House would very soon be taken and another would have to fill it, because I should be in the Bankruptcy Court. If we were in the position that the White Paper shows that this Fund is in, our doom would be fixed and ordained, and there would be no escape from it. This scheme is not sound, as shown by this White Paper.
  With 1,300,000 upon the live register, with this Bill in working operation, the loss to the fund is to be £4,400,000 a year. That is what the Federation of British Industries considers to be a good scheme. With 1,200,000 on the live register, according to the White Paper, the loss would be about £4,000,000 a year, but, oddly enough, by a combination of processes which is not shown—I do not know why—hon. Members, if they turn to Section 7 of the White Paper, will find that the results given for 1,100,000 persons on the live register are given without any reason. And while with 1,200,000 persons on the live register the fund would drop £4,000,000 a year if the number is reduced by 100,000 the fund would show a balance of £3,000,000 a year, so that there would be a difference between the two of £7,000,000 a year. If I am wrong I hope that I shall be corrected.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: I think that the right hon. Gentleman has not read the Sections quite carefully. The loss of £4,000,000 with 1,200,000 is before
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  the changes contemplated by the Bill, and the surplus of £3,000,000, with 1,100,000, is after the changes contemplated by the Government.
  Mr. MacDONALD: All I can plead is that the two sentences in paragraph 6, from which that meaning is drawn, are very hard to interpret:
  "With the live register of 1,200,000 and on the present basis of benefits and contributions"—
  that is after a certain description of the changes created by this Bill—
  "the fund would be incurring a debt at the rate of nearly £4,000,000 a year."
  And then it says:
  "under the conditions set up by the Bill, therefore, it unemployment were as stated there would still be a small addition to the debt of the Unemployment Fund."
  A "small addition," so far as the literary arrangement is concerned, is a reference to £4,000,000. That is how I read it. I admit that you can put the other meaning on it.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: The right hon. Gentleman will agree that I do not wish to interrupt him, I only desire to make the point clear. I should have thought that the wording of the actuary was quite clear, and the wording of the actuary is this:
  "With a live register of 1,200,000 and on the present basis of benefits and contributions"—
  the present basis is the existing basis at this moment, before the Bill comes into effect—
  "the fund would he incurring debt at the rate of nearly £4.000,000 a year,"
  which, of course, is a fairly large sum.
  "Under the conditions set up by the Bill, therefore, if unemployment were as stated,"—
  that is to say 1.200,000—
  "there would still be a small addition to the Unemployment Fund."
  That is to say, is would about balance. But, coming to paragraph 7 of the White Paper, it is quite clear, on reading the last sentence carefully, that under the revised conditions of the Bill, with a live register of 1,100,000, there would be a. balance of £3,000,000 a year surplus for the reduction of debt.
  Mr. MacDONALD: The last point is quite clear and I am glad to have the explanation. I drew the attention of

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  some of my friends to it. I will put my interpretation down to my own stupidity in order to shorten the explanation. But if hon. Members are in the least interested in the subject and will read the first part of paragraph 6 of the report they will find that the whole impression of that is that the actuary is dealing with the situation as it would be if the Bill's proposed changes take place. However, there it is. With 1,300,000 on the live register the Bill means a deficit of £4,400,000 a year. With 1,200,000 on the live register there is still to be a loss on the fund, not much, but still a loss. When we get down to 1,100,000 on the register there is to be a benefit to the fund of £3,000,000 a year. And that is what they call a financially sound scheme. I now understand why an attempt has been made to increase the gap. Someone just now referred to the difference between the Tory party and the Labour party. I will point out another difference. The Tory party approaches the unemployment problem from the point of view of claims. The Labour party approaches it from the point of view of human consideration, the unemployed being men, married or unmarried, with family responsibilities and with citizenship responsibility. Votes! Nobody has any less right than hon. Members opposite to sneer about catching votes. Votes or no votes, the unemployed are something more than votes.
  The Labour party takes the view, first of all, that the human claim of men and women upon whose backs responsibilities have been placed is such that it is but right that the men and women should have a chance of fulfilling those responsibilities. Therefore, we make finance fit the requirements. The Tory party reverses the process. It says: "We cannot get this fund to fit; we cannot get it to square until the people upon the fund are down to somewhere between 1,100,000 and 1,200,000. Therefore, our proposal for dealing with the unemployed is to give the Minister power to make exclusions, to put up tests that have nothing whatever to do with unemployment, but tests of mere financial convenience, and by the creation of those tests we are going to save it, to disqualify, to reduce the numbers, and we will make the unemployed needs fit the finance." Then they say, "Of course, these people will not
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  die or starve; they must go upon the Poor Law. "I am opposed to knocking these men and women off, because they must go to the Poor Law, and that for two reasons. First of all, the most grievous burden, the most unshiftable burden that industry has to bear to-day is the burden of rates. I joined most heartily in the cheer when the right hon. Member for Hillhead (Sir R. Horne) gave voice to the good, sound doctrine that we have been preaching for years, namely, that the burden of rates is far more oppressive to industry than the burden of taxation.
  A Government which professes to have concern for an enlivening of our industry, for an easing of the burden, and a brightening of the prospects of industry, is saying, "We are going with two hands to put burdens upon your back that you cannot shift. At any rate, one of them is very difficult to shift. We are going to add a very irritating tax to your burdens for the number of people you employ, and we are going to enable you to pay that by taking off a similar tax for unemployment insurance, and because we are going to take that tax off you for unemployment insurance, we are going to compel a certain proportion of the now provided for unemployed to go upon the poor rate, and so increase your poor rate." That is one of the most extraordinary propositions I have ever heard from a Government which professes to have an interest in the industry of this country. That is the industrial argument, and I am only sorry that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Hillhead is not here to reinforce and support me in the argument I am putting forward. The other consideration is this; that the unemployed man or woman who has had a run of unemployment, say for 12 months, 18 months or two years, is not a legitimate subject for Poor Law attention. We have gone beyond that—at least I hope we have gone beyond it, and I hope the House of Commons has gone beyond it. These men and women are not derelict; they are simply part and parcel of the life of Society. The Society of to-day cannot be run without these people, and they can only be dealt with in a proper way by being considered and treated as independent members of the community, whatever be the scheme you adopt. Insurance has been suggested as the best scheme; all sorts of other proposals have been made, and all sorts of modifications have been

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  proposed, but whatever the treatment may be, I beg of this House to remember that these are men or women in the prime of life, who are willing to work, who are asking for work, but who are unfortunate in their attempts to get work through a certain period more than this limited insurance period. I do beg of this House to help us in every way to keep those men and women absolutely clear of the taint which undoubtedly comes to those who have recourse to the Poor Law. That is the reason why we are going to oppose this Bill.
  In the end in very plain language what the Government says is this: "We want to get 200,000 people off the register." In other words they want to keep £6,500,000 in the coffers, and they are cutting their coat according to a cloth that has been limited by their own decree. It is not another party that has limited it, but the Government themselves. The Government say: "We will reduce your claimants until those that are left can be satisfied from the cloth that we have decided shall be cut." I think this Bill is unworthy of the Government. I think it is unworthy of the House. It is not a contribution to the problem of unemployment; it is not a contribution in the problem of dealing with unemployment by insurance; it is not a contribution to the problem of how to take up the young that have never come into the market; it is not a contribution to the problem of how to deal with the woman who is married but who is not a member of a family with an adequate family income without her insurance coming in. It is not a Bill that deals with the problem of over-coutinued unemployment; it is not a Bill that deals with the problem of extra allowance for over-continued unemployment; it is a Bill that squeezes a big problem into a mean and insignificant and, therefore, an unjust position, and, as such, we will heartily oppose it through every stage through which it has to pass.
  The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of LABOUR (Mr. Betterton): As the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition said, this Debate has now gone on for a good many hours—I do not, for a moment, say it is too long—and, as was perhaps
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  inevitable, a good deal of the discussion has extended very wide of the subject-matter of the Bill which is before the House. The right hon. Gentleman, who has just sat down, has, I think, made it necessary for me to re-state in a word or two the position in which we are, the reasons why we are there, and the means by which we propose to deal with the position. If I understand the psychology of this House aright, this House is always very willing to regard with respect opinions with which it profoundly differs. We, on this side of the House, disagree with many hon. Members present who disapprove of the whole contributory system of insurance, but but while we disagree with them we understand them, and understanding them, as I say, we respect their arguments. But what we have difficulty in understanding is this: we have difficulty in understanding right hon. and hon. Members who appear to be supporting a contributory scheme when, in fact, every one of their arguments is relevant only to a non-contributory scheme. I will develop that point in a moment, but the Leader of the Opposition appeared to me to be mixing up in a certain' part of his speech standard and extended benefit. He mixed up, as the right hon. Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw) has so often mixed up, right and equity, and when he said that 200,000 persons were paying, I would point out that the whole of this situation has arisen because, in fact, those 200,000 persons to whom he referred had run out of benefit and were not paying at all. Therefore there was a confusion in his mind as to what was the effect of the fact that those 200.000 persons had run out of benefit.
  May I recall to the House the situation as between now and the causes and circumstances which have led up to this Measure? The Bill introduced last year by the late Minister for Labour was founded quite clearly upon the contributory principle. It was furthermore fortified by an actuary's report; indeed, by two actuaries' reports. That Bill made two main alterations. First, it removed the discretion of the Minister in certain particulars, and, secondly, it added to the benefits which were to be paid week by week. But the right hon. Gentleman, realising rightly that his Bill was based on a contributory basis, did as he was

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  bound to do. He safeguarded the finances of that Bill by a very stringent provision, and he said, "Although I take power to waive it for one year, after the coming October, unless 30 contributions stand to the credit of those who are to benefit, then they fall out and are not to benefit at all." He clearly did so, because he realised that that was a necessary part of the contributory system contained in the Bill.
  Let me remind the House exactly what happened. The right hon. Gentleman was urged in Committee by certain hon. Members of his own party to reduce the waiting period from six days to three. He declined, because he said that if he did so it meant rearranging the whole financial conditions of his Bill. My predecessor, the then Parliamentary Secretary—actually both of them—voted against the proposal to reduce the six days to three. The vote in Committee was, I think, 10 to 8, but the hon. Member for St. Helens (Mr. Sexton) voted by mistake in favour of six days. Had he voted as he intended to do the vote would have been equal. After that, of course, the Bill came down on the Report stage to the House, and the right hon. Gentleman the late Minister of Labour then accepted the three days which he had refused in Committee. I myself happened to ask him, while the Bill was in Committee, precisely the same question which he has asked me to-day, so I should have thought his inquiry would have been unnecessary. He asked me what would this cost, and the answer he gave me himself was:
  "I can tell the hon. Member what our calculation is; i.e., that this Amendment (that is the waiting period) in the course of the year will cost £4,800,000, and, frankly, I do not think I have a dog's chance of getting it through."
  When, very naturally and properly, if I may say so, the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury) and many other hon. Members in all parts of the House have asked me how this figure of £6,500,000 is made up, my answer is the answer supplied by the right hon. Gentleman, that on the basis of 1,100,000 unemployed, according to the right hon. Gentleman's own figure, the amount represented by that number of unemployed would be £4,800,000. Therefore, I want to answer quite fairly and precisely the question put by the hon.
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  Member for Bow and Bromley, that, as far as we can see, the answer, on the calculation made by the right hon. Gentleman himself, is that probably a sum of between £4,500,000 and £5,000,000 will be represented by the waiting period alteration, and the remainder by the exercise of the Minister's discretion.
  11.0 P.M.
  May I say a word upon this question of discretion 2 The right hon. Gentleman the late Minister of Labour, the right hon. Gentleman who has just sat down, and many other speakers on the other side, over and over have talked about a statutory right to benefit, a right irrespective of contribution, and that particular point was emphasised by the Leader of the Opposition. Surely all those arguments would be strictly relevant if you had a non-contributory scheme. If you had a non-contributory scheme, there would be no question at all of considering or talking about the relation of contribution to benefit. But where you have a contributory scheme, it is quite obviously out of the question and if you once establish the absolute right to benefit irrespective of the contribution paid, then you are doing two things. You are, first of all, inflicting a really serious injustice on the other contributors to the Fund. Singularly little has been made of that point in the discussion, but, after all, the Ministry of Labour are the trustees of the contributors. You are doing something which is quite inconsistent with the whole scheme of insurance. The right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition said a good deal with which I entirely agree about several matters, but the point I want to make is this: as a system of insurance this thing will break down if you attempt to attach to it something which is really not insurance at all, but something of another nature. I would refer again to the right hon. Gentleman the late Minister of Labour, for he realises from his experience of last year that in regard to extended benefit it is necessary, for several reasons, to retain a very large discretion in the hands of the Minister himself. There is no part of the duty of the Minister of Labour which is more difficult and more anxious, and which, personally, I can say gives me greater anxiety than the exercise of this discretion which is imposed upon my

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  right Ron. Friend the Minister of Labour and myself by the Act of last year. By the Act of last year the Minister of Labour is the ultimate authority to decide whether
  "in normal times insurable employment suited to his capacities would be likely to be available for him."
  A more invidious and a more, shall I say, painful task, it is hardly possible to describe—this discretion which is absolute and put by the Act of last year into our hands. It involves a tremendous amount of difficulty. The Minister also, under the Act of last year, has to decide in the last resort—of course with the statutory assistance—whether a man has
  "been employed in an insurable employment to such an extent as was reasonable having regard to all the circumstances of the cast, and in particular to the opportunities of obtaining insurable employment during that period."
  These are matters in which there is a discretion in the hands of the Minister. To say, as the right hon. Gentleman said to-day, that the discretion should be removed from the Minister is palpably absurd.
  There are one or two specific points that have been raised. The hon. Member for St. Helens (Mr. Sexton) raised a point upon which I heard him, with great eloquence, speak in Committee last year—that is the very difficult point of the two half-days. The question of dealing administratively with the two half-days is a point that has baffled successive Ministers of Labour from the very time insurance was first started. No doubt the hon. Member will raise it again in Committee, and it will be discussed. But may I say it baffled Dr. Macnamara, it baffled Sir Montague Barlow, it baffled the right hon. Gentleman opposite the Minister for Labour last year, and now my right hon. Friend and myself, to see any administrative possibility of dealing with it. It is a difficult and important point. The hon. Member for Leigh (Mr. Tinker) referred to the report by the Minister of Labour in which the Minister thanked hon. Members like himself who have devoted so much of their time to local work on the committees. Were it not for hon. Members like him who devote time, labour, and experience to the administration of our system of insurance that
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  system would break down. Therefore when the hon. Member asks whether he is to go on doing so, whether we want him to go on, I tell him that we are indebted—perhaps I should not say more than we know—but more than I can express—to the hon. Member and hon. Members up and down the country who have made this scheme work. The scheme may have imperfections, I know there are anomalies and difficulties, and without the assistance of, as I say, people in the localities who know the locality the system would break down.
  There is one further point I wish to deal with, and that is the waiting period. I think there has been some doubt and misapprehension as to what the effect of this waiting period is. Until last year six days had been the waiting period since 1912, with the exception of a few months. When my hon. Friend the Member for the Cleveland Division (Sir P. Goff), among others, referred to the hardships that this would inflict on men already out of work, I think he was under a misapprehension, because my right hon. Friend the Minister explained that the extension of the waiting period to six days will not affect the benefit position of any person who has satisfied the three days' waiting period under the existing law and who is still unemployed. The waiting period will not have to be served by that applicant until there has been an interval of employment of more than six weeks.
  Mr. LANSBURY: If the unemployed are going to be in the: same position as they are now, will the hon. Gentleman explain how he is going to save the £5,000,000? [HON. MEMBERS: "£6,500,000!"] No, he is getting a part of that from another source.
  Mr. BETTERTON: I want to be quite frank with the hon. Member. I was going on to explain from what classes that will come. It will not come from the two classes I have already mentioned, because three days already served franks a man for six weeks. As the hon. Gentleman says, the money will have to come from somewhere. The classes that will be affected are the two following: applicants who may have been unemployed and served the three days waiting period under the existing law, but who have been employed for more than six weeks since

