Sitting of 17 September 1931

Preamble
The House met at a, Quarter before Three of the Clock, Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair.
ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS.
  UNEMPLOYMENT.

    GRAVESEND.
    Mr. ALBERYasked the Minister of Labour what the unemployment figures in the Gravesend Division of Kent were at the time the last Government assumed office, and what they were when the Government resigned?
    The MINISTER of LABOUR (Sir Henry Betterton): The number of persons on the registers of the Rochester and Gravesend Employment Exchanges was 3,962 on 3rd June, 1929, and 7,709 on 24th August, 1931.
    Mr. EDE: Has the Minister formed any estimate of the number there will be after three months of the present Government?

    BENEFIT.
    Mr. PERRYasked the Minister of Labour whether, under the new proposals of the Government, any of the unemployed persons claiming transitional benefit and referred to public assistance committees for the determination of their needs and rate of benefit, if any, payable, will have any right of appeal against the decisions of the public assistance committees?
    Sir H. BETTERTON: It is contemplated that the assessment of the needs of individual cases will be made by the ordinary machinery of the public assistance authority and that there will be no appeal to any other authority.
    Mr. PERRY: Is the Minister aware that this takes away a very valuable right from the unemployed person; in fact, sets up a Poor Law dictatorship?
    Sir H. BETTERTON: I do not accept the statement of the hon. Member as to
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    a Poor Law dictatorship. What I have said is that the procedure of the public assistance committee in assessing need will be precisely what it is at present.
    Mr. PERRY: Is it not a fact that the unemployed person will have no right of appeal against the assessment of need?
    Sir H. BETTERTON: That is precisely what I have said.
    Mr. LAWSON: Is not this an alteration of conditions of the law which is not even contemplated in the Economy Bill?
    Sir H. BETTERTON: I do not agree. It was agreed to by the last Government.
    Lieut.-Colonel WATTS-MORGAN: Is the Minister aware that in the County of Glamorgan there will be 10,000 cases which will come before the Public Assistance Committee?
    Sir H. BETTERTON: I am not aware of the figures given by the hon. and gallant Member.
    Mr. T. WILLIAMS: In the case of an ex-Service man falling within the transitional stage and in receipt of a disability pension, can the Minister say whether the pension will be taken into account in considering the question of unemployment benefit?
    Sir H. BETTERTON: That is a totally different question; perhaps the hon. Member will put it down.
    Mr. BATEY: When the amount is fixed by the Public Assistance Committee will it be granted by way of loan as Poor Law relief which is now repayable?
    Sir H. BETTERTON: No, Sir. What will happen is that the need will be assessed by the Public Assistance Committee, and it will be paid out of Exchequer funds, as it is to-day.
    Major HERBERT EVANS: May I inquire—
    Mr. SPEAKER: We are getting a long way from the question on the Paper.
    Mr. LAWSONasked the Minister of Labour if he can give an estimate of the number of unemployed persons who will

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    be placed in the transition category when the 26 weeks' rule begins to operate in the case of those then on standard benefit?
    Mr. WELLOCKasked the Minister of Labour what is the éstimated number of unemployed workers which the new condition for obtaining standard benefit. will deprive of such benefit?
    Sir H. BETTERTON: Figures giving the latest available information on the points raised in these questions are in course of preparation, and I will circulate them in the OFFICIAL REPORT in the course of a day or two.

    Ex-OFFICERS AND NURSES (TRAINING).
    Major EVANSasked the Minister of Labour the number of ex-officers and nurses accepted for training under the Royal Warrant during 1928, 1929, and 1930?
    Sir H. BETTERTON: There have been no acceptances for training under the Royal Warrant during 1928, 1929 and 1930.

    HOURS OF INDUSTRIAL EMPLOYMENT BILL.
    Mr. MANDERasked the Minister of Labour if he will state the intention of the Government with reference to the Hours of Industrial Employment Bill?
    Sir H. BETTERTON: The Government do not propose to embark on a programme of contentious legislation, and, therefore, this Bill cannot be proceeded with at present.
    Mr. MANDER: Will not the Government endeavour to improve on the miserable record of their predecessors in this matter?
    Mr. MACLEAN: If the Government do not intend to embark upon contentious legislation, I take it that they will drop the Economy Bill?