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  they last drew benefit will have to serve a, new waiting period of six days after the present Bill becomes law. That is one class. The second class are those applicants who have not previously been unemployed and who claim benefit after the present Bill becomes law—they will have to serve the waiting period. The question of the continuity rule to which my right hon. Friend referred when he was speaking is, of course, a very difficult and a very complicated one, but further discussion on the details of it might be left;, I suggest, to the Committee stage.
  There is one further question to which I wish to refer. My right hon. Friend said this was a stop-gap Bill. He meant that the Act of 1924 comes to an end in June next year in this sense, that the benefits cease to be payable. Therefore it will obviously be necessary before that time to have a new Bill. This is a carrying over Bill to enable us to make good a grave defect and carry on until next year. The Minister of Labour has said he is going to set up a committee almost immediately to inquire into three things. First of all to inquire into the principles of the unemployment insurance scheme; secondly, to inquire into the finance of it; and thirdly, into the administration of it. There is no doubt at all that our present scheme and system of unemployment has gone, in some direction, a very long way from the insurance basis. I think myself that the creation of something like this system of uncovenanted benefit was necessary for this reason, that an immense addition was made by the Act of 1921 to the numbers of insured persons, and something like an addition of 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 coincided and synchronised with a slump in trade, which, for the suddenness with which it came, was quite unparalleled. Therefore, you had this great increase in the number of unemployed synchronising with a slump in trade, and for that reason uncovenanted benefit, or extended benefit was created. My right hon. Friend thinks that a committee should inquire into some of the very questions which have been referred to by the Leader of the Opposition, and consider what in the light of existing facts and experience are the lines upon which we should proceed in the future.
  Mr. MacDONALD: Is it to be a Departmental Committee?
  Mr. BETTERTON: No.
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: It is to be a Committee representative of the three parties who contribute, the employers, the men and the State.
  Mr. MacDONALD: Will it be a Departmental Committee, a Royal Commission or a Committee of the House of Commons?
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: It is not proposed to set up a Select Committee of the House of Commons nor yet a Royal Commission, but a Committee set up by the Department representative of the three parties.
  Mr. HAYDAY: Will its proceedings be in public?
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: I think that point had better be reserved.
  Mr. BETTERTON: The second point will be the question of finance, and after the strictures of the right hon. Gentleman on the actuary's report, I think he will be the first to agree that the finance of our whole system of insurance might well be examined by such a Committee. The third question to be examined is administration. I do not know if the House realises that there are in existence a volume of Acts, eight or nine in number, which are operative either wholly or in part at the present time, and it is the unpleasant duty of my right hon. Friend and myself, at any rate, to have to know them and the precise bearing which one has on the other. The Act of last year was based on the Act of 1920, which was for the purposes of the Act of last year the principal Act, and it is not surprising that when we have eight or nine Acts very complicated and very technical that there should be anomalies which might be got rid of, and it is not surprising that hon. Members should come to me, as they often do, and say that this section or that sub-section is altogether unconscionable and ought to be repealed. All that, we hope, the Committee will look into, and assist us, as the result of their deliberations, to found a permanent scheme which will not contain the anomalies which now exist, and will give the satisfaction that is so much to be desired.
  Mr. SAKLATVALA: May I ask the Minister a question? Accepting the nature of the Bill as a contributory Bill, have the Government realised that to

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  obtain nearly £7,000,000 from 1,200,000 unemployed means a contribution from the unemployed at the rate of 2s. per head per week, as compared with one-third of that contribution by the masters and the employed workers?
  Sir PATRICK HASTINGS: May I also ask a question, which I think is of great importance, and which, as the hon. Gentleman was so full and detailed in his explanation, he will no doubt be willing to answer? It arises on Clause 1. As I understand the explanation the hon. Gentleman has already given, the Actuary has formed an estimate of what will be the saving in a year by reason of the exercise of the Minister's discretion under Clause 1. The Actuary, I understand, has valued that amount at £1,500,000. It appears to be quite obvious that no actuary could arrive at such an estimate unless he had been told the principles upon which the Minister would act, and the class or classes of persons who would fall under the ban, if I may use that expression, of the Minister's discretion. I am sure it would be of great value to every Member of the House if we could know what the Actuary knew—in other words, what is the discretion which the Minister has already, in a sense, exercised in advance by estimating the exercise of his discretion, in order that we may know what class or classes of persons will be affected to the extent of £1,500,000?
  Sir A. STEEL-MAITLAND: By the leave of the House, I can answer the two questions which have been put With regard to the first question, the hon. Member, I think, is not aware that it is not only, as I have often stated in this House and elsewhere, a standing army of 1,200,000 unemployed, but a very much greater number, probably three times as many, who at one time or another are in receipt of benefit. With regard to what has been said by the hon. and learned Member for Wallsend (Sir P. Hastings), I made a statement earlier in the afternoon giving precisely the information for which he asks, namely, that the classes comprised are the same classes which were dealt with similarly before the right hon. Gentleman introduced his Bill, that is to say, single persons living with their parents who can
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  support them, married women living with their husbands who are in work, in certain circumstances short-time workers, and also aliens, putting it briefly and broadly, whose residence in this country has not yet been long enough to make it tolerably certain that they have become a regular part of the population.
  Captain BENN: I would ask the indulgence of the House for a few moments while I state, in one or two sentences, the reasons that actuate me and many of those around me to offer a determined opposition to this Bill. Nothing that the right hon. Gentleman has said has dealt with the argument that in this Bill, at a time when the resources of the unemployed are more scanty than ever they were, when their sufferings are greater than ever they were, the right hon. Gentleman is proposing to extract £6,500,000 from those resources. That criticism has remained unanswered throughout the whole of the Debate. £5,000,000 of that is to be taken by extending the waiting period, which will diminish, of course, the benefits not only of those who are drawing extended benefit, but of those who are drawing the standard benefit for which they have paid their contributions. That argument is susceptible of much development by those above the Gangway, who are far more acquainted with the practical working of unemployment insurance than we who are below the Gangway or hon. Members opposite. The second point is that at a time when the right hon. Gentleman is acknowledging the burden of the rates and claiming that by his Pensions Bill he is relieving them, he is in fact putting this burden of £6,000,000 on the rates. It is so. Whore else does the hon. Member suppose these people are going to go to get their needs supplied? They have long passed the time when they have any reserve whatever. He is simply putting a burden of £6,000,000 on the rates, which is double the burden which the Minister of Health claimed he was relieving the rates of having his Pensions Bill. I suspect that one of the objects of the Bill is, by reducing the number of names on the live register, to give the impression that there is a diminution of unemployment. If the hon. Member for Hulme (Sir J. Nall) or the right hon. Gentleman him-

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  self imagines that by what he calls the introduction of an actuarial basis or by failing to register people as unemployed they cease to be unemployed or to suffer the hardships of unemployment, he makes a very great mistake.
  Mr. H. WILLIAMS: I regret to to say —[HON. MEMBERS: "Divide!"]—that a large and an increasing number of unemployed have now reached a stage—
  Mr. PENNY: On a point of Order. Would you, Mr. Speaker, ask the hon. Member to speak up, so that we may hear him?
  Mr. T. GRIFFITHS Mr. T. GRIFFITHS rose in his place, and claimed to move, "That the Question be now put."
  Lieut. - Commander KENWORTHY Lieut. - Commander KENWORTHY rose—
  Mr. SPEAKER: The House has instructed me to put the Question.
  Question put accordingly, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question."
  The House divided: Ayes, 278; Noes, 141.

  Division No. 257.]

  AYES.

  [11.28 p.m.

  Acland-Troyte, Lieut.-Colonel

  Cope, Major William

  Henderson, Capt. R. R. (Oxf'd, Henley)

  Agg-Gardner, Rt. Hon. Sir James T.

  Couper, J. B.

  Henderson, Lieut.-Col. V. L. (Bootle)

  Ainsworth, Major Charles

  Courtauld, Major J. S.

  Heneage, Lieut.-Colonel Arthur P.

  Albery, Irving James

  Craig, Capt. Ht. Hon. C. C. (Antrim)

  Henn, Sir Sydney H.

  Alexander, E. E. (Leyton)

  Craig, Ernest (Chester, Crewe)

  Hennessy, Major J. R. G.

  Allen, J. Sandeman (L'pool, W. Derby)

  Cralk, Rt. Hon. Sir Henry

  Hennikar-Hughan, Vice-Adm. Sir A.

  Applin, Colonel R. V. K.

  Croft, Brigadier-General Sir H.

  Herbert, S. (York, N. R., Scar. & Wh'by)

  Ashley Lt.-Col. Rt. Hon. Wilfrid W.

  Crookshank, Col. C. de W. (Berwick)

  Hilton, Cecil

  Astbury, Lieut.-Commander F. W.

  Crookshank, Cpt. H.(Lindsey, Gainsbro)

  Hoare, Lt.-Col. Rt. Hon. Sir S. J. G.

  Astor, Viscountess

  Cunliffe, Joseph Herbert

  Hogg, Rt. Hon. Sir D. (St. Marylebone)

  Atholl, Duchess of

  Curzon, Captain Viscount

  Hohler, Sir Gerald Fitzroy

  Baldwin, Rt. Hon. Stanley

  Dalkeith, Earl of

  Homan. C. W. J.

  Balniel, Lord

  Davidson, Major-General Sir John H.

  Hope, Capt. A. O. J. (Warw'k, Nun.)

  Barclay-Harvey, C. M.

  Davies, A. V. (Lancaster, Boyton)

  Hope, Sir Harry (Forfar)

  Beamish, Captain T. P. H.

  Davies, Maj. Geo. F. (Somerset, Yeovil)

  Hopkins, J. W. W.

  Beckett, Sir Gervase (Leeds, N.)

  Davies, Sir Thomas (Cirencester)

  Hopkinson, A. (Lancaster, Mossley)

  Bellairs, Commander Carlyon W.

  Davison, Sir W. H. (Kensington, S.)

  Horlick, Lieut.-Colonel J. N.

  Benn, Sir A. S. (Plymouth, Drake)

  Dawson, Sir Philip

  Howard, Capt. Hon. D. (Cumb., N.)

  Bennett, A. J.

  Dean, Arthur Wellesley

  Hudson, Capt. A.U. M.(Hackney, N.)

  Betterton, Henry B.

  Doyle, Sir N. Grattan

  Hume. Sir G. H.

  Birchall. Major J. Dearman

  Eden, Captain Anthony

  Huntingfield, Lord

  Bird, E. R. (Yorks, W. R., Skipton)

  Elliot, Captain Walter E.

  Hurd, Percy A.

  Blades, Sir George Rowland

  Elveden, Viscount

  Hutchison, G. A. Clark (Midl'n &P'bl's)

  Blundell, F. N.

  Erskine, Lord (Somerset, Weston-s.-M.)

  Inskip, Sir Thomas Walker H.

  Boothby, R. J. G.

  Evans, Captain A. (Cardiff, South)

  Jackson, Lieut.-Colonel Hon. F. S.

  Bourne, Captain Robert Croft

  Fairfax, Captain J. G.

  Jacob, A. E.

  Bowater, Sir T. Vansittart

  Fanshawe, Commander G. D.

  Jephcott, A. R.

  Bowyer, Capt. G. E. W.

  Fermoy, Lord

  Jones, G. W. H. (Stoke Newington)

  Boyd-Carpenter, Major A.

  Fielden, E. B.

  Kennedy, A. R. (Preston)

  Brass, Captain W.

  Finburgh, S.

  Kindersley, Major Guy M.

  Bridgeman. Rt. Hon. William Clive

  Fleming, D. P.

  King, Captain Henry Douglas

  Briggs, J. Harold

  Ford, P. J.

  Kinloch-Cooke. Sir Clement

  Briscoe, Richard George

  Forestier-Walker, Sir L.

  Knox, Sir Alfred

  Brocklebank, C. E. R.

  Foxcroft, Captain C. T.

  Lamb, J. Q.

  Brooke, Brigadier-General C. R. I.

  Fraser, Captain Ian

  Lane-Fox, Lieut.-Col. George R.

  Broun-Lindsay, Major H.

  Gadie, Lieut.-Colonel Anthony

  Lister, Cunliffe-, Rt. Hon. Sir Philip

  Brown, Maj. D. C. (N'th'l'd, Hexham)

  Galbraith, J. F. W.

  Little, Dr. E. Graham

  Brown, Brig. Gen. H. C. (Berks, Newb'y)

  Ganzoni, Sir John

  Lloyd, Cyril E. (Dudley)

  Bull, Rt. Hon. Sir William James

  Gates, Percy

  Locker-Lampson, G. (Wood Green)

  Bullock, Captain M.

  Gilmour, Lt.-Col. Rt. Hon. Sir John

  Loder, J. de V.

  Burgoyne, Lieut.-Colonel Sir Alan

  Glyn, Major R. G. C.

  Looker, Herbert William

  Burman, J. B.

  Gower, Sir Robert

  Lord, Walter Greaves-

  Burney, Lieut.-Com. Charles D.

  Grace, John

  Lougher, L.

  Butler, Sir Geoffrey

  Grant, J. A.

  Luce, Maj.-Gen. Sir Richard Harman-

  Butt. Sir Alfred

  Greene, W. P. Crawford

  Lynn, Sir R. J.

  Cadogan, Major Hon. Edward

  Grenfell, Edward C. (City of London)

  MacAndrew, Charles Glen

  Campbell, E. T.

  Gretton, Colonel John

  Macdonald, R. (Glasgow, Cathcart)

  Cassels, J. D.

  Grotrian, H. Brent

  Maclntyre, Ian

  Cautley, Sir Henry S.

  Guinness, Rt. Hon. Walter E.

  McLean, Major A.

  Cecil, Rt. Hon. Sir Evelyn (Alton)

  Gunston, Captain D. W.

  Macmillan, Captain H.

  Chapman, Sir S.

  Hacking, Captain Douglas H.

  MacRobert, Alexander M.

  Charteris, Brigadier-General J.

  Hall, Lieut.-Col. Sir F. (Dulwich)

  Maitland, Sir Arthur D. Steel-

  Chilcott, Sir Warden

  Half, Capt. W. D. A. (Brecon & Rad.)

  Makins, Brigadier-General E.

  Christie, J. A.

  Hanbury, C.

  Malone, Major P. B.

  Churchill. Ht. Hon. Winston Spencer

  Hannon, Patrick Joseph Henry

  Manningham-Buller, Sir Mervyn

  Clarry, Reginald George

  Harland, A.

  Margesson, Captain O.

  Cobb, Sir Cyril

  Harrison, G. J. C.

  Marriott, Sir J. A. R.

  Cochrane, Commander Hon. A. D.

  Harvey, Major S. E. (Devon, Totnes)

  Mason, Lieut.-Colonel Glyn K.

  Cohen, Major J. Brunel

  Haslam, Henry C.

  Merriman, F. B.

  Conway, Sir W. Martin

  Hawke, John Anthony

  Meyer, Sir Frank

  Cooper, A. Duff

  Headlam, Lieut.-Colonel C. M.

  Mitchell, S. (Lanark, Lanark)

  Mitchell, W. Foot (Saffron Walden)

  Remer, J. R.

  Thomson, F. C. (Aberdeen, South)

  Mitchell, Sir W. Lane (Streatham)

  Rentoul, G. S.

  Thomson, Rt. Hon. Sir W. Mitchell-

  Moore, Lieut.-Colonel T. C. R. (Ayr)

  Rhys, Hon. C. A. U.

  Tinne, J. A.

  Moore, Sir Newton J.

  Rice, Sir Frederick

  Tryon, Rt. Hon. George Clement

  Moore-Brabazon, Lieut.-Col. J. T. C.

  Roberts, E. H. G. (Flint)

  Vaughan-Morgan, Col. K. P.

  Moreing, Captain A. H.

  Ropner, Major L.

  Waddington, R.

  Morrison, H. (Wilts, Salisbury)

  Ruggles-Brise, Major E. A.

  Wallace, Captain D. E.

  Morrison-Bell, Sir Arthur Clive

  Russell, Alexander West (Tynemouth)

  Ward, Lt.-Col. A.L.(Kingston-on-Hull)

  Murchison, C. K.

  Salmon, Major I.

  Warner, Brigadier-General W. W.

  Nall Lieut.-Colonel Sir Joseph

  Samuel, A. M. (Surrey, Farnham)

  Warrender, Sir Victor

  Nelson Sir Frank

  Samuel, Samuel (W'dsworth, Putney)

  Waterhouse, Captain Charles

  Nicholson, O. (Westminster)

  Sandeman, A. Stewart

  Watson, Sir F. (Pudsey and Otley)

  Nicholson, Col. Rt. Hn. W.G.(Ptrsf'ld.)

  Sanderson, Sir Frank

  Watts, Dr. T.

  Nuttall Ellis

  Sandon, Lord

  Wheler, Major Sir Granville C. H.

  Oakley, T.

  Sassoon, Sir Philip Albert Gustave D.

  White, Lieut.-Colonel G. Dairymple

  O'Connor T. J. (Bedford Luton)

  Savery, S. S.

  Williams, Com. C. (Devon, Torquay)

  O'Neill Major Rt. Hon. Hugh

  Scott, Sir Leslie (Liverp'l, Exchange)

  Williams, Herbert G. (Reading)

  Oman Sir Charles William C

  Shaw, R. G. (Yorks, W.R., Sowerby)

  Wilson, Sir C. H. (Leeds, Central)

  Penny Frederick George

  Shaw, Capt. W. W. (Wilts, Westb'y)

  Wilson, R. R. (Stafford, Lichfield)

  Perkins, Colonel E. K.

  Sheffield, Sir Berkeley

  Windsor-dive, Lieut.-Colonel George

  Perring, William George

  Shepperson, E. W.

  Wise, Sir Fredric

  Peto, G. (Somerset, Frome)

  Sinclair,Col. T. (Queen's Univ., Belfast)

  Wolmer, Viscount

  Philipson, Mabel

  Skelton, A. N.

  Womersley, W. J.

  Pielou, D. P.

  Smith, R.W. (Aberd'n & Kinc'dine,C.)

  Wood, E. (Chest'r, Stalyb'ge & Hyde)

  Pilcher, G.

  Smithers, Waldron

  Wood, Sir Kinsley (Woolwich, W.)

  Power 'sir John Cecil

  Somerville, A. A. (Windsor)

  Woodcock, Colonel H. C.

  Pownall Lieut.-Colonel Assheton

  Sprot, Sir Alexander

  Worthington-Evans, Rt. Hon. Sir L.

  Preston William

  Stanley, Col. Hon. G. F. (Will'sden, E.)

  Wragg, Herbert

  Price, Major C. W. M.

  Stanley, Hon. O. F. G. (Westm'eland)

  Young, E. Hilton (Norwich)

  Raine, W.

  Steel, Major Samuel Strang

  Ramsden, E.

  Styles, Captain H. Walter

  TELLERS FOR THE AYES.—

  Rawson, Alfred Cooper

  Sueter, Rear-Admiral Murray Fraser

  Commander B. Eyres Monsell and

  Reid, D. D. (County Down)

  Sykes, Major-Gen. Sir Frederick H.

  Colonel Gibbs.

  NOES.

  Adamson, Rt. Hon. W. (Fife, West)

  Hartshorn, Rt. Hon. Vernon

  Saklatvala, Shapurji

  Adamson, W. M. (Staff., Cannock)

  Hastings, Sir Patrick

  Salter, Dr. Alfred

  Alexander, A. V. (Sheffield, Hillsbro')

  Hayday, Arthur

  Scrymgeour, E.

  Ammon Charles George

  Hayes, John Henry

  Sexton, James

  Attlee, Clement Richard

  Henderson, T. (Glasgow)

  Shaw, Rt. Hon. Thomas (Preston)

  Baker J. (Wolverhampton, Bilston)

  Hirst, G. H.

  Shiels, Dr. Drummond

  Barker G. (Monmouth, Abertillery)

  Hirst, W. (Bradford, South)

  Sitch, Charles H.

  Barnes, A.

  Hudson, J. H. (Huddersfield)

  Slesser, Sir Henry H.

  Barr, J.

  Hutchison, Sir Robert (Montrose)

  Smillie, Robert

  Batey, Joseph

  Jenkins, W. (Glamorgan, Neath)

  Smith, Ben (Bermondsey, Rotherhithe)

  Benn, Captain Wedgwood (Leith)

  John, William (Rhondda, West)

  Smith, H. B. Lees (Keighiey)

  Bentinck, Lord Henry Cavendish-

  Johnston, Thomas (Dundee)

  Snell, Harry

  Bowerman, Rt. Hon. Charles W.

  Jones, Henry Haydn (Merioneth)

  Snowden, Rt. Hon. Philip

  Broad F. A.

  Jones, Morgan (Caerphilly)

  Spencer, G. A. (Broxtowe)

  Bromley, J.

  Kelly, W. T.

  Stamford, T. W.

  Brown, James (Ayr and Bute)

  Kenworthy, Lt.-Com. Hon. Joseph M.

  Stephen, Campbell

  Cape, Thomas

  Lansbury, George

  Sutton, J. E.

  Charleton, H. C.

  Lawson, John James

  Thomson, Trevelyan (Middlesbro, W.)

  Clowes, S.

  Lee, F.

  Thorne. W. (West Ham, Plalstow)

  Cluse, W. S.

  Lindley, F. W.

  Thurtle, E.

  Collins, Sir Godfrey (Greenock)

  Lowth, T.

  Tinker, John Joseph

  Compton Joseph

  Lunn, William

  Trevelyan, Rt. Hon. C. P.

  Connolly, M.

  MacDonald, Rt. Hon. J. R. (Aberavon)

  Varley, Frank B.

  Cove, W. G.

  Mackinder, W.

  Viant. S. P.

  Dalton Hugh

  MacLaren, Andrew

  Walsh, Rt. Hon. Stephen

  Davies' Evan (Ebbw Vale)

  Maclean, Nell (Glasgow, Govan)

  Warne, G. H.

  Davies, Rhys John (Westhoughton)

  March, S.

  Watson, W. M. (Dunfermilne)

  Day, Colonel Harry

  Maxton, James

  Watts-Morgan, Lt.-Col. D. (Rhondda)

  Dennison R.

  Mitchell, E. Rosslyn (Paisley)

  Webb, Rt. Hon. Sidney

  Duncan, C.

  Montague, Frederick

  Wedgwood, Rt. Hon. Josiah

  Dunnico, H.

  Morris, R. H.

  Welsh, J. C.

  Edwards, C. (Monmouth, Bedwellty)

  Morrison, R. C. (Tottenham, N.)

  Westwood, J.

  Edwards John H. (Accrington)

  Murnin, H.

  Wheatley, Rt. Hon. J.

  Evans, Capt. Ernest (Welsh Univer.)

  Naylor, T. E.

  Whiteley, W.

  Gibbins, Joseph

  Oliver, George Harold

  Wiggins, William Martin

  Gillett, George M.

  Palin, John Henry

  Wilkinson, Ellen C.

  Gosling, Harry

  Paling, W.

  Williams, C. P. (Denbigh, Wrexham)

  Graham, D. M. (Lanark, Hamilton)

  Parkinson, John Allen (Wigan)

  Williams, David (Swansea, East)

  Greenall, T.

  Pethick-Lawrence, F. W.

  Williams, Dr. J. H. (Llanelly)

  Greenwood, A. (Nelson and Colne)

  Ponsonby, Arthur

  Williams, T. (York, Don Valley)

  Grenfell, D. R. (Glamorgan)

  Potts, John S.

  Wilson, C. H. (Sheffield, Attercliffe)

  Griffiths, T. (Monmouth, Pontypool)

  Richardson, R. (Houghton-le-Spring)

  Wilson, R. J. (Jarrow)

  Groves, T.

  Riley, Ben

  Windsor, Walter

  Grundy, T. W.

  Ritson, J.

  Young, Robert (Lancaster, Newton)

  Guest, Dr. L. Haden (Southwark, N.)

  Robertson, J. (Lanark, Bothwell)

  Hall, F. (York, W. R. Normanton)

  Robinson, W. C. (Yorks, W. R., Elland)

  TELLERS FOR THE NOES.—

  Halt, G. H. (Merthyr Tydvil)

  Rose, Frank H.

  Mr. Arthur Henderson and Mr. T.

  Hardle, George D.

  Runciman, Rt. Hon. Walter

  Kennedy.

  Harris, Percy A.

  Bill read a Second time.

  Motion made, and Question put, "That the Bill be committed to a Committee of
  the Whole House."—[Mr. Ramsay MacDonald.]
  The House divided: Ayes, 136; Noes, 255.

  Division No. 258.]

  AYES.

  [11.39 p.m.

  Adamson, Rt. Hon. W. (Fife, West)

  Harris, Percy A.

  Saklatvala, Shapurji

  Adamson, W. M. (Staff., Cannock)

  Hartshorn, Rt. Hon. Vernon

  Salter, Dr. Alfred

  Alexander, A. V. (Sheffield, Hillsbre)

  Hastings, Sir Patrick

  Scrymgeour, E.

  Ammon, Charles George

  Hayday, Arthur

  Sexton, James

  Attlee, Clement Richard

  Hayes, John Henry

  Shaw, Rt. Hon. Thomas (Preston)

  Baker, J. (Wolverhampton, Bilston)

  Henderson, T. (Glasgow)

  Shiels, Dr. Drummond

  Barker, G. (Monmouth, Abertillery)

  Hirst, G. H.

  Sitch, Charles H.

  Barnes, A.

  Hirst, W. (Bradford, South)

  Slesser, Sir Henry H.

  Barr, J.

  Hudson, J. H. (Huddersfield)

  Smillie, Robert

  Batey, Joseph

  Jenkins, W. (Glamorgan, Neath)

  Smith, Ben (Bermondsey, Rotherhithe)

  Beckett, John (Gateshead)

  John, William (Rhondda, West)

  Smith, H. B. Lees (Keighley)

  Benn, Captain Wedgwood (Leith)

  Johnston, Thomas (Dundee)

  Snell, Harry

  Bowerman, Rt. Hon. Charles W.

  Jones, Morgan (Caerphilly)

  Snowden, Rt. Hon. Philip

  Broad, F. A.

  Kelly, W. T.

  Spencer, G. A. (Broxtowe)

  Bromley, J.

  Kenworthy, Lt.-Com. Hon. Joseph M.

  Stamford, T. W.

  Brown, James (Ayr and Bute)

  Lansbury, George

  Stephen, Campbell

  Cape, Thomas

  Lawson, John James

  Sutton, J. E.

  Charieton, H, C.

  Lee. F.

  Thomson, Trevelyan (Middlesbro. W)

  Clowes, S.

  Lindley, F. W.

  Thorne, W. (West Ham, Plaistow)

  Cluse, W. S.

  Lowth, T.

  Thurtle, E.

  Collins, Sir Godfrey (Greenock)

  Lunn, William

  Tinker, John Joseph

  Compton, Joseph

  MacDonald, Rt. Hon. J. R. (Aberavon)

  Trevelyan, Rt. Hon. C. P.

  Connolly, M.

  Mackinder, W.

  Varley, Frank B.

  Cove, W. G.

  MacLaren, Andrew

  Viant, S. P.

  Dalton, Hugh

  Maclean, Nell (Glasgow, Govan)

  Walsh, Rt. Hon. Stephen

  Davies, Evan (Ebbw Vale)

  March, S.

  Warne, G. H.

  Davies. Rhys John (Westhoughton)

  Maxton, James

  Watson, W. M. (Dunfermilne)

  Day, Colonel Harry

  Mitchell, E. Rosslyn (Paisley)

  Watts-Morgan, Lt-Col. D. (Rhondda)

  Dennison, R.

  Montague, Frederick

  Webb, Rt. Hon. Sidney

  Duncan. C.

  Morris, R. H.

  Wedgwood, Rt. Hon. Josiah

  Dunnico, H.

  Morrison, R. C. (Tottenham, N.)

  Welsh, J. C.

  Edwards, C. (Monmouth, Bedwellty)

  Murnin, H.

  Westwood, J.

  Evans, Capt. Ernest (Weish Univer.)

  Naylor, T. E.

  Wheatley, Rt. Hon. J.

  Gibbins, Joseph

  Oliver, George Harold

  Whiteley, W.

  Gillett, George M.

  Plain, John Henry

  Wilkinson, Ellen C.

  Gosling, Harry

  Paling, W.

  Williams, David (Swansea, E.)

  Graham, D. M. (Lanark, Hamilton)

  Parkinson, John Allen (Wigan)

  Williams, Dr. J. H. (Llanelly)

  Greenall, T.

  Pethick-Lawrence, F. W.

  Williams, T. (York, Don Valley)

  Greenwood, A. (Nelson and Coine)

  Ponsonby, Arthur

  Wilson, C. H. (Sheffield, Attercliffe)

  Grenfell. D. R. (Glamorgan)

  Potts, John S.

  Wilson, R. J. (Jarrow)

  Griffiths, T. (Monmouth, Pontypool)

  Richardson, R. (Houghton-le-Spring)

  Windsor, Walter

  Groves, T.

  Riley, Ben

  Young, Robert (Lancaster, Newton)

  Grundy, T. W.

  Ritson, J.

  Guest, Dr. L. Haden (Southwark, N.)

  Robertson, J. (Lanark, Bothwell)

  TELLERS FOR THE AYES.—

  Hall. F. (York, W.R., Normanton)

  Robinson, W. C. (Yorks, W. R. Eliand)

  Mr. Arthur Henderson and Mr. T.

  Hall, G. H. (Merthyr Tydvil)

  Rose, Frank H.

  Kennedy.

  Hardle, George D.

  Runciman, Rt. Hon. Walter

  NOES.

  Acland-Troyte, Lieut.-Colonel

  Boothby, R. J. G.

  Cecil, Rt. Hon. Sir Evelyn (Aston)

  Agg-Gardner, Rt. Hon. Sir James T.

  Bourne, Captain Robert Croft

  Cecil, Rt. Hon. Lord H. (Ox. Univ.)

  Ainsworth, Major Charles

  Bowyer, Capt. G. E. W.

  Chapman, Sir S.

  Albery, Irving James

  Boyd-Carpenter, Major A.

  Charteris, Brigadier-General J.

  Alexander, E. E. (Leyton)

  Brass, Captain W.

  Chilcott, Sir Warden

  Allen, J. Sandeman (L'pool, W. Derby)

  Bridgeman, Rt. Hon. William Clive

  Christie, J. A.

  Applin, Colonel R. V. K.

  Briggs, J. Harold

  Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston Spencer

  Ashley, Lt.-Col. Rt. Hon. Wilfrid W.

  Briscoe, Richard George

  Clarry, Reginald George

  Astbury, Lieut.-Commander F. W.

  Brocklebank, C. E. R.