    LOCAL AUTHORITIES (COST OF INQUIRIES).
    Dr. MARION PHILLIPSasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether any provision will be made from public funds to meet the increase in administrative charges to local authorities consequent upon the new duty to be placed upon
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    them of inquiries into the affairs of unemployed persons no longer in receipt of transitional benefit?
    The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER (Mr. Philip Snowden): It is anticipated that in many cases the local authorities will not need to incur additional expenditure in this connection. It has appeared from discussions with representatives of the authorities that some authorities will desire themselves to bear any extra expense they are put to. In other cases, however, they will be unable to bear it and provision will be made by Order in Council for the Minister of Labour to make them a grant in respect of approved additional expenditure.

    TRADE BOARDS ACT.
    Major EVANSasked the Minister of Labour the number of establishments under trade boards not inspected during 1930 and the amount of arrears paid to workpeople in consequence of offences discovered by inspectors during the same period?
    Sir H. BETTERTON: All the figures for which the hon. and gallant Member asks are given in the report of the Ministry of Labour for 1930 (Cmd. 3859).
    Major EVANS: Is the Minister aware that on the percentage basis the amount of the offences discovered by his inspectors is no less a sum than £150,000.
    Sir H. BETTERTON: I am aware of exactly what is stated in the report of the Ministry of Labour for 1930.

  TRANSPORT.

    LONDON OMNIBUSES (ROUTE MARKS).
    Mr. HURDasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department when the London General Omnibus Company was informed that the number and route of the service should be clearly shown on the back as well as the front of each vehicle; and when that requirement will be fulfilled?
    The SECRETARY of STATE for the HOME DEPARTMENT (Sir Herbert Samuel): The London General Omnibus Company were informed in July last that the display in large type of route num-

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    bers and destination points on the near side and on the rear of double deck omnibuses of the newest type should be carried out during the annual overhaul of each vehicle. The requirement will not, therefore be completely fulfilled until July, 1932.
    Mr. HURD: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware of the serious public inconvenience caused by the absence of these route marks? Is it not possible to expedite the matter?
    Sir H. SAMUEL: I am aware of the inconvenience, and that was why the instruction was given. But it involves considerable structural alterations to these vehicles which can best be done when they are brought in for the annual overhaul.
    Mr. HURD: Is it not possible to cover the advertisements of the "Daily Herald" by information as to the route?
    Mr. COCKS: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware of the great inconvenience that has been caused by people who are unaware of the destination of the Liberal party?
    Mr. HURD: Can I have a reply to my suggestion?

    ROAD ACCIDENTS.
    Mr. DAYasked the Home Secretary whether he will arrange for a system to be instituted whereby the circumstances of every fatal road accident in respect of which an inquest is held should be reported by the coroner concerned for the purpose of tabulating the causes of such accidents and the consideration of methods of avoiding them?
    Sir H. SAMUEL: It is not necessary to put this duty on coroners. There are other means of obtaining the information. The questions involved are being considered by a Departmental Committee set up by the late Minister of Transport.
    Mr. DAY: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that coroners themselves have suggested this?
    Sir H. SAMUEL: The suggestion will be considered, no doubt.
    Mr. MUGGERlDGE: May I ask whether the number of fatal accidents in connection with long-distance motor coaches are specifically stated?
    Sir H SAMUEL: There is an annual return.
    Mr. MUGGERIDGE: Does it include separate figures of the accidents in these long-distance motor coaches?
    Sir H. SAMUEL: That point shall be considered.

  POLICE.

    WIRELESS SERVICE.
    Mr. DAYasked the Home Secretary what action has been taken by his Department with reference to the recommendation passed by the county chief constables in April last suggesting that the Home Office should set up a national wireless installation for the purpose of circulating details of grave crimes to mobile police squads; and will he give particulars of any arrangements that are being made to further this suggestion?
    Sir H. SAMUEL: The whole question of the further development of wireless as an aid to police work is now under review by a conference on which my Department is represented.
    Mr. DAY: Will the right hon. Gentleman also consider the methods by which this notification is made in America?
    Sir H. SAMUEL: The experts will no doubt have that in mind.

    SURREY CONSTABULARY.
    Mr. EDEasked the Home Secretary what action has been taken on the application of the Surrey Standing Joint Committee for an increase in the police establishment for the Surrey constabulary area; and if, in considering the application, he is taking into account the appropriate proportion to be observed between the numbers in the various ranks of the force?
    Sir H. SAMUEL: An interim augmentation has been approved, but no decision has been reached on the main question. The answer to the last part of the question is in the affirmative.
    Mr. EDE: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the proportion of constables to other ranks in this force is higher than in any other county constabulary in the country, and will he try to apply the Liberal principle of equality or opportunity?