  Cobb, Sir Cyril

  Astor. Viscountess

  Brooke, Brigadier-General C. R. I.

  Cochrane, Commander Hon. A. D.

  Atholl, Duchess of

  Broun-Lindsay, Major H.

  Cockerill, Brigadier-General G. K.

  Baldwin, Rt. Hon. Stanley

  Brown. Maj. D. C. (N'th'l'd., Hexham)

  Cohen, Major J. Brunei

  Balniel, Lord

  Brown, Brig.-Gen. H. C. (Berks, Newb'y)

  Conway, Sir W. Martin

  Barclay-Harvey, C. M.

  Bull, Rt. Hon. Sir William James

  Cooper, A. Duff

  Beamish, Captain T. P. H.

  Bullock, Captain M.

  Cope, Major William

  Beckett, Sir Gervase (Leeds, N.]

  Burgoyne, Lieut.-Colonel Sir Alan

  Couper, J. B.

  Bellairs, Commander Carlyon W.

  Burman, J. B.

  Courtauld, Major J. S.

  Benn, Sir A. S. (Plymouth, Drake)

  Burney, Lieut.-Com. Charles D.

  Craig, Capt. Rt. Hon. C. C. (Antrim)

  Bennett, A. J.

  Butler, Sir Geoffrey

  Craig, Ernest (Chester, Crewe)

  Bentinck, Lord Henry Cavendish.

  Butt, Sir Alfred

  Craik, Rt. Hon. sir Henry

  Betterton, Henry B.

  Cadogan, Major Hon. Edward

  Croft, Brigadier-Genera! Sir H.

  Birchall, Major J. Dearman

  Campbell, E. T.

  Crookshank, Col. C. de W. (Berwick)

  Bird. E. R. (Yorks. W. R., Skipton)

  Cassels, J. D.

  Crookshank, Cpt. H.(Lindsey, Gainsbro)

  Blades. Sir George Rowland

  Cautley, Sir Henry S.

  Cunilffe, Joseph Herbert

  Blundell, F. N.

  Cazalet, Captain Victor A.

  Curzon, Captain Viscount

  Dalkeith, Earl of

  Huntingfield, Lord

  Raine, W.

  Davidson, Major-General Sir John H.

  Hurd, Party A.

  Ramsden, E.

  Davies, A. V. (Lancaster, Royton)

  Hutchison, G. A. Clark (Midl'n & P'bl's)

  Rawson, Alfred Cooper

  Davies Maj. Geo. F. (Somerset, Yeovil)

  Inskip, Sir Thomas Walker H.

  Reid, D. D. (County Down)

  Davies, Sir Thomas (Cirencester)

  Jackson, Lieut.-Colonel Hon. F. S.

  Remer, J. R.

  Davison, Sir W. H. (Kensington, S.)

  Jacob, A. E.

  Rentoul, G. S.

  Dawson, Sir Philip

  Jephcott, A. R.

  Rhys, Hon. C. A. U.

  Dean Arthur Wellesley

  Jones, G. W. H. (Stoke Newington)

  Rice, Sir Frederick

  Doyle, Sir N. Grattan

  Jones, Henry Haydn (Merioneth)

  Roberts, E. H. G. (Flint)

  Eden, Captain Anthony

  Kennedy, A. R. (Preston)

  Ropner, Major L.

  Elliot Captain Walter E.

  Kindersley, Major Guy M.

  Ruggles-Brise, Major E. A.

  Elveden, Viscount

  King, Captain Henry Douglas

  Russell, Alexander West (Tynemouth)

  Erskine, Lord (Somerset, Weston-s.-M.)

  Kinloch-Cooke, Sir Clement

  Salmon, Major I.

  Evans Captain A (Cardiff, South)

  Knox, Sir Alfred

  Samuel, A. M. (Surrey, Farnham)

  Fairfax Captain J. G.

  Lamb, J. Q.

  Samuel, Samuel (W'dsworth, Putney)

  Fanshawe, Commander G. D.

  Lane-Fox, Lieut.-Col. George R.

  Sandeman, A. Stewart

  Fermoy Lord

  Lister, Cunliffe-, Rt. Hon. Sir Philip

  Sanderson, Sir Frank

  Fielden, E. B.

  Little, Dr. E. Graham

  Sandon. Lord

  Finburgh, S.

  Lloyd, Cyril E. (Dudley)

  Sassoon, Sir Philip Albert Gustavs, D.

  Fleming, D. P.

  Locker-Lampson, G. (Wood Green)

  Savery, S. S.

  Ford P. J.

  Loder, J. de V.

  Scott, Sir Leslie (Liverp'l, Exchange)

  Forestler-Walker, Sir L.

  Looker, Herbert William

  Shaw, R. G. (Yorks, W. R., Sowerby)

  Foxcroft, Captain C. T.

  Lord, Walter Greaves-

  Shaw, Capt. W. W. (Wilts, Westb'y)

  Fraser, Captain Ian

  Lougher, L.

  Sheffield, Sir Berkeley

  Gadle, Lieut.-Col. Anthony

  Luce, Maj.-Gen. Sir Richard Harman

  Shepperson, E. W.

  Galbraith J. F. W.

  Lynn, Sir R. J.

  Sinclair, Col. T. (Queen's Univ., Belfst.)

  Ganzoni Sir John

  MacAndrew, Charles Glen

  Skelton, A. N.

  Gates Percy

  Macdonald, R. (Glasgow, Cathcart)

  Smith, R.W. (Aberd'n & Kinc'dine, C.

  Gilmour Lt.-Col. Rt. Hon. Sir John

  Macintyre, Ian

  Smithers, Waldron

  Glyn, Major R. G. C.

  McLean, Major A.

  Somerville, A. A. (Windsor)

  Goner Sir Robert

  Macmillan, Captain H.

  Sprot, Sir Alexander

  Grace John

  MacRobert, Alexander M.

  Stanley, Col. Hon. G. F. (Will'sden, E.)

  Grant J. A.

  Maitland, Sir Arthur D. Steel-

  Stanley, Hon. O. F. G. (Westm'eland)

  Greene W. P. Crawford

  Makins, Brigadier-General E.

  Steel, Major Samuel Strang

  Greenwood, William (Stockport)

  Malone, Major P. B.

  Styles, Captain H. Walter

  Grenfell, Edward C. (City of London)

  Manningham-Buller, Sir Mervyn

  Sueter, Rear-Admiral Murray Fraser

  Gretton, Colonel John

  Margesson, Captain D.

  Sykes, Major-Gen. Sir Frederick H.

  Grotrian H. Brent

  Marriott, Sir J. A. R.

  Thomson, F. C. (Aberdeen, South)

  Guinness, Rt. Hon. Walter E.

  Mason, Lieut.-Col. Glyn K.

  Thomson, Rt. Hon. Sir W. Mitchell-

  Gunston, Captain D. W.

  Merriman, F. B.

  Tinne, J. A.

  Hacking, Captain Douglas H.

  Meyer, Sir Frank

  Tryon, Rt. Hon. George Clement

  Hall Lieut.-Col. Sir F. (Dulwich)

  Mitchell, S. (Lanark, Lanark)

  Vaughan-Morgan, Col. K. P.

  Hall Capt W. D'A. (Brecon & Rad.)

  Mitchell, W. Foot (Saffron Walden)

  Waddington, R.

  Hammersley, S. S.

  Mitchell, Sir W. Lane (Streatham)

  Wallace. Captain D. E.

  Hanuury, C.

  Moore, Lieut.-Colonel T. C. R. (Ayr)

  Ward, Lt.-Col. A. L.(Kingston-on-Hull)

  Hannon, Patrick Joseph Henry

  Moore, Sir Newton J.

  Warner, Brigadier-General W. W.

  Harland, A.

  Moore-Brabazon, Lieut.-Col. J. T. C.

  Warrender, Sir Victor

  Harrison, G. J. C.

  Moreing, Captain A. H.

  Waterhouse, Captain Charles

  Harvey, Major S. E. (Devon, Totnes)

  Merrison, H. (Wilts, Salisbury)

  Watson, Sir F. (Pudsey and Otley)

  Haslam, Henry C.

  Morrison-Bell, Sir Arthur Clive

  Watts, Dr. T.

  Hawke, John Anthony

  Murchison. C. K.

  Wheler, Major Sir Granville C. H.

  Headlam, Lieut.-Colonel C. M.

  Nall, Lieut.-Colonel Sir Joseph

  White, Lieut.-Colonel G. Dairymple

  Henderson, Capt. R. R. (Oxf'd, Henley)

  Nelson, Sir Frank

  Williams, Com. C. (Devon, Torquay)

  Henderson, Lieut.-Col. V. L. (Bootle)

  Nicholson, O. (Westminster)

  Williams, C. P. (Denbigh, Wrexham)

  Heneage, Lieut.-Colonel Arthur P.

  Nicholson, Col. Rt. Hn. W. G. (Ptrsf'ld.)

  Williams, Herbert G. (Reading)

  Kenn, Sir Sydney H.

  Nuttall, Ellis

  Wilson, Sir C. H. (Leeds, Central)

  Hennessy, Major J. R. G.

  Oakley, T.

  Wilson, R. R. (Stafford, Lichfield)

  Henniker-Hughan, Vice-Adm. Sir A.

  O'Connor, T. J. (Bedford, Luton)

  Windsor-Clive, Lieut.-Colonel George

  Herbert, S. (York, M. R., Scar. & Wh'by)

  O'Neill, Major Rt. Hon. Hugh

  Wise, Sir Fredric

  Hilton, Cecil

  Oman, Sir Charles William C.

  Wolmer, Viscount

  Hoare, Lt.-Col. Rt. Hon. Sir S. J. G.

  Penny, Frederick George

  Womersley, W. J.

  Hogg, Rt. Hon. Sir D.(St. Marylebone)

  Perkins, Colonel E. K.

  Wood. E. (Chest'r, Stalyb'ge & Hyde)

  Hohier, Sir Gerald Fitzroy

  Perring, William George

  Wood, Sir Kingsley (Woolwich, W.)

  Homan, C. W. J.

  Peto, G. (Somerset, Frome)

  Woodcock, Colonel H. C.

  Hope, Capt. A. O. J. (Warw'k, Nun.)

  Philipson, Mabel

  Worthington-Evans, Rt. Hon. Sir L.

  Hope, Sir Harry (Forfar)

  Piolou, D. P.

  Wragg, Herbert

  Hopkins, J. W. W.

  Plicher, G.

  Young, E. Hilton (Norwich)

  Hopkinson, A. (Lancaster, Mossley)

  Power, Sir John Cecil

  Horlick, Lieut.-Colonel J. N.

  Pownall, Lieut.-Colonel Assheton

  TELLERS FOR THE NOES.-

  Howard, Capt. Hon. D. (Cumb., N.)

  Preston, William

  Commander B. Eyres Monsell and

  Hudson, Capt. A. U. M.(Hackney, N.)

  Price, Major C. W. M.

  Colonel Gibbs.

  Hume, Sir G. K.

  Bill committed to a Standing Committee.

  The remaining Orders were read, and postponed.
  It being after Half-past Eleven of the Clock, Mr. SPEAKER adjourned the House, without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
  Adjourned at Eleven Minutes before Twelve o'Clock.

COAL INDUSTRY.
  GERMANY AND AMERICA.
  GERMANY AND AMERICA.
  ENGLAND, BELGIUM, AND FRANCE.
  ENGLAND, BELGIUM, AND FRANCE.
  AVERAGE OUTPUT.
  AVERAGE OUTPUT.
  CLOSED MIXES.
  CLOSED MIXES.
  EXPORTS.
  EXPORTS.
  LOCAL RATES (COLLECTION).
  LOCAL RATES (COLLECTION).
  STATE INSURANCE SCHEMES.
  STATE INSURANCE SCHEMES.
  FOOD PRESERVATIVES (REGULATIONS).
  FOOD PRESERVATIVES (REGULATIONS).
  CONTRIBUTORY INSURANCE BILL.
  CONTRIBUTORY INSURANCE BILL.
  SLEEPY SICKNESS.
  SLEEPY SICKNESS.
HOUSING.
  REFUSAL OF SUBSIDY, OBAN.
  REFUSAL OF SUBSIDY, OBAN.
  COLLIERY SCHEMES.
  COLLIERY SCHEMES.
  TRADE FACILITIES ACT.
  TRADE FACILITIES ACT.
  INCOME TAX.
  INCOME TAX.
TRADE AND COMMERCE.
  AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY (IMPORTS).
  AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY (IMPORTS).
  MACHINE GUNS (EXPORTATION).
  MACHINE GUNS (EXPORTATION).
  CINEMATOGRAPH FILMS.
  CINEMATOGRAPH FILMS.
  SALE OF BREAD AND WEIGHTS AND MEASURES BILLS.
  SALE OF BREAD AND WEIGHTS AND MEASURES BILLS.
  TREATY OF LAUSANNE (TURKISH CLAIMS).
  TREATY OF LAUSANNE (TURKISH CLAIMS).
  RUSSIA.
  RUSSIA.
  CHINA (SOVIET INFLUENCE).
  CHINA (SOVIET INFLUENCE).
  KENYA.
  KENYA.
POST OFFICE.
  MOTOR VANS.
  MOTOR VANS.
  TELEPHONE SERVICE.
  TELEPHONE SERVICE.
  ROYAL ARTILLERY ARTIFICERS PROMOTION).
  ROYAL ARTILLERY ARTIFICERS PROMOTION).
  TEACHERS (SUPERANNUATION) BILL.
  TEACHERS (SUPERANNUATION) BILL.
SCOTLAND.
  AGRICULTURAL CONFERENCE (RECOMMENDATIONS).
  AGRICULTURAL CONFERENCE (RECOMMENDATIONS).
  ARTIFICIAL CROP-DRYING (DEMONSTRATIONS).
  ARTIFICIAL CROP-DRYING (DEMONSTRATIONS).
  UNEMPLOYMENT STATISTICS.
  UNEMPLOYMENT STATISTICS.
TRANSPORT.
  STRAND (STREET REPAIRS).
  STRAND (STREET REPAIRS).
  SOUTHERN RAILWAY (CLOSED STATIONS).
  SOUTHERN RAILWAY (CLOSED STATIONS).
  GREAT WEST ROAD.
  GREAT WEST ROAD.
  NEW ROADS (SURPLUS LAND).
  NEW ROADS (SURPLUS LAND).
Preamble
The House met at a quarter past four of the clock, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
FORMER ENEMY ALIENS (DISABILITIES REMOVAL) BILL.
Second Reading (which stands appointed for to-day) put off to to-morrow.

COASTGUARD BILL. [H.L.]
THE EARL OF PLYMOUTH: My Lords, I beg leave to introduce a Bill to amend the law with respect to the Coastguard and for purposes connected therewith and to move that it be read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1a.—(The Earl of Plymouth.)
On Question, Bill read 1a, and to be printed.

BATH CORPORATION BILL.

  BEDWELLTY URBAN DISTRICT COUNCIL BILL.
  THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (THE EARL OF DONOUGHMORE): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion which stands in my name.
  Moved, That the Order made on the 10th day of April last, "That no Private Bill brought from the House of Commons shall be read a second time after Tuesday the 30th of June next," be dispensed with in respect of the Bath Corporation Bill and the Bedwellty Urban District Council Bill; and that the Bills be now read 2a.—(The Earl of Donoughmore.)
  On Question, Motion agreed to, and Bills read 2a accordingly.