    FACTORY AND WORKSHOPS ACT.
    Major EVANSasked the Home Secretary what was the number of non-textile factories and workshops Acts under the particular Section of the Factory and Workshops Act at any convenient date during 1930?
    Sir H. SAMUEL: I regret that the figures are not available. The particular Section has been extended to a number of non-textile industries and the collection of the figures would involve a large amount of work which I do not think would be justified.
    Major EVANS: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that these figures were available in the Home Office 25 years ago to my personal knowledge; have they not been kept annually ever since?
    Sir H. SAMUEL: I am told that they are not available.

    DISTURBANCES, WESTMINSTER.
    Mr. SIMMONSasked the Home Secretary if he has now considered the statements supplied to him by Members of this House and by private individuals concerning the action of the police in dealing with the unemployed section of the crowd outside the House of Commons on Tuesday, 8th September, and if he can now make any further statement on the matter?
    Sir H. SAMUEL: I have seen the statements referred to and they are at present under investigation. I shall be obliged if the hon. Member will put another question on the Order Paper for answer next week.

    EDUCATION (ADMINISTRATION).
    Mr. EDEasked the President of the Board of Education if it is proposed to act on the suggestion of the Committee on National Expenditure, in paragraph 503 of their report, that all educational functions should be concentrated, as far as local 'authorities were concerned, in the hands of county and county borough councils, and to carry out also the suggestion, in paragraph 503 of the report, that county and county borough councils should take overthe responsibility for supervising and helping private educational effort in their areas; and what
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    national and local economies would be made by accepting these suggestions?
    The PRESIDENT of the BOARD of EDUCATION (Sir Donald Maclean): The answer to the first part of the question is in the negative. With regard to the second part, I have not been furnished with any information on this point which may have been in the possession of the committee.
    Mr. EDE: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the May Committee themselves said, in the paragraph quoted, that they put this first among the efficiencies that should be secured? Do we understand that the right hon. Gentleman does not desire efficiency, but only economy, at the Board?
    Sir D. MACLEAN: The answer is as I have given it. The answer is in the negative.

  NATIONAL FINANCE.

    LOCAL EDUCATION OFFICERS.
    Mr. MANDERasked the President of the Board of Education whether he will state what instructions have been given by his Department with reference to the reduction by 13 per cent. of the salaries of municipal employ és serving in the offices of education committees who have already suffered Civil Service pay reductions?
    Sir D. MACLEAN: No hard and fast rule has been imposed with reference to the reductions in salaries of officers other than teachers employed by local education authorities; but the Board have informed the authorities that, in determining their grant, they will have regard to the extent to which appropriate reductions in such salaries and wages have been made in the light of the reductions in the salaries of teachers and the various branches of the public service. Any recent reduction in salary would clearly be a relevant factor in considering whether any further reduction was appropriate.
    Mr. MANDER: Do I understand from that answer that it is not intended that the 15 per cent. cut shall be applied to employ és in this category?
    Sir D. MACLEAN: As far as my Department is concerned the reduction will be the appropriate one, and what that might be will be determined by the facts.

    TEACHERS' SALARIES.
    Mr. HOPKINasked the President of the Board of Education what is the total sum paid in salaries to teachers in this country not governed by the Burnham scale; and if it is intended that these salaries are to be reduced by 15 per cent.?
    Sir D. MACLEAN: I have not the information to enable me to answer the first part of the question in the terms in which it is put. If, however, the hon. Member has in mind the case of supplementary teachers in elementary schools, I may say that the total sum paid in salaries to such teachers, in the financial year 1930–31, was approximately £730,000. As regards the second part of the question I would refer the hon. Member to paragraph 1 of the Board's Circular 1413, of which I am sending him a copy, from which he will see that the Board's grants will be calculated on the assumption of a deduction of 15 per cent. from the aggregate total of the teachers' salaries otherwise payable.
    Mr. HOPKIN: On what principle are some teachers penalised and others let off altogether—the teachers in the private schools?
    Sir D. MACLEAN: The same principle as applies to other cuts in the Economy Bill.
    Viscountess ASTOR: Are these not the cuts of which the late Government approved?
    Sir O. MACLEAN: That is so.
    HON. MEMBERS: How do you know?
    Mr. HOPKINasked the President of the Board of Education if he is aware that a number of teachers in Carmarthen-shire will shortly suffer considerable reductions in salary by being transferred from scale 3 to scale 2; and if he proposes to reduce the salaries of these teachers by 15 per cent. or at all?
    Sir D. MACLEAN: Under Lord Burn-ham's arbitral award of 8th December, 1927, relating, to Carmartbenshire, all teachers then paid on Scale 3 were to
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    remain on that scale, and I am not aware that any teachers in the county will shortly suffer reduction by being transferred to Scale 2.
    Mr. HOPKIN: Is the right hon. Gentleman not aware that the teachers in all industrial areas are to come down from Scale 3 to Scale 2 on 1st April of next year, and is it not a fact: that the teacher getting £432 will suffer a cut of £111, or 23½ per cent.?
    Sir D. MACLEAN: The answer is as I have given it. I am unaware of any such circumstance as my hon. Friend has mentioned.
    Mr. COCKS rose—
    HON. MEMBERS: Sit down!
    Mr. COCKS: On a point of Order. Is it in order, Mr. Speaker, when you are seated and I rise to put a supplementary question, that hon. Members opposite should shout "sit down" and create disorder?
    Mr. SPEAKER: The nature of some of the hon. Member's supplementary question did not encourage me to call upon him to ask any more.
    Major BRAITHWAITEasked the President of the Board of Education whether he will give an undertaking that when the financial condition of the country is again secure he will reconsider the case of the teachers' salaries, and that the present cuts are not to be regarded as permanent?
    Lieut.-Colonel GAULTasked the President of the Board of Education whether the 15 per cent. reduction in teachers' salaries is proposed by the Government as an emergency cut only and without prejudice to the rates of pension to which they are entitled under existing salaries; and if it is intended to reinstate them in their remuneration when the financial conditions of the country justify a return to the present standards of pay?
    Sir D. MACLEAN: The reduction in teachers' salaries is occasioned by the national emergency, and is not to be regarded as the view of the Government of what should be proper rates of remuneration of teachers under less abnormal conditions. The position should be reviewed on its merits when the financial position

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    of the country allows. As regards superannuation, I would refer my hon. Friends to the written answer which I gave yesterday to the hon. Member for Middleton and Prestwich (Sir N. Stewart Sandeman).
    Sir GEORGE HAMILTON: Will the right hon. Gentleman consider departmentally, as announced by the Prime Minister yesterday, whether there are any great injustices in these cuts, and, if so, will he submit his opinion to the Cabinet?
    Mr. MORGAN JONES: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that all Members of this House have been circularised by the Association of Local Education Authorities to the effect that they consider the imposition of the cut upon the superannuation or pensions for teachers to be a gross injustice?
    Sir D. MACLEAN: With regard to the question of the hon. Member for Ilford (Sir G. Hamilton), of course the undertaking of the Prime Minister will have the fullest and authoritative consideration of the department. With regard to the second question, I am aware of the expression of opinion which the circular mentioned contains.
    Lieut.-Colonel GAULT: Does the right hon. Gentleman not think that it would have been more equitable to have taken the pre-crisis rates of salaries and wages as a datum line from which to deduct a uniform cut?
    Mr. MATHERS: If the financial position of the country gets worse, will further cuts be made?
    Mrs. MANNING: Am I to gather from the right hon. Gentleman's answer that the Government will take the initiative in restoring these salaries, just as they have taken the initiative in reducing them?
    Sir D. MACLEAN: I think that any Government when in power can safely rely on the initiative being taken by the teachers' organisation.
    Mr. COCKS: May I ask the Minister whether in the conversations which he has had on this subject with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he will live up to his name of "Fighting Mac"?

    UNCLAIMED BANK BALANCES.
    Mr. TOOLEasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he is aware that considerable sums of money are lying in British banks as unclaimed bank balances; and whether, in view of the present financial stringency, he is willing to appoint a small committee to investigate the matter with the view to all unclaimed balances being taken over by the State?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: I am not aware of any evidence that the amount of unclaimed bank balances is considerable, and I do not think that any useful purpose would be served by the appointment of a committee to investigate the matter.
    Mr. TOOLE: Will the right hon. Gentleman give an undertaking or at least find out how much money is unclaimed in this way, and would this not give a real opportunity to the banks to practise the economies that are being practised by other people, instead of economising by giving other people's money to the State in this time of crisis?
    Sir JOHN FERGUSON: Is it not a fact that every year all the British banks go into the question of outstanding deposit moneys and endeavour to trace the descendants, which inquiries to my knowledge have gone back in the last few years to 1825?
    Mr. MACLEAN: Is it not the case that a previous Government set up a committee to go into this question, which made a report to the Cabinet on the matter, and cannot the Chancellor of the Exchequer continue that inquiry and find out whether anything can be done in this matter?
    Mr. SNOWDEN: I do not think any further inquiry would add to the information which came before that committee in 1919, and they said that from the point of view of the State these unclaimed balances were of no or of little concern.
    Mr. TOOLE: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that when this matter was last before the House the present Prime Minister walked into the Lobby and voted in favour of this being done?
    Mr. ERNEST BROWN: Is the right hon. Gentleman not aware that this policy used to be known as "Bottomley's Bloomer"?