COLONIAL BANK BILL. [H.L.]
Read 3a, and passed, and sent to the Commons.
BETHLEM HOSPITAL BILL. [H.L.]
Read 3a, and passed, and sent to the Commons.
LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL (TRAMWAYS AND IMPROVEMENTS) BILL.
Read 3a, with the Amendments. Further Amendments made. Bill passed, and returned to the Commons.
BOARD OF EDUCATION SCHEME (WINCHESTER, CHRIST'S HOSPITAL SCHOOL FOUNDATION) CONFIRMATION BILL.
Read 3a (according to Order), and passed.
WEMYSS AND DISTRICT WATER ORDER CONFIRMATION BILL.
Read 3a (according to Order), and passed.
GUARDIANSHIP OF INFANTS BILL.
Read 3a (according to Order), with the Amendments, and passed, and returned to the Commons.

HONOURS (PREVENTIONS OF ABUSES) BILL. [H.L.]
Order of the Day for the House to be put into Committee read.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(The Marquess of Salisbury.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly:
[The EARL OF DONOUGHMORE in the Chair.]
Clause 1:
Punishment of abuses in connection with the grant of honours.
(3) Any person guilty of a misdemeanour under this Act shall be liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or to a fine not Acceding five hundred pounds, or to both such imprisonment and such fine, or on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding three months or to a fine not exceeding fifty pounds, or to both such imprisonment and such fine, and where the person convicted (whether on indict-

1059
ment or summarily) received any such gift, money, or consideration as aforesaid which is capable of forfeiture, he shall in addition to any other punishment be liable to forfeit the same to His Majesty.
VISCOUNT BERTIE OF THAME VISCOUNT BERTIE OF THAME moved, in subsection (3), to leave out "which is capable of forfeiture." The noble Viscount said: The object of this Amendment is to prevent any guilty person from being able to retain his ill-gotten gains.
Amendment moved—
Clause 1, page 2, line 5, leave out ("which is capable of forfeiture").—(Viscount Bertie of Thame.)
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY): I quite understand that the noble Viscount's intention is to make this clause more effective than it is, but I think I shall be able to convince him that his Amendment would not be workable, because he will notice that the words of the clause are:
"where the person convicted…received any such gift, money, or consideration as aforesaid which is capable of forfeiture, he shall in addition to any other punishment be liable to forfeit the same to His Majesty."
The Amendment would be quite right in respect of a gift or in respect of money, but when you come to the word "consideration" it could not possibly be worked. How could a consideration be forfeited to His Majesty? For example, the giver of the consideration might give it in this way: he might make the recipient a director on a board on which the remuneration might be very good, and so bribe him in that way. It is clear that this consideration could not be forfeited to His Majesty. I hope my noble friend will not press the Amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 1 agreed to.
Remaining clause agreed to.

MARRIED WOMEN (TORTS) BILL. [H.L.]
Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (VISCOUNT CAVE): My Lords, in moving the Second Reading of this Bill I should like to remind your Lordships that a few weeks ago Lord Danesfort called attention to
1060
the fact that in these days a husband who has no interest in his wife's property, and little legal control over her acts, is yet liable, under an archaic law, for damages in respect of all her wrong-doings, even if her wrong-doings are committed without his knowledge, and even in some cases when she is living separate from him. I quite agreed that the state of the law, as it at present stands, is absurd, and I said that we proposed to bring in a Bill to amend it. This Bill is brought in therefore, and it provides in one short clause that the husband of a married woman shall not, as such, be liable to be sued, or be made a party to any action or legal proceeding brought against her in respect of any tort committed by her, whether before or after the marriage. There is a great injustice in the present state of the law which ought to be altered, and I hope your Lordships will assent to the Second Reading of the Bill.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
LORD BUCKMASTER: My Lords, I certainly have no intention of opposing this Bill. What the Lord Chancellor has said is right, and as the law stands today a great and unmerited injustice may often be done to a man who, while he is wholly unable to control his wife's malicious propensities, may be rendered liable for the damages arising out of her wrong-doing. While I am prepared to assent to the Bill, I cannot avoid saying that I think it is unfortunate that the Government do not take steps to have one complete examination of the whole relations of men and women, and alter the thing wholly and for good. As it is, all that we do is to take something here and there, take one step forward one day, and, being afraid lest we have gone too far, go back the next day. We have never attempted to rearrange the whole relations of men and women in regard to the new conditions in which the world finds itself. Personally, I wish very much that it was done. While I am glad to find that this small Bill is going to pass, I greatly regret that it has not a larger and wider scope.
VISCOUNT HALDANE: My Lords, I do not dissent from anything that the noble and learned Lord has just said, but I wish to point out that if this Bill is to pass in the present Session it cannot go beyond its present form. I agree that

1061
there are several other questions on which the law relating to the relations of husband and wife requires to be looked into and altered, but just now we are concerned with an obviously proper amendment of the law which can stand by itself without prejudice to other questions, and I therefore desire to see this Bill passed as quickly as possible.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND BILL. [H.L.]
House in Committee (according to Order): Bill reported without amendment.
SUMMARY JURISDICTION (SEPARATION AND MAINTENANCE) BILL.
Read 3a (according to Order), with the Amendments, and passed, and returned to the Commons.
STATUTORY GAS COMPANIES (ELECTRICITY SUPPLY POWERS) BILL.
Amendments reported (according to Order).

INDIA.
LORD OLIVIER LORD OLIVIER rose to ask His Majesty's Government whether they can now inform the House as to the policy which they propose to pursue in regard to Indian constitutional questions; and to move for Papers. The Noble Lord said: My Lords, just about a year ago I was explaining to your Lordships the circumstances in which the Government of India and His Majesty's Government had deemed it advisable to appoint a Committee to inquire into the working of the existing scheme of constitution in India. I then said:—
"I have had innumerable representations, and I have had all manner of assurances as to its working, or as to its unworkability. I do not propose to indicate in the slightest degree the effect of all these representations on my mind. All these matters, I suggest, are those upon which a judgment can only be formed after the Viceroy has had all his reports from his Provincial Governors and that Committee has gone thoroughly into the case, and evidence has been heard and considered."
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Since that time the Secretary of State and the Governor-General of India have been considering the outcome of the Report of that Committee, which sat under the presidency of Sir Alexander Muddiman, the Home Member of the Government of India. The noble Earl, the Secretary of State, has had the very great advantage of being able to confer upon there matters with the Earl of Reading, the Governor-General of India, and I think I may congratulate His Majesty's late Government on having been instrumental in providing for the passage of a Bill which enabled the Secretary of State to have that great advantage of conference on such matters as this.
Before I pass from that matter, I should like to express the very great gratification that it was to myself personally and to His Majesty's late Government that we were able in all matters to work in practical agreement, both on this question and other questions, with the present Viceroy and Governor-General of India, Lord Reading. That was an immense satisfaction to myself, both administratively and personally, and in so far as His Majesty's late Government had a strong and sincere desire to promote the development of responsible self-government in India tinder the scheme of the Montagu-Chelmsford Constitution and in accordance with the declaration of His Majesty's Government, they were—I will not even say seconded in that desire, but they had the entire and most friendly co-operation of the present Viceroy of India. I cannot doubt, therefore, that the question of what is now to be done as a consequence of the Report of the Committee has been dealt with in the most liberal spirit.
I should like to say a few words with regard to the upshot of the Report of that Committee. The Committee comprised Sir Alexander Muddiman, who was the Member for Home Affairs of the Government of India, Sir Muhammed Shafi, a Mahomedan, who was then Law Member of the Governor-General in Council, the Maharaja of Burdwan, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, the well-known Indian Liberal leader. Sir Arthur Froom, Sir Sivaswami Aiyer, Sir H Moncrieff Smith, Secretary to the Government of India, Mr. K. A. Jinnah, Leader of the Independent

1063
Party in the Legislative Assembly, and Mr. R. P. Paranjpye, a well-known Progressive. Their duty was:—
"To inquire into the difficulties arising from, or defects inherent in, the working of the Government of India Act, and the rules thereunder, and to investigate the possibility and desirability of securing remedies for such difficulties or defects consistent with the structure, policy and purpose of the Act."
The Committee presented two Reports, but there was little substantial difference between the considerations which formed the basis of the criticism as to difficulties and defects, although the emphasis laid upon them differs considerably. In the upshot the Majority made a series of recommendations for dealing with faults and defects which they found in the working of the Act, with sums of which the Minority agreed and from others of which they dissented.
It would be a great waste of time for me to go into any particulars of those recommendations, because it is obvious that the noble Earl will be able to deal only in the broadest possible manner with the policy which His Majesty's Government intend to pursue, and it would be idle to attempt to discuss any particular recommendations. I would only say that the Minority, in their Report, went further than the Majority in principle, because they came to the conclusion that the difficulties and inconveniences of working the present Constitution were such that no mere amendment in detail would remedy them and make it an efficient system for the training of Indian politicians in Parliamentary work. They had some justification for taking this wider view, for, in announcing the purpose of the inquiry, Sir Malcolm Hailey had stated in the Legislative Assembly that:—
"We propose to make a serious attempt to investigate the complaints against the working of the scheme in practice, to assess the causes and to examine the remedies necessary."
If the Minority had—and I shall point out that they had—certain causes of dissatisfaction with the working of the Act, which could not be remedied within the scope of the Act, it appeared to them to be their duty to point out those cases, and to indicate the line upon which they thought that a remedy might be found.
They were further encouraged in that
1064
view by the words of Sir Malcolm Hailey, who at the same time said:—
"If our inquiry into the difficulties of the working of the Act shows the feasibility and the possibility of any advance within the Act, that is to say, the use of the Rule-making power provided under the Statute, we are willing to make recommendations to that effect, but if our inquiry shows that no advance is possible without amending the Constitution, then the question of advance must be left as an entirely open and separate issue upon which the Government is in no way committed."
The Minority made certain complaints of the very essentials of this diarchical Constitution which, in fact, are not dissented from by the Majority, and which are endorsed very strongly by a whole cloud of witnesses who have had to do with the working of the Act in several Provinces. They claim that there are certain crucial Parliamentary defects in the Constitution which make it unsuitable and, in fact, impossible, as a training school for Parliamentary government of a responsible character.
That, as your Lordships will admit, is a very serious criticism of the scheme of the present Constitution. The crucial Parliamentary defects of the Constitution as a training ground for responsible Government, admitted though not emphasised by the majority, are brought out very clearly by the minority. The first is the inter-dependence of the administration of reserved subjects—that is to say, subjects reserved for the Governor and his officers and Executive Council—and the transferred subjects which are ostensibly transferred to the responsibility of unofficial Ministers. In that connection I might quote a passage from the dispatch of the Governor of Bombay of November, 1918, in which he pointed out in advance this complication. He then said:
"Practically all proposals of importance put forward by the Minister in charge of any of the Departments suggested for transfer will involve a reference to the authorities in charge of the Reserved Department. There are few, if any, subjects on which the functions of the two sections of government"—
responsible Ministers, supposed to be responsible to the Council, and those who are responsible to the Governor—
"would not overlap; consequently it will be seldom possible in the case of a transferred subject for a Minister to dispense with a reference to the Departments concerned with the reserved subjects."

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That is to say, the Minister of a transferred subject cannot freely exercise his responsibility to the Council alone. He has to act in concert with, or with some submission to, the Governor and those of his officers who are responsible for reserved subjects. That is an interference with anything like government by a responsible Ministry. Secondly, it is pointed out—and this is admitted by both parts of the Committee—that the Ministers cannot be responsible solely to the Legislature, as the Parliamentary Joint Committee in its Report intended, because of the very real control that the Finance Department must exercise over all expenditure, and because the points of view of popular Ministers and of members of the Executive Council in charge of inter-current Departments, who owe no responsibility to the Legislature and are steeped in official tradition, may and not infrequently do differ.
Further, there is this third difficulty, that the more responsible Ministers are amalgamated by joint deliberation with the official heads of Departments in a quasi Cabinet, as is advocated by the Majority Committee, the more will they become identified in the popular view with the official Government, and the less possible it is for them either to summon opposition among their own followers to support them against the Government, with whom they have acted, or the more difficult freely to oppose the Government on questions of the policy of the Reserved Departments. It will readily be understood, and both sections of the Committee admit, that in the present stage of politics representatives of the electorate must show, as a whole, the temper of an Opposition. If they do not do so they will be supplanted by other representatives forming a new Opposition, as was done at the last Election by the Swarajists. The functioning of the Councils under the present diarchical Constitution is not and cannot be made a training for ministerial Parliamentary responsibility, however much it may be made a training for ministerial administration, which is a different thing.
Now, the question before the Minority, as before the Majority, is whether these defects in the Councils as at present constituted, for their actual purpose of serving as a training ground for Parliamentary responsibility, can be remedied
1066
at all without further reconsideration of the Constitution, and upon that subject evidence was given by a succession of Executive Councillors and Ministers, Indians who had served under the new scheme in high positions, men not hostile to the Government, who with few exceptions gave it as their conscientious opinion that the present diarchical Constitution was not working as a fruitful means of training Ministers in responsible action, but was working in a manner which was causing, and likely to cause, friction and not peace, and that that was in consequence of the very essence of the Constitution, and not at all on account of such minor defects as could be remedied in accordance with the recommendations of the Majority Report.
The Governor-General of the United Provinces, in a Report, described the present diarchical Constitution as "a complex, confused system, having no logical basis, rooted in compromise, and defensible only as a transitional expedient." Sir William Marris and his Council went on to say that their conclusion on the whole Inquiry was that there is no halfway house between the Constitution, which they so forcibly condemn, and a wholly new Constitution, and that concessions falling short of complete provincial autonomy will placate no section of the opponents of the existing system. They say:—
"It seems to the Governor-in-Council that the difficulties and defects inherent in the scheme are quite incurable by any mere alteration of the Act or rules. The utmost that changes so restricted could do would be to oil the wheels of the constitutional machinery; they could have no effect on the general and permanent tendencies of the Constitution itself."
This conclusion is really implicit in the Report of the Majority, though they do not emphasise it, and this consideration the Minority took up very seriously. Is it not expedient in the interests of all concerned that the recommendations of the Minority, with which the Secretary of State and the Governor-General may agree, be now adopted, in order to ease the dissatisfaction of all Parties with the present Constitution, and give them hope that a real system of responsible government can be set up, and that the Government should at once take in hand the examination of all the known defects in the Constitution? That is where the Minority Report differs from, and goes

1067
further than, the Report of the Majority, who held themselves, I may say, restricted by the terms of their reference from embarking upon that question.
In that connection I wish to acquaint your Lordships with what I consider a very significant circumstance. Sir Muhammad Shafi, who, as I have said, was a member of the Committee, and Law Member of the Viceroy's Council, after he had discharged his duties on the Committee was interviewed by a representative of the Associated Press of India, and he explained that, whereas in reporting on the reference given to him he did not consider that it was within his province to make any comment on the lines of the Minority Report, further consideration; should be given to the revision of the Constitution. He said:
"It would, to my mind, be in the highest degree conducive to the best interests of Government, as well as of the people and of constitutional evolution in India, if the British Government were, without waiting for the expiry of the statutory period in 1929, to undertake a large inquiry of the kind advocated by the Minority by means of a Royal Commission. In its essence this proposal for a larger inquiry is nothing more than the recommendation made unanimously, with the concurrence of the official members of the First Legislative Assembly on the 29th September, 1921, as a result of the debate on Rai Bahadur Jadunath Mazumdar's Resolution advocating certain definite steps in constitutional advance. That Resolution was, in pursuance of the recommendation embodied therein, forwarded by the Government of India to the then Secretary of State. Since then discussions in the Second Legislative Assembly have made it clear that a large majority of the elected representatives of the people are strongly in favour of such an inquiry.
"while immediate acceptance by His Majesty's Government of the recommendations for action within the Act made by the Majority would result in a smoother and more satisfactory working of the existing constitutional machinery, the institution of a larger inquiry, as advocated by the Minority, into the defects and difficulties inherent in the Constitution itself, and for the purpose of placing the Constitution on a permanent basis with full responsible government as the final stage, would satisfy by far a large majority of politically-minded Indians. Action on these lines is, in my opinion, certain to bring a twofold result. It would, in the first place, oil the hinges (if the existing constitutional machinery and as I have said above, make its actual working far smoother and more satisfactory than is the case at present. In the second place, the appointment of a Royal Commission would satisfy the Liberals, the Independent Nationalists, and a majority of Mahomedans, who have not definitely identi-
1068
fied themselves with either of those Parties, and, I am hopeful, would go a long way towards influencing the Swarajists to abandon their blocking tactics, thus creating an entirely new atmosphere of mutual cooperation and good will between the Government and the people for the successful evolution of a constitutional programme in conformity with the policy laid down by the British Parliament in the Preamble to the Government of India Act, 1919. This is a course which, to my mind, is perfectly consonant with the dictates of far-sighted statesmanship and is certain to result in strengthening the political connection between Great Britain and India."
I am satisfied that the counsel given by Sir Mohammed Shafi, a Mussulman and a man high in the counsels of the State, a man who cannot be accused of any factions desire to make trouble or to accelerate reform in a manner that would be dangerous, is counsel which would be given by practically every native Indian in India who gives attention to politics. It is idle to suppose that Mahomedans are less desirous of the evolution of responsible Government than are the Hindus. It is idle to suppose that the Liberal Party, or the Independent Party, or the Moderates can be detached from the Swarajist Party by such concessions as are proposed to be given by the Majority; whereas I am confident that the opening by His Majesty's Government of the door of hope that the examination of the constitutional position will now be set in hand, as recommended by the Minority, with a view to arriving, in consort with Indian opinion, at some kind of adumbration of a future development of Indian policy, would practically unite and conciliate all the advanced Parties and induce them for the remainder of the time during which the present Constitution may work to do their best to carry on the Government efficiently under this scheme.
It is, therefore, my great hope that the noble Earl the Secretary of State for India in his statement to-day will be able not only to tell us that he proposes to consider, with the Government of India, the putting into effect, whether by rules or by amendments of the Act, of the recommendations of the Majority of the Committee—with regard to which he cannot give us the details to-day but can only give them after consultation with the Government of India—but that in addition, he will be able to show to your Lordships and to the Indian reformers some hope that a beginning will be made, following out the lines recommended by

1069
the Minority of the Committee, with some further revision and inquiry into the working of the Constitution. I beg to move.
THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR INDIA (THE EARL OF BIRKENHEAD): My Lords, my first duty is beyond question to express gratitude for the great patience which both here and in another place has enabled me to hold the important office that I have filled for a period of eight months without making any considerable Parliamentary statement. For this unusual indulgence I am indebted both to my noble friend Lord Olivier, who has repeatedly postponed a Question put down in his name, to the general body of your Lordships, and not less to those in the House of Commons who have exhibited a similar degree of patience. If may venture to express an opinion upon the point, I think that both Houses of Parliament, in this matter, have exhibited a wise constraint. The responsibility for the government of India is so vast, the problems are so novel and so complex, that no mind, however quickly acquisitive of new facts, or however industrious in its application to their mastery, can hope to make any useful contribution without months of unremitting industry.
I hope I have not altogether misspent the time which the indulgence of the House has made available to me. I propose to-day to make the best attempt I can to discharge the task which will naturally be expected from me; that is, to review the general situation in India. Such a consideration involves financial, commercial and political considerations. I shall attempt to deal with each.
I must, however, make it plain at the outset that upon one, and not the least important, of the subjects to which I must address myself, there has been a considerable measure of misunderstanding. Both in this country and in India there has been much speculation as to the decisions reached by agreement between the Governor-General and myself. No decisions whatever have been reached; nor could any have been reached. Indeed, not even the Cabinet, which has naturally been kept closely aware of the discussions between myself and Lord Reading, has reached any decision. The Government is far too conscious of the implications of the Montagu-Chelmsford Constitution to find it possible even to
1070
think of conclusions until certain indispensable antecedent steps have been taken.
My noble friend Lord Lytton, who is at present the head of the Government of India, has naturally been kept very carefully informed of the discussions between myself and Lord Reading. Week by week, as those discussions have proceeded, he has been made aware, both in general and in particular, of their scope and tendency. Such a knowledge could not properly be withheld from him, though, as I have made it plain, neither he nor his Government is affected by any responsibility thereby. But before any decisions of any kind are taken, it is obvious that the consideration and advice of the Government of India must be formally invoked; and it is at least equally obvious that the opinions of the Legislative Assembly must be elicited. For reasons which are apparent, we should not dream of announcing or even of forming decisions without the contribution of that very important Legislative body which we have so recently called into existence.
I am not, therefore, to-day either announcing or purporting to announce, decisions or conclusions. I cannot any longer resist the legitimate desire of Parliament to be informed of the result of the discussions which have taken place between the Governor-General and myself. The truest description which I can give of the spirit in which I address Parliament is that, having held this responsible office for eight months, I am attempting a survey of the impressions which its tenure up to the present moment has stamped upon my mind.
I address myself, in the first place, to the financial position of India. I am happy to say that on a general survey, this position must be pronounced satisfactory. The period of heavy deficits which in the five years ending 1922–23 amounted to about Rs. 100 crores, may, in my belief, be regarded as definitely closed. This happy result is to be explained by the continued exercise of strict economy in every department of administration and by the imposition of additional taxation, particularly in the years 1921–22 and 1922–23. I need not trouble your Lordships with an examination of the Budget results, unexpectedly fortunate as they were, of the year

1071
1923–24. But I ought to say a word upon the revised estimate for 1924–25, which shows a surplus of nearly Rs.400 lakhs with an improvement of Rs.473 lakhs Revenue and an increased Expenditure of only Rs.92 lakhs. The improvement is mainly attributable to substantial savings in military expenditure, savings in exchange, improved gross Customs receipts, increase in the contribution of railways to general revenues, and a considerable windfall on account of enemy ships.
The Budget for 1925–26, which is based on an average rate of exchnge of 1s. 6d., assumed an excess of Revenue over Expenditure of Rs.324 lakhs, of which Rs.268 lakhs was estimated to be a true recurring surplus. The Government of India had repeatedly announced that their financial policy would be directed to the reduction and eventual extinction of the provincial contributions at the earliest possible date; and it was therefore decided to utilise Rs.250 lakhs of the true recurring surplus in the remission of contributions. Under the scheme laid down in the Devolution Rules, Madras will obtain a remission of Rs.126 lakhs; the United Provinces, Rs.56 lakhs; the Punjab Rs.61 lakhs, and Burma Rs.7 lakhs. The Government of India had already taken into account in its Estimates the further remission for three years of Bengal's contribution of Rs.63 lakhs, which has since been accepted by the Legislature. These proposals, which have been the subject of deep consideration, were not received with any articulate enthusiasm in India. Those Provinces which obtained no relief out of the Rs.250 lakhs, were dissatisfied, more especially as the exceptional treatment of Bengal was continued. Bombay was particularly active in protest, and eventually the Government of India obtained the assent of the Legislature to a distribution of Rs. 50 lakhs of the non-recurring surplus, as a grant for 1925–26 only, to certain Provinces which either would not benefit, or would only benefit slightly by the reduction of Rs.250 lakhs in the contributions. The resolution passed by the two Chambers recommended that the reliefs given to the Provinces should be devoted mainly to expenditure in the Transferred Departments.
I ought not to leave the central Budget without placing it on record that for the
1072
last two years the Government of India has actively pursued the policy of retrenchment in military and other expenditure recommended by the Inchcape Committee. On the civil side, almost all the recommendations of the Committee have received effect, and on the military side, the retrenchments actually secured almost exactly equal the total specific economies recommended by the Committee. The reduction in military expenditure in the last few years is illustrated by the following figures (in crores of rupees) of net expenditure:—

1922–23

65¼

1923–24

59¼

1924–25 (revised estimate)

57½

1925–26 (Budget)

57

The thanks of the country and of this House are due to my noble friend Lord Inchcape for the invaluable services rendered by the Committee of which he was Chairman.
I proceed, my Lords, to add a few observations upon the conditions of trade in this great sub-continent, which is so large a customer of ours at a moment when we need customers wherever we can discover them. India was severely affected by the trade slump which followed the post-Armistice boom. In 1920–21 the adverse balance in merchandise on private account exceeded Rs.78 crores; in 1921–22, the adverse balance fell to Rs.23 crores; in 1922–23, the favourable balance, which is a normal feature of Indian trade, was restored, and exports exceeded imports by no less a sum than Rs.80 crores. In 1923–24 the favourable balance rose to Rs.134 crores. In 1924–25 there was a happy continuance of the revival of trade, and the favourable balance in merchandise on private account was about 150 crores, which is, unless I am mistaken, a record in the history of Indian trade. It is well known that India normally imports a large amount of precious metals towards the settlement of its trade balance, and last year the net imports of gold and silver were no less than 94 crores. The result of the private trade in merchandise and treasure was that there was in 1923–24 a favourable balance for India of Rs.86 crores, and in 1924–25 of Rs.61 crores. This position, a very remarkable one, must largely be ascribed to the fact that the recovery of India's export trade has not been associated with correspond-

1073
ing increase in imports of merchandise. The reasons for the restriction of imports are various. The high prices of imported goods militated against free purchases. Indian exports, on the other hand, consist largely of raw materials for which there has been keen demand. Lastly, the increase in the Indian tariff must evidently have tended towards smaller imports.
The improvement in India's financial position has enabled the Government of India gradually to get rid of its floating Debt, which has, in the main, been funded in the process of loan operations over the last few years. In 1923–24 a 4½ per cent. sterling Loan of twenty million pounds was placed in this market at an issue price of 90. This represented an advance of £5 on a previous issue price of 90. This again represented an advance of £5 on a previous issue of the same stock in October, 1922. Indian credit in this market has been helped by the improvement in her financial position, which has been appreciated in the City, as well as by the general factors that have helped here and elsewhere gilt edged securities. No Sterling Loan was issued in 1924–25, and the Budget for the current year has been framed on the fortunate and reasonable assumption that there will be no fresh sterling borrowing. The absence of the Secretary of State from this market is likely to help further the improvement of India's credit here, especially in view of unprecedentedly heavy appeals to the market since the War.
On the Indian side the market has also been moving in favour of Government as the result of the practical extinction of the floating Debt and the reduction in the amount which the Government has been compelled to borrow. In 1923–24, for the first time for many years, the Government of India found itself able to dispense with unlimited loans. The amount it borrowed was limited to 24 crores of rupees; in 1924–25 the amount raised by the Rupee Loan was only in the neighbourhood of 13 crores of rupees. This year the Budget assumes a Rupee Loan of 12 crores of rupees, but as a matter of fact no new money will be asked for, the loan, of which particulars have recently been published, being a conversion operation only.
I ought perhaps, in any estimate of the present and future material condition of
1074
India, to say a special word upon the subject of agriculture. No greater contrast in occupation than that between the people of Great Britain and those of India could well be found. Whereas the former Jive in vast aggregations in large towns, the latter Lye scattered in countless communities over the countryside. In England and Wales 80 per cent. of the population is returned as urban; in India 80 per cent., on a moderate estimate, is recorded as rural. Unfamiliar as these topics are to me, I nevertheless venture with almost dogmatic certainty upon the statement that an immense increase is attainable in the yield and therefore in the prosperity of agricultural India. Much has already been done by the Agricultural Department: by loans, by irrigation, by scientific instruction. Nor am I unaware of the difficulties which beset the path of the reformer. He is confronted by the stubborn conservatism of the peasant proprietor; by an infinite splitting up and sub-division ownership; even by an obstinate disinclination to be taught new ideas or to adopt fresh methods. But making all allowance for all these difficulties, I would desire to make my opinion plain, that a future of Incalculable prosperity awaits India if and when she learns fully to realise and to value her agricultural kingdom. This particular subject is, as your Lordships know, a transferred subject. This circumstance does not render a correlated and rational attempt to deal with it more easy; but it has been closely discussed between the Governor-General and myself; and I am not without hope that, during my tenure of office, if I am fortunate, it may be in our power to contribute to its further development a powerful impetus.
I pass now to a general consideration of political conditions in India, and here I naturally approach the most important of the discussions which have taken place between Lord Reading and myself. In 1919 a remarkable and extremely o bold experiment was made. It was made in the atmosphere of post-War idealism. My predecessor, Mr. Montagu, who was chiefly responsible for this experiment, must, on the whole, accept any censure where it has failed as he is entitled to all the credit where it has succeeded. He died prematurely. As one who at the

1075
time was never a particularly enthusiastic, though of course I was a responsible, supporter of his policy, I may be allowed, now that he is dead, to pay a tribute of respect and admiration alike to his idealism and to his courage. He was a true friend of India; and his name will not, I believe, be forgotten in that country.
The Act of 1919 was admittedly an experiment. No country in the world has ever been confronted with problems comparable to ours in India. Of the 440 millions of British citizens who constitute the British Empire, 320 millions are Indians. The loss of India would mean a shrinkage in the Empire from 13,250,000 to less than 11,500,000 square miles. Our problem is, in fact, and always has been, one of prodigious difficulty. It is to accommodate the minds of the East to those of the West, or if you prefer so to say it (I have no prejudice in the matter), the minds of the West to those of the East. History can, in fact, in all its courses afford no parallel for such a partnership.
When the British nation first decisively intervened in India, there was no question of a successful and independent national destiny for this incalculable country. It was in disintegration. It could not have continued to cohere. It was in 1746 that the state of war commenced between Great Britain and France in India from which, in the result, we were to emerge as the supreme Power in Asia. And it was not until the year 1765 that that supremacy was decisively asserted. I am, I believe, making no excessive claim when I lay it down that whatever mistakes have been made in the generations that have followed, the fiduciary obligations which we undertook in relation to the complex peoples of India, embracing as they do a population of 320 millions, practising nine great religions and speaking 130 different speeches, have not been unfaithfully discharged. Certainly it will not be disputed that we have never lagged behind the temporary world standards by which responsibilities of this kind have been measured by those Towers which have found themselves, never indeed in analogous, but sometimes in remotely comparable circumstances. And so it happened consistently with our habit of keeping abreast with the current
1076
of modern thought, that we decided, with the full and deliberate acquiescence of both Houses of Parliament, to make that great experiment which is known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Constitution.
It is extremely important that we and others should realise with precision what was done by the Government of India Act, 1919. Its permanent and static effect is unquestionably contained in the Preamble. The Act itself was admittedly fluid and experimental. I shall not feel that. I am wasting the time of your Lordships if I ask leave to remind you of the terms of the Preamble. Its language ought to be borne in mind by every instructed critic of our Indian policy and of the actual Indian situation with which I have to deal. These were the words of the Preamble; this is the obligation contained in that Preamble to which, and to which alone, we set our hands:—
"Whereas it is the declared policy of Parliament to provide for the increasing association of Indians in every branch of Indian administration, and for the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in British India as an integral part of the Empire:
"And whereas progress in giving effect to this policy can only be achieved by successive stages, and it is expedient that substantial steps in this direction should now be taken:
"And whereas the time and manner of each advance can be determined only by Parliament, upon whom responsibility lies for the welfare and advancement of the Indian peoples:
"And whereas the action of Parliament in such matters must be guided by the cooperation received from those on whom new opportunities of service will be conferred, and by the extent to which it is found that confidence can be reposed in their sense of responsibility:
"And whereas concurrently with the gradual development of self-governing institutions in the Provinces of India it is expedient to give to those Provinces in provincial matters the largest measure of independence of the Government of India, which is compatible with the due discharge by the latter of its own responsibilities:"
These words expressed the deliberate and deeply considered decision of Parliament. Conformably with the principles laid down in this Preamble, one Constitution or another might, at one time or another, be attempted. Experience educating us, or informing our critics in India, might induce us to make an amendment here or an advance or a variation