    POUND STERLING.
    Mr. LEACHasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what amount of securities has been offered to the Government by the leading banks, insurance and investment houses, for use in defence of the pound sterling; and how much of it has been accepted?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: No such proposal has been made.
    Mr. WISE: Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether any attempt was made to discover how much might be obtainable or could be procured?
    Mr. SNOWDEN: That is a question that I cannot answer.
    Mr. WISE: Would the right hon. Gentleman say that the information is not available or that he refuses to answer?
    Mr. SNOWDEN: I think I might say "Yes" to both those questions.
    Mr. W. J. BROWN: Are we to assume from the right hon. Gentleman's reply that it is only policemen, civil servants, soldiers, sailors, and teachers who are expected to come to the aid of the State in its hour of trouble?

    OVERSEA CAPITAL ISSUES.
    Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHYasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what is the total amount of the overseas loans raised on the London money market during the present calendar year; and whether the Treasury was consulted with regard to these loans?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: There are no official returns of capital issues. Those compiled by the Midland Bank show for the period January to August, 1931, a total of £36,721,000 in respect of overseas issues for British possessions and £9,236,000 for foreign countries. There is no obligation to consult the Treasury with regard to such issues.
    Lieut. - Commander KENWORTHY: Will the right hon. Gentleman be good enough to answer the latter part of my question, as to whether the Treasury was consulted?
    Mr. SNOWDEN: I have done.
    Lieut. - Commander KENWORTHY: Then, in view of his speeches as long ago as February, warning us of the difficulties ahead of us, did he not take any steps to check this export of capital?
    Mr. SNOWDEN: Most of this, by far the greater part, has gone to the Governments of the British Dominions.
    Lieut. - Commander KENWORTHY: Will the right hon. Gentleman do anything in the matter?
    Mr. SNOWDEN: I have given the answer already, and that is that the Treasury have no authority to interfere.
    Colonel WEDGWOOD rose—
    Mr. SPEAKER: We seem to be having Debates on every question.
    Colonel WEDGWOOD: But I wish to know—
    Mr. SPEAKER: We shall never get through half the questions if we go on at this rate.

    BRITISH CAPITAL ABROAD (CONVERSION).
    Mr. R. A. TAYLORasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he has taken or proposes to take any steps to prohibit the purchase of foreign currencies by British nationals except for bona fide trade or other approved purposes?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: I would refer the hon. Member to the reply which my hon. and gallant Friend the Financial Secretary gave yesterday to the hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for Central Hull (Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy).
    Mr. TAYLOR: Does the right hon. Gentleman propose to take any other step than that indicated in the reply?
    Mr. SNOWDEN: Like the answer given to a supplementary question yesterday by my hon. and gallant Friend, I have nothing at all to add.

    COLONIAL DEVELOPMENT FUND.
    Mr. D. G. SOMERVILLEasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether there is any money left in the Colonial Development Fund for potential employment?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: It is estimated that of the £750,000 voted by Parliament as a grant in aid of the Fund for the current financial year approximately £560,000 will be required for schemes already sanctioned, leaving a balance of about £190,000 available for further schemes, if sanctioned.

    BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION.
    Mr. O'CONNORasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what action has been taken to give effect to the recommendations of the May Committee in regard to the increased revenue which might accrue to the Exchequer from wireless licences?
    Captain CROOKSHANKasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether it is proposed to adopt any of the recommendations of the Committee on National Expenditure with regard to revenue allocated to the British Broadcasting Corporation; and, if so, which?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: The position as between the Exchequer and the British Broadcasting Corporation has been reviewed in the light of the recommendations of the Committee on National Expenditure. I am able to announce that the Corporation has agreed to forgo, out of their proportion of the revenue from wireless licences under the scale now in force, the sum of £50,000 for the period up to the 31st March, 1932, and the sum of £150,000 in the course of the financial year 1932. The result of this arrangement is estimated to give the Exchequer, in respect of the current financial year, £646,166 out of a total licence revenue of £2,050,000: and in respect of the year 1932–33 £775,000 out of £2,250,000. In addition 10 per cent. of the total revenue is retained by the Post Office in respect of the cost of collection, and therefore out of a total revenue from licences next year of £2,250,000, public funds will receive £1,000,000.
    Mr. W. J. BROWN: Do the estimated savings include any provisional or other estimate for reductions in the salaries of the directors of the British Broadcasting Corporation, or, alternatively, is it proposed to apply the marriage bar which operates in the Civil Service?
    Mr. SNOWDEN: The remuneration of the officers and officials of the British Broadcasting Corporation does not come within the purview of the Exchequer, but I am able to announce that reductions will be made on the same scale as apply to the Civil Service.
    Mr. T. WILLIAMS: Does not my right hon. Friend think that this is a very good example of a successful nationalised service?

    GOLD EXPORT.
    Colonel WEDGWOODasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether, in view of the risk of loss to the Treasury in connection with the repayment of the £80,000,000 credit, he has considered the effect of imposing a 10 per cent. export tax on gold?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: No, Sir.

    BRITISH TREASURY CREDITS.
    Colonel WEDGWOODasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he is kept informed every day as to the amount of the £80,000,000 credit still standing to our credit?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: Yes, Sir.

    ROYAL FAMILY.
    Mr. GEORGE HARDIEasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether it is proposed to introduce legislation to cut by 10 per cent. the royal annuities?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: I would refer the hon. Member to the recent announcements in the Press from which he will observe that His Majesty the King and the other members of the Royal Family are by their own wish participating in the movement for the reduction of national expenditure.
    Mr. HARDIE: May I ask if that refers to Royal annuities amounting to £106,000, given to six persons, as follows—[Interruption.]
    Mr. SPEAKER: We cannot have this information given at Question Time.
    Mr. HARDIE: I am trying to get information. Did the statement which was made in the Press refer only to His Majesty's household, or did it include these annuities, which I desire to read now in order that the Chancellor of the Exchequer may inform—
    Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member has had the answer to his question.
    Mr. HARDIE: Only to one section, not to the section in regard to annuities.
    Mr. SPEAKER: This is not a time for giving information, but a time for eliciting information.
    Mr. HARDIE: What I want to know is whether it applies to annuities—[Interruption.]
    HON MEMBERS: Answer!
    Mr. SNOWDEN: I will look into the matter.

    TRAVELLING ALLOWANCES.
    Mr. CAMPBELLasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer the estimated cost to the State of the railway travel of all public servants, including Members of Parliament and officers in the fighting forces; and what the figure would be if they all travelled third class?
    Mr. TURTONasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer (1) what would be the saving effected by the provision of third-class tickets instead of first-class tickets for the free railway travel facilities of the Civil Service; and whether, in view of the national emergency, he will recommend such proposals;
    (2) whether he has considered the limitation of the provision, of free railway vouchers to Members of the House to third-class travel; whether the saving obtained by this limitation is still estimated at £16,000; and what decision he has come to upon the matter?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: The answer to those questions is that the matter is now under examination.

    ARMY PAY.
    Mr. SIMMONS(by Private Notice) asked the Financial Secretary to the War Office if any special steps have been taken to explain to the troops at Aldershot the reasons for the reduction in pay that they are to be called upon to suffer as a result of the Economy Bill?
    The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the WAR OFFICE (Mr. Duff Cooper): A letter was sent to all Commands and was reproduced as an Army Council Instruction in the following terms:
    "I am commanded by the Army Council to inform you that the present state of the national finances has necessitated the adoption of widespread measures of economy throughout the country. In these measures the Army and all the Services of the Crown have been called upon to bear their share. The Army Council are confident that all ranks will he ready to make the sacrifices demanded of them in order to contribute to the restoration of national prosperity."
    Steps have been, and are being taken to explain to all ranks the incidence of, and the reasons for the reductions.
    Mr. SIMMONS: Are we to understand from that reply that all ranks have willingly and without protest accepted these cuts?
    Mr. COOPER: The sacrifice has been accepted by all ranks in a spirit that is worthy of the best traditions of the Army.
    Mr. MATHERS: Will steps be taken by the Army authorities to consider questions of hardship involved, in the same way as is being done in the Navy?
    Mr. COOPER: The Army Council have taken careful note of every case of hardship that is involved, and a special committee of the Army Council has been set up to inquire into them and to see how they can be dealt with.
    Mr. SIMMONS: Are the soldiers themselves being consulted? [interruption.]
    Mr. COOPER: I did not hear that question.