1077
there. But the whole message as we understand it, of our situation in India, with all that, it involves in the storied past, in the critical present, and in the incalculable future, is to be read in that Preamble. We shall not be diverted from its high obligations by the tactics of restless impatience. The door of acceleration is not open to menace; still less will it be stormed by violence. But there never has been a moment since the Constitution was adopted in which the Government of India, acting in harmony with the Government at home, has not been vigilantly and attentively considering the spirit in which the present reforms have been received in India. It has indeed been an imperative and urgent duty for my predecessors and myself so to consider them. Wise men are not the slaves of dates; rather are dates the servants of sagacious men.
Developments have been easily conceivable to me—are still not wholly inconceivable to me—in which the acceleration of the date of the Royal Commission might have been recommended even by very cautious statesmen. I should, however, be failing in my duty if I did not make plain my clear and definite impression that the tactics hitherto pursued by the most highly organised Party in India could not have been more happily conceived if they had been subtly intended to forward the cause of reaction. A Constitution was given which, whatever its defects, beyond question afforded great opportunities to the politically minded—if I may adopt a phrase I do not specially admire—among the Indian peoples. The opportunities not ungenerously offered might have been made the occasion of a sincere co-operation uniting the ancient and sophisticated traditions of the East with the more practical experience of the West. I suspect that a really gifted national leader would have used the Constitution, with all its possibilities of extension, in this sense.
No such leader was forthcoming. We have been confronted everywhere by those who are our principal opponents, with a blank wall of negation. They did not say: "You have not given us enough; but we will prove by our use of that which you have given that we are fit for more." And yet such an attitude would have been both sensible, practical and politic. What is ten years in the age-long history of the immemorial East?
1078
Our critics took a different line. They said: "We will have nothing whatever to do with your Constitution." Borrowing a quotation which they would perhaps have been unwilling to employ, they almost said, "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." They ignored the view, and I think they were profoundly mistaken in doing so, that, strange and apparently incongruous as is the partnership between the two countries, each has much to contribute to the thought and inspiration of the other. The art, the civilisation, the sophistication, the literature and the philosophy of India, though spread over an incredibly wide field and derived from many confluent streams, contain an individual quality to which, in their subtlest elements, Western thought has not attained.
And it is equally true that the practical qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race, harnessed to a very experienced and common-sense outlook upon world politics, brings to the partnership qualities which will not be often found to the East of Suez. Common sense and reason would, therefore, appear to suggest that men of enlightened view in India and in Great Britain should have proceeded upon lines of thought which ought almost—assuming necessary allowances all round—to have proved identical. To talk of India as an entity is as absurd as to talk of Europe as an entity. Yet the very nationalist spirit which has created most of our difficulties in the last few years is based upon the aspirations and claims of a nationalist India. There never has been such a nation. Whether there ever will be such a nation the future alone can show.
One of the greatest anxieties which confronts us in India to-day is the communal differences which divide 70 millions of Moslems from the vast Hindu population. The noble Lord who was my predecessor is indeed mistaken if he finds any signs that these differences have been compoed in the last few years. In these dissensions we have kept our hands unsullied by partisanship. If we withdrew from India to-morrow, the immediate consequences would be a struggle à outrance—I choose my words carefully—between the Moslems and the Hindu population. I put on one side, for the purposes of this anticipa-

1079
tion, the perils obviously afforded by the existence of two or three million turbulent and martial tribesmen, living percariously between the frontiers of India and the borders of Afghanistan.
The actual circumstances being, it seems to me, indisputably such as I have indicated, I have always been puzzled to understand the train of reasoning which passes through the minds of the clever men who have unfortunately made themselves our antagonists in India. There are many such men. I have tried with the greatest sympathy to understand their point of view. I have asked them whether they contemplate the withdrawal at an early date of the British troops from India. I have never found one who advocated such a course. Is there in fact one responsible leader of any school of Indian thought who will to-morrow say: "Commit to us at once the full responsibility; and we will acquiesce at once in the withdrawal of British troops from India"? I do not believe that such a man could be found and, if he could, my opinion of his judgment would under go a swift diminution. I do not speak upon this point without having had many opportunities of founding a conclusion derived from many divergent sources of information. Your Lordships may, I think, take it from me as an almost generally accepted conclusion that an immediate repudiation of our responsibilities in India would be at least as fatal to the interests of India itself as in any year since 1765.
I have thought it desirable by way of a somewhat lengthy preface to make these general observations before. I state my view as to the degree in which the Montagu-Chelmsford Act has been a success or a failure. I am bound in such a matter to make my views precisely plain. In common with my colleagues in the Cabinet, I must, of course, accept full responsibility for that great constitutional change. But I may perhaps be permitted to say that I entertained greater doubts upon this reform than some of those with whom I co-operated. For this reason I am of all people specially bound to attempt an honest and impartial review of the working of the Act. I myself was always very distrustful of the diarchical principle. It seemed to me to savour of the kind of pedantic and hide-bound Constitution to
1080
which Anglo-Saxon communities have not generally responded, and which in my anticipation was unlikely to make a successful appeal to a community whose political ideas were, thanks in the main to Macaulay, so largely derived from Anglo-Saxon models.
I am obliged, therefore, to address myself candidly to the question: "Has the Montagu-Chelmsford reform succeeded, or has it failed?" My Lords, I cannot say that it has failed. It has been exposed to every cruel mishap which could befall a new Constitution, freely conceived and generously offered. Most of the popular leaders in Indian life have abused and defamed it. It has never been given a chance. Mr. Montagu undoubtedly looked, and surely he was entitled to do so, to those who cherished the most sanguine expectations of Indian political capacity to co-operate in his great task. These expectations were not realised. The critics of Indian capacity for self-government would indeed have been helpless had wiser counsels prevailed in India. Suppose, for instance, that judicious and sagacious co-operation had been exhibited by the leaders of Indian thought: Does any one imagine that reactionary critics of those reforms in this country could in that event have retarded the chariot of progress? Had that which was given been used with cheerful good will to justify the gift of that which was still sought, the task of acceleration would have been easy indeed. Unfortunately, the leaders of Indian thought contributed a different bias; and the most highly organised political Party in India wasted its energies upon the futile attempt to destroy that which we had conceived, at least in its first fruits, to be a generous experiment.
But not all the resources of a very adroit and sophisticated Party have availed to destroy this experimental Constitution, and indeed, I, who was prepared to curse, upon the balance of the whole matter find myself almost inclined to bless. These general observations, very necessary to be borne constantly in mind, lead me to inform your Lordships more closely of the results of the working of the new Constitution. We are aided in the task of attempting a general survey of its workings up to the present in different parts of India by the reports which have

1081
recently been presented by the Governments concerned. In the main I accept and am prepared to justify and defend them.
In Madras the transitional Constitution has worked with a great measure of success. Ministers have used their influence to steady public opinion and feeling, and have displayed a general moderation and no small measure of statesmanship. The Governor in Council has stated that if an earnest endeavour to work on constitutional lines is a qualification for political advance, the Madras Presidency has shown itself fitter for an advance than any other province. It is not my wish or concern to dispute that claim.
In the present Council of Bombay, the Swarajist Party is the strongest in numbers, but does not command a majority, and it is pledged to a policy of refusal of political responsibility. The Ministers were, therefore, selected from the smaller groups, a circumstance which must obviously be a source of weakness. Lacking sufficient support from their followers, they are driven to lean precariously upon the official vote, and so the distinction between the two halves of the Government has been almost completely obscured. The Bombay Government has recently pointed out that the main object at present must be to strengthen the position of the Ministers and to encourage the organisation of Parties.
In the first Council elected in Bengal, progress was made and some solid achievements were recorded. The Government claims with justice that Ministers were able to influence a sufficient number of the Members to make it possible, with the aid of officials, to carry through a considerable amount of useful legislation. The second Council contained a large and influential body belonging to the Non-co-operation Party, which is pledged, of course, to prove that the present. Constitution is unworkable. This body was joined by the Independents, and the combined Party commands more than 60 votes in a House of a total strength of 140. The possibility is by no means to be excluded that at the next General Election there may be a return of an absolute Swarajist majority, taking office with the avowed intention of wrecking the Government from within.
1082
The Government points out that the Constitution requires to be specially considered from the point of view of giving the Executive power to deal with obstruction.
Since this Report was framed by the local Government, the Bengal Legislative Council has very plainly indicated that it prefers to dispense with Ministers and the diarchic Constitution. Accordingly, the Government of India and I had no option but to suspend the transfer of subjects in that Province. Your Lordships will not fail to observe that whether the Constitution was good or whether the Constitution was bad, it had at least plainly contemplated the very contingency which has in fait happened, and whether it is a weak point of the Constitution or whether it is a strong point that has assumed the limelight in Bengal, those who framed the Constitution are at least entitled to point out that the Constitution still shows the reserve of strength with which it was endowed at the time it was drafted.
The Government of the United Provinces say that it is constantly alleged by their enemies and critics that the reforms have failed. If this means that the Constitution has definitely broken down they absolutely deny the statement. Since the collapse in its original form of the non-co-operation movement, it is claimed that the internal conditions of the Province have steadily improved, and except for the tension between Moslems and Hindus—which has nothing whatever to do with the Constitution— there is nothing to cause the Government serious anxiety. Forty-seven millions of people in these Provinces are living peaceably under an ordered and progressive administration, and are probably more prosperous than their predecessors have ever been. The reformed Constitution has failed, it is true, to satisfy alike the Swarajists and the Liberals, and this constitutes some small cause for anxiety. The Governor in Council, in words quoted by the noble Lord who moved, has, it is true, placed it on record that, in his opinion, the diarchy is a cumbrous, complex, confused system having no logical basis, rooted in compromise and defensible only as a transitional expedient. My Lords, I have said enough to make it plain that whatever other controversies may

1083
separate the noble Lord and myself this will neither be one of the most bitter nor the most protracted.
In the Punjab the working out of the scheme has driven the two main communities, Hindu and Mahomedan, into open dissension. This is an extremely interesting local development. It has unquestionably aggravated and rendered more bitter their communal differences, and it has further developed an acute antagonism between the urban and rural interests. There is not as yet, in the view of the Government, evidence of the existence of a thinking and selective electorate in the districts capable of exercising its vote on considerations of policy. Here, too, the diarchical scheme has produced considerable anomalies, and it cannot, I think, be plausibly claimed that so far the Punjab afforded a suitable field for the introduction of such a divided responsibility. So far, Ministers willing to co-operate with the Executive have been found who have been supported by a Party which has not attempted to force them into an extreme position.
In Burma, the reforms were introduced two years later, as your Lordships may recall, than in the other Provinces in India. Less than seven per cent. of the electorate voted at the only General Election held, and this was boycotted by the extremists. During the eighteen months in which the reforms have been in operation hardly any difficulties have been experienced, and hardly any defects discovered in the working of the Constitution.
I have almost finished this category, but I think your Lordships will agree that it is important. The Government of Bihar and Orissa said that one may search in vain for signs that three years of the reforms have educated the electorate to the meaning of an Election and the business of a Legislature. In many districts the reports of the presiding officer declared that a large proportion of the voters did not know the name of the candidate for whom they voted, but had only been told the colour of his box. The Government includes amongst the causes which have contributed to the non-success of the reforms, the failure to create a Ministerial Party prepared to support the Ministers in carrying out a definite programme. The Council still remains divided into two
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parties, official and non-official. Where the issue is not an anti-Government one Ministers have their following in Council, but they cannot bring this to bear on political conditions and cannot therefore assist Government in times of difficulty. The local Government adds that there is very little that can be done to smooth the working of diarchy, or to eliminate administrative imperfections.
The Central Provinces Government say that the value of the experiment in responsible Government during the first Council was weakened, first, by the lack of connection between the Members and their constituents, secondly, by the absence of any Party organisation which would have made the responsibility of Ministers to the Council effective; and, thirdly, by lack of funds. The fair measure of success in the working of diarchy, which, in their claim, was achieved, was due partly to the moderation of the Council, and partly to the efforts made to work the scheme by the Members of Government and the permanent services. Here also the Province is for the time being without Ministers, but I am not without hope that their appointment may shortly be found feasible.
In Assam the Governor in Council sums up the difficulty of working the Constitution as due, firstly, to the existence of a section of public men, considerable enough in numbers and ability to influence the Council, which is actively hostile to the present Constitution, and declines to work it; and, secondly, to the financial difficulties which have precluded the local Government from undertaking any activities other than those of carrying on the essential administrative functions on pre-existing lines. The Ministers have thus no convincing answer to the cry of their opponents that the reforms have bestowed no benefits on the electors.
Enough has been said to satisfy my present purpose—which is to show that no short or dogmatic answer can be given to the question: Has the Constitution succeeded? It has neither altogether succeeded, nor has it altogether failed; and it must further be noted, by way of additional qualification, that where it has succeeded the price of success has been, at some stages and in some districts, a considerable inroad upon the diarchical principle. I have not thought

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it proper to discourage such tendencies, holding the view that the whole matter was experimental and afforded an opportunity to each Province to work out its constitutional salvation in its own way.
What, then, is it possible for me to say, at this stage, of the future? The wisdom of Parliament declared that, after the period of ten years, the Montagu-Chelmsford Constitution should be reviewed by a Royal Commission. It will undoubtedly require such revision; and it cannot be too plainly stated that everything will necessarily be thrown into the melting pot. Diarchy itself is very obviously not a sacred principle. It must be decided by results. The conception was always doctrinaire and artificial. A great measure of success may justify it, where a smaller would not.
And now I apply myself more closely to a subject which has caused much speculation, and provoked at least an equal degree of agitation—the date revision. To those who framed the reforms, ten years appeared to be a reasonable period for review; and in determining what was a reasonable period for the purposes of revision, it seems unnatural to suppose that Parliament presciently anticipated the very unreasonable campaign of non-co-operation which has done its best to wreck the Constitution altogether. Even assuming co-operation, it was thought that a period of ten years would be required to afford the data for reliable conclusions and generalisations. But I do not hesitate to make clear my own view that it was not the intention of the Legislature to attempt to shackle succeeding Governments, if a spirit of cheerful and loyal co-operation was generally exhibited on the one hand, or if upon the other, grave and glaring defects disclosed themselves. It would, indeed, have been an assumption of omniscence alien to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, for Parliament to assume so high a prophetic gift as to declare that in no circumstances should the date of the Commission be accelerated. In fact the door was never closed; it is, on the contrary, open to-day; but the condition is clear and precise. There will be—there can be—no re-consideration until we see everywhere among the responsible leaders of Indian thought evidence of a sincere and genuine desire to co-operate with us in making the best of the existing Constitution.
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The Swarajist Party has, in my opinion, most unhappily so far thrown its powerful weight into the other scale. Along this road there is no progress. That Party has recently lost a capable and energetic leader, who commanded great support, and made many sacrifices for a cause in which he profoundly believed. But I should fail in my duty if I did not make it absolutely plain that the advice which he gave to his countrymen was throughout unhappily conceived. It may be—I dare attempt no prediction—that his untimely death will even now afford an opportunity of reconsideration. It has been the habit of the spokesmen of Swarajist thought to declare in anticipation that no Constitution framed in the West can either be suitable for, or acceptable to, the peoples of India. It has always seemed to me that a very simple answer may be made to such a contention. We do not claim in Great Britain that we alone in the world are able to frame Constitutions, though we are not altogether discontented with the humble constructive efforts which we have made in this field of human ingenuity. But if our critics in India are of opinion that their greater knowledge of Indian conditions qualifies them to succeed, where they tell us that we have failed, let them produce a Constitution which carries behind it a fair measure of general agreement among the great peoples of India. Such a contribution to our problems would nowhere be resented. It would, on the contrary, be most carefully examined by the Government of India, by myself, and I am sure, by the Commission, whenever that body may be assembled. I gladly recognise that the so-called Liberal Party in India, neither inconsiderable in numbers nor lacking in the leadership of enlightened men, has refused to associate itself with the ill-starred course of non-co-operation. It is still possible that this Party, perhaps to be gradually reinforced by fresh moderate elements, may play a great part in the Constitution fashioning of the future.
I pass at this point by a natural transition to the Muddiman Report, a subject to which the noble Lord (Lord Olivier) devoted a great part of his observations. The obligations of the Government must be admitted to the experienced men who contributed so much labour, and produced so competent