    NAVAL RATES OF PAY (ATLANTIC FLEET).
    Captain W. G. HALL(by Private Notice) asked the First Lord of the Admiralty whether he has any further statement to make as to the unrest in the Navy with regard to the reductions in pay?
    The FIRST LORD of the ADMIRALTY (Sir Austen Chamberlain): In consequence of the decision which I announced yesterday the following Order was issued to the Fleet:
    "The Board of Admiralty is fully alive to the fact that amongst certain classes of ratings special hardship will result from the reduction of pay ordered by His Alajesty's Government. It is their direction that ships of the Atlantic Fleet are to proceed to their Home ports forthwith to enable personal investigation to be made by the Commander-in-Chief and representatives of the Admiralty with a view to necessary alleviation being made. Any further refusals of individuals to carry out orders will be dealt with under the Naval Discipline Act. This order is to be promulgated to the Fleet forthwith."
    In accordance with this Order the Fleet sailed yesterday.
    Captain HALL: Will the House be given an opportunity to discuss this matter, and, if so, when?
    Sir A. CHAMBERLAIN: All questions relating to the business must be addressed to the House.
    Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY: May we take it that this statement about hard cases does not apply only to the men of the Atlantic Fleet, but to the men in other ports and other commands—that it applies to the whole Service?
    Sir A. CHAMBERLAIN: Obviously. One fleet is not going to be picked out for special treatment.
    Commander SOUTHBY: Can the right hon. Gentleman inform the House whether these cuts in naval pay are among the cuts which were agreed provisionally by the members of the late Cabinet?
    Sir A. CHAMBERLAIN: It is not very easy for me to answer about the late Cabinet, but the instructions which I found at the Admiralty when I arrived there were to make these cuts.
    Mr. A. V. ALEXANDER rose—
    Viscountess ASTOR: Tell the truth.
    HON. MEMBERS: Withdraw!
    Mr. TOOLE: Is it in order for an hon. Member opposite to make imputations?
    Mr. SPEAKER: Imputations are always out of order.
    HON. MEMBERS: Withdraw and apologise!
    Viscountess ASTOR: No, I will not.
    Mr. SPEAKER: On this occasion I suffer from the same infirmity as the hon. Member for West Wolverhampton (Mr. W. J. Brown). I could not hear.
    Mr. ALEXANDER: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware, first, that the men of the Fleet were defended faithfully with regard to their position by his predecessor; secondly, that the Cabinet of the day were warned specifically by the Admiralty, the Sea Lords, and their political representatives of the danger of what has since taken place; and thirdly, he has said that instructions were left that the cuts were to be made—has he not been aware that it was left for the details of any procedure to be taken to be discussed with the Chancellor of the Exchequer?
    Sir A. CHAMBERLAIN: I have no doubt that while the right hon. Gentle-
    1016
    man was First Lord of the Admiralty he would do, as everyone in that position would, his best to defend the interest of that great Service.
    The PRIME MINISTER (Mr. Ramsay MacDonald): I am the only person who can speak for the communications that passed between the Admiralty and those who were considering this question. The advice given to us by the Admiralty was that the men would loyally accept these cuts provided two things were done. One was that there were cuts all round in the public services; and, two, that an adequate cut was made in unemployment pay.
    Mr. ALEXANDER: Perhaps the Prime Minister will add to the answer, first whether he denies the truth of the points put in my first two questions; and, secondly, whether what he now indicates was the view expressed by the Admiralty was because they were asked to say whether they thought they would be able to put the cuts into operation, that they expressed their doubt, but said that, on balance, they thought the loyalty of the Service would prevail.
    The PRIME MINISTER: That is perfectly true. Every Department was requested to make its observations about certain proposals made regarding cuts. The Admiralty replied in the terms, so far as I can charge my memory, that there were two conditions attached which were essential in offering cuts to the men in the Navy, and under these conditions they said that they felt perfectly certain that the men would loyally accept them.
    Commander SOUTHBY: May I ask the Prime Minister if he can inform the House whether, when the communications were received from the Admiralty, they were accompanied with any protest from the First Lord as the head of the Service?
    The PRIME MINISTER: The hon. Member must deal with the Department.
    Mr. W. J. BROWN: Arising out of the earlier reply of the First Lord, may I ask if he can inform the House whether the manoeuvres about to be engaged in have been entirely suspended, and, if so, whether the interpretation which is to be drawn by the police, teachers, civil servants and others is that a strike—[Interruption].
    Mr. STEPHEN: I want to ask that the Papers should be laid—[HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear!"]—because the Prime Minister has quoted from them. It will be within the recollection of the House that the Prime Minister said that the statement in the Admiralty reply was a certain thing. Secondly, I take it that he was quoting from the reply of the Admiralty, and consequently I ask you, Mr. Speaker, whether the Papers in connection with this matter will be laid?