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a Report. We do not anticipate—for reasons which I have already made plain—that we shall be able, as the noble Lord desired, to accept the Report of the Minority at this stage. The problem of provincial autonomy has not indeed been adequately thought out by those who are to-day pressing it so strongly upon our, attention. Provincial autonomy contemplates the complete transfer to all the Provinces of law and order; and it would render necessary far-reaching changes in the Central Government of India which I have never Yet seen closely analysed, and very rarely even cursorily examined. The noble Lord (Lord Olivier) certainly to-day attempted neither analysis nor examination.
It is rather on the lines recommended by the Majority that any immediate action must be taken. As I have already said, we must await the formal views of the Government of India on this matter; but it will certainly be the desire of His Majesty's Government to go as far as possible in carrying out the proposals which the Government of India may make after discussion in the Legislative Assembly. Many of the recommendations of the Committee can be carried out by Regulation, and do not require an Act of Parliament. There need be no delay in making these changes. In those cases where legislation is required the matters will be appropriately dealt with as and when opportunity offers.
I ought next, my Lords, to make a few observations upon a subject which has greatly exercised Indian speculation, namely, the so-called Indianisation of the Army. An essential factor in India's advance towards responsible Government is, to Indian minds, the possession of a National Army. We can all see why, and we can all understand and appreciate Indian aspirations. But here again we are in the region of experiment, and of very delicate and dangerous experiment. The method which has been adopted is that of the complete but gradual Indianisation as an experiment of eight units. It is criticised as being both slow and limited in scope. The process must indeed necessarily be slow—the length of time which it ordinarily takes the British officer, if he is fortunate, to reach the command of his regiment is twenty-five years, and there is no reason to expect that an Indian officer will take a shorter time. And the ex-
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periment is necessarily limited in scope if only by reason of the paucity of material. For, apart from the fact that we cannot afford to risk in any degree lowering the efficiency of our small Indian Army, on which the security of India depends, at present we have difficulty in finding enough Indian cadets up to Sandhurst standard to provide sub-alterns even for these eight units. We are doing our best to remedy this. The Prince of Wales' Military College at Dehra Dun is beginning to produce boys of a more promising type; and the Government of India have recently appointed a Committee, under the presidency of the Chief of the General Staff, to examine the whole question of training for the Army. They may recommend the creation of an Indian Sandhurst, and if they do we shall consider their recommendation with every desire to do what may appear necessary to make this experiment of Indianisation a success within its limits. But until it has been shown to be a success within those limits, it is not our purpose to go beyond them. How could we? An Army exists after all for the purpose of fighting, and if we could not get eight units that would fight efficiently, what would be the use of trying sixteen? No sane Government will allow its Army to become the toy of political Parties.
I know that some Indian politicians dislike this particular experiment on the ground of what they call the "segregation" of Indian officers in these eight units, as though some idea of inferiority were involved in it. The complaint comes ill from those who criticise the slowness of the experiment. For what is the advantage of concentrating Indian officers in these units? Just this, that, the test being whether a completely Indianised unit is as good as any other, the sooner we create completely Indianised units the sooner we shall know whether the experiment has succeeded or not. And is not that exactly what the politicians themselves want? One would almost think that those who complain of "segregation" are not so sure as they sometimes seem that the experiment will succeed, and shrink from the conclusive test—
"He either fears his fate too much
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all."

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But I do not wish to appear unsympathetic. I am not so. We are doing our best. No one did more for India in this matter than the great Commander-in-Chief whose loss we have recently been lamenting, and I adopt his words:—
"We are experimenting with the Indianisation of eight units of the Army. The experiment must be carried through. It may succeed or it may not. That remains to be seen, but, whatever happens, the experiment must be tried out, and not plucked out by the roots to see how its growth is progressing … India must have the best and nothing but the best for the foundations of her future Army."
And now I pass to the position of the Services. I do not want to say very much about this—it will be one of the subjects for the Royal Commission when the time conies. But there is an aspect upon which I must touch. One of the objections to the present Constitution which is most constantly put forward is that Ministers are prejudiced in their task by the fact that not all the Services which are the instruments of their policy are under their control, and that the Bill now before Parliament tends towards accentuating this difficulty. I should be the first to welcome signs that the provisions in the Reforms Act, which reserved to the Secretary of State a considerable measure of direct responsibility for the Indian Services, even in the transferred sphere, were unnecessary, for they would be the best indication that Indian political opinion has realised the vital necessity to the well-being of any form of government of giving public servants general support and encouragement in the fulfilment of their duties. Unfortunately such signs are still all too rare, and until public servants, both English and Indian, can feel in India, as they can elsewhere, that unfair and captious criticism of their actions will be neither voiced nor tolerated by responsible public opinion, the reservations in support of the Services contained in the Reforms scheme will unfortunately remain justified and necessary.
I have already discussed in this House a revolutionary outbreak in Bengal which, in my judgment, rendered the adoption of exceptional repressive measures essential. These measures have not failed in their effect. The local situation is being constantly and vigilantly watched, and when the general interest and safety of the community justify relaxation, such relaxation will not be withheld. But that
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moment has not yet come. I ought to make a passing mention of that unhappy efflorescence of communal difference which has occasioned increasing anxiety in many parts of India. These disturbances, troublesome and grave as in some districts they have been, serve as a reminder that Indian problems are not so simple as is sometimes superficially imagined. The presence in India of 70 million Mahomedans, martial in their traditions, and virile in their qualities, contributes an immense complication to difficulties already incalculably great. This situation is being most closely watched both by the Government of India and in my Office.
I add next a word on the subject of the great Ruling Princes of India. Their generosity, their loyalty and their courage have been proved on many a stricken field, and need no eulogy from me. Their rights in the majority of cases are stated and consecrated by solemn Treaties. Whatever changes and developments the future may bring with it, we shall never fall short in our obligations to those who have shared our perils and never despaired of our Imperial destiny.
I must add a very brief observation upon a matter of peat consequence which has caused, and continues to cause, me grave anxiety. I refer to the conditions in which many Indian citizens of the Empire live in various parts of His Majesty's Dominions other than India. The subject is notoriously delicate, and one must avoid indiscreet or unskilful language in relation to it. But I may, I imagine, without offending any interest which I am bound to consider, ask other parts of the Empire to remember how profoundly this problem affects relations between the Empire and India. I know their difficulties. No one, I believe, knows them better. I do not ask more than that, in every measure which they take, they should exhaust every effort to avoid such a discrimination as must deeply wound the ancient and dignified peoples of India.
And now, my Lords, my task is nearly ended. I have had the advantage during the last few months of constant discussions with my noble friend the Governor-General. Let me take this opportunity once for all of expressing the obligations under which I myself, and indeed the whole country, stand to His Excellency. His prudence, his circumspection, his

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judgment, his patience and his courtesy, have all been exhibited upon a stage which demanded these very qualities at this very time. He has supported without dismay the burden of many anxieties; and has maintained a high and serene composure in the face of many and various antagonisms. I sincerely hope that he will return to complete his task, strengthened and re-created in health.
I cannot affect to believe that the contents of this speech, to which your Lordships have listened with so much patience, will bring satisfaction to those elements in India which are determined to remain dissatisfied. But I would nevertheless remind them that while we have obligations in respect of the voters, who numbered only some 8½ millions at the last Election, we have also obligations in respect of the 250 millions in British India, of whom we are the responsible guardians, and in a less degree in respect of the 70 millions in the Indian States. While, as we survey the strange history which has associated two peoples so different in origin, in civilisaton, and in religion, we are conscious of many errors of judgment and even of some occasional acts of wrong, we are nevertheless bold enough to claim that, in fair perspective, we have not been the unworthy trustees of the charge which we undertook so many generations ago. We have brought to this gigantic task an unstinted devotion. Many a nameless hero has spent his strength and flung away his life in grappling with the hideous spectre, of famine and disease. Many an illustrious Viceroy, as the stately pages of Lord Curzon's book remind us, has mortgaged too deeply in this same task his vital resources.
The terms of the Preamble are even now not incapable of realisation. But we must first expel and exorcise the demon of suspicion. We ask the Indian people to-day, with the deepest sincerity, for good will and for co-operation. But while it is an object close to our minds to create this atmosphere, I should be guilty of disingenuousness if I painted at this moment the prospects in colours too vivid or too sanguine. I am not able in any foreseeable future to discern a moment when we may safely, either to ourselves or India, abandon our trust. There is, my Lords, no "Lost
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Dominion"; there will be no "Lost Dominion" until that moment—if ever it comes—when the whole British Empire, with all that it means for civilisation, is splintered in doom. It is our purpose resolutely, tirelessly, and wholeheartedly, to labour for the wellbeing of India as our ancestors have laboured throughout the generations. For that purpose we desire, and we request, good will; nor shall we be niggardly bargainers if we meet with the generous friendship which is near and dear to our hearts. We no longer talk of holding "the gorgeous East in fee"; we invite in a contrary sense the diverse peoples of this continent to march side by side with us in a fruitful and harmonious partnership which may recreate the greatest and the proudest days of Indian history.
LORD OLIVIER: My Lords, the extremely interesting and valuable statement which the Secretary of State has made to the House has left us all so much in his debt that I can well understand that no one would wish to rise hastily to make any superficial comment upon it. I could have made some critical comments, and I could have endorsed very strongly the critical comments which the noble Earl has made upon the previous history of the actions of the Swarajist Party in India. But the noble Earl has addressed himself to the task which he had before him in a spirit of high statesmanship and of good will, and I desire to do nothing whatever to disturb or influence the effect which that appeal for good will may have.
I shall, therefore, make no comments or criticisms upon his speech except to say that the statements which the noble Earl made to your Lordships with regard to the improvement of trade in India and, indeed, with regard to every subject which he touched, were extremely relevant under present conditions to the political difficulties that we have to face. The generally increasing prosperity of which he was able to tell us is, I hope, likely to diminish in the future the difficulties which he and the Governor-General have been experiencing. Especially was I very glad indeed to hear of his determination to take up with the Governor-General in a definite manner the task of really reorganising agricultural methods in India. There is no question whatever that one of the

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most continual incitements to complaint against our Government is the extreme poverty of India and the little (as it is alleged) that British Governments have done to remedy and improve the defective methods of Indian agriculture. That, I am quite sure, will be a message of encouragement and of sympathy to India for which the community will be very grateful to the noble Earl.
I should like to make one final observation. I think that the noble Earl may have a little under-estimated, as many people do, the strength of what may be called national feeling and national pride in India and the national disposition to claim that Indians shall have a great deal to say with regard to the framing of their own Constitution. It is not enough to say, as the noble Earl has said and as has been said repeatedly, that you have two great communities in India, that you have many religions, many languages and so on, and that therefore it is idle to speak of India as a nation. That is very much less true to-day than it was even ten years ago. Whereas ten years ago you might have said that the masses of India cared very little about national religion or about politics, it is, I am perfectly convinced from all that I have been able to learn in the last two or three years, equally unquestionable that this era has passed away, that there is a strong and universal sentimentally nationalist feeling in India upon which the leaders who speak in the name of Indian nationality can count.
I should like to quote in that connection a passage from the last Report of Mr. Rushbrook Williams on the Material and Moral Progress of India—the Report for 1923–24—a very useful volume which I am sorry to say is not yet in your Lordships' Library, although I received it myself from India three or four months ago. What Mr. Rushbrook Williams reminds us of is this: He says:
"While non-co-operation as a political campaign has suffered discredit through its manifest impossibilities, non-co-operation as an attitude of mind and as the vehicle of an awakened national sentiment, still survives. We shall fail to understand the political life of India to-day unless we realise that from the beginning Mr. Gandhi's campaign has not been so much the cause of India's unrest as a symptom of those deep discontents from which the unrest resulted."
So, although in times of peace you might have regarded the masses of India merely as a dry bed of sand, you must now
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regard them as a bed of sand into which certain infiltrations of feeling have passed, and must take care that you are not founding your policy upon a quicksand. It is on that account that I made my appeal to the noble Earl to take into consideration what I feel convinced is an accurate statement of the feelings of all Nationalist and Propagandist Parties in India in support of the Minority Report, and whereas the noble Earl said, and said truly, that the question of what provincial autonomy means has not been explored, that is one of the very reasons why I want to see, and all who are interested in the development of India want to see, the question of what is to be in the future directly tackled. When such men as the late Governor of Madras tell us that some parts are ready for provincial autonomy, and others are not, I want to see these ideas explored in order to find out whether it is impossible to develop this idea of provincial autonomy. It is obvious, as indeed it was before I rose, that no Papers can be laid because the noble Earl has to correspond with the Government of India before any Papers can be laid, and therefore I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.
[From Minutes of July 6.]

BURNLEY CORPORATION BILL.
Brought from the Commons; read 1a; and referred to the Examiners.
ST. MARY'S CHURCH, BIRMINGHAM, AND GENERAL HOSPITAL BILL. [H.L.]
Returned from the Commons, agreed to, with Amendments.
ST. MILDRED'S CHURCHYARD BILL. [H.L.]
Returned from the Commons, agreed to, with Amendments: The said Amendments considered, and agreed to.

BOOTHFERRY BRIDGE BILL. [H.L.]
The King's consent signified, and Bill reported from the Select Committee, with Amendments.
House adjourned at twenty-five minutes past six o'clock.

BATH CORPORATION BILL.
Committed: The Committee to be proposed by the Committee of Selection.
BEDWELLTY URBAN DISTRICT COUNCIL BILL.
Committed for Tuesday next.

STANDARD LIFE ASSURANCE COMPANY BILL. [H.L.]
Returned from the Commons, agreed to, with Amendments.
The LORD CHANCELLOR acquainted the House, that the Clerk of the Parliaments had laid upon the Table the Certificate from the Examiners that the further Standing Orders applicable to the following Bill have been complied with:—
Bradford Corporation.
The same was ordered to lie on the Table.

ELECTRICITY (SUPPLY) ACTS, 1882 To 1922 (LONDON AND HOME COUNTIES ELECTRICITY DISTRICT ORDER, 1925).
Report from the Select Committee—

1. That the matter appears to have been sufficiently dealt with by Departmental enquiries;

2. That no opportunity should be afforded for petitioning against the Order;

3. That the following amendment of the Order is desirable, viz.: Clause 39, subsection 2, paragraph (b), after the first ("District") insert ("represented on the joint authority");

4. That no further enquiry by a Select Committee appears to be necessary:

Read, and ordered to lie on the Table.

ST. MARY'S CHURCH, BIRMINGHAM, AND GENERAL HOSPITAL BILL. [H.L.]
Commons Amendments considered, and agreed to.
SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE (CONSOLIDATION) BILL. [H.L.]
The Report of the Amendments (which stands appointed for this day) put off to Thursday next.