    Mr. SPEAKER: If the hon. Member puts that question to me, I cannot tell him whether there are any papers.
    Mr. BUCHANAN: May I submit that the Prime Minister, in his reply, said that there were requests or recommendations made. May I submit that those recommendations, requests, or memoranda must have been made in writing, and therefore there must be a document. If that is so, has it not always been the common practice of this House for documents like those to be produced by the Government as a White Paper?
    The PRIME MINISTER: May I make the position clear. I did not quote, I only charged my memory.
    Mr. LANSBURY: I want to ask the Prime Minister a question. In view of the contradictory statements, not only on this particular matter, but in a previous answer this afternoon, when there is a great public controversy about what certain people have done, I should very much like to make my own position as an individual clear on this matter. We were all colleagues, and we were all in it, but if there is to be a public controversy, I want the Prime Minister to get permission for all of us to be able to read whatever documents we are responsible for, and to be able to make our own statement in regard to this controversy.
    The PRIME MINISTER: I only intervened to-day on account of the questions which reported statements of fact according to my right hon. Friend opposite. I replied. "What was' the gist of the communication?"
    Mr. W. J. BROWN: Then there was a, document?
    The PRIME MINISTER: The hon. Member must know perfectly well that
    1018
    that is not affected by the rule. It is not a question as to whether there was a document, but as to whether the document was textually quoted. Right hon. Gentlemen opposite know that each one of them has the right to go to the Cabinet Secretariat and ask to look at the records that exist during the term of their office.
    Mr. LANSBURY: That is not the question. I have the whole of the Cabinet papers in my possession. Every Cabinet Minister has the right to have the documents concerning Cabinet matters during the time that he is a member. I do not want to stand apart, nor do I propose to publish or say anything as an individual, but statements are being made in this House about the unanimous decisions of the Cabinet which are not true, and all that I ask is whether we are to be allowed to publish documents that we ourselves put forward in this controversy, and make our own statements as to what took place in the Cabinet. If we are not to be allowed to do that, then I think that Ministers in this new Government ought not to be told what to gay as to what we did or what we did not do.
    The PRIME MINISTER: Keeping to the specific point before us, hon. and right hon. Members must not put questions indicating their knowledge of the situation inaccurately, because they compel us to reply. If the right hon. Gentleman had not put the question he did to-day, I would not—[Interruption.] He put a question whether so-and-so and so-and-so had not been done by the late Government—[Interruption.] Hon. and right hon. Members can look at the OFFICIAL REPORT to-morrow morning regarding the question put by the late First Lord, and in reply to that question I gave the information which I gave.
    Mr. LANSBURY: At the beginning of Questions to-day, a statement was made in regard to unemployment benefit, and so on. A statement was made by the Minister of Labour which could only have been supplied to him by some member of the late Cabinet, and as he could not have got from anyone except one of my late colleagues what the attitude of the Cabinet was as to transitional benefit and a means test, I only want to know whether I have the same right to stand here and say what happened in the Cabinet?
    Mr. SPEAKER: This Debate is, strictly, entirely out of order. There is no question before the House.
    Mr. LANSBURY: I would like to ask you, Mr. Speaker, when is the opportunity for an ex-Minister to make his statement as to why he resigned from a particular Government [Interruption.] Every Minister who resigns individually has a right to make his statement in this House. The difficulty of the position just now is that the Cabinet broke up, certain members of it are in a new Government and certain statements are bandied across the Floor of the House as to what was unanimous and what was not. I only want to know if I am to have the right to give the story of the happenings in the Cabinet from my point of view?
    Mr. SPEAKER: It is clearly not for me to give a Ruling on that. We have had several Debates since 8th September, when this question was fully discussed.
    Mr. LANSBURY: Yes, only it goes on from day to day.
    Mr. ALEXANDER: With your permission, Mr. Speaker, and that of my colleagues in the House, I should like to say, on the point raised by the Prime Minister, that I should never have dreamed of putting the question in the form in which it was put, but for the reply in the House to the effect that the right hon. Gentleman found instructions in his Department for the cuts to be put into operation. In those circumstances, it was only due to myself and my colleagues in the late Government to make it plain that the men were defended, warnings were given, and, secondly, that instructions had not been given for the cuts to be put into operation at the Admiralty when we left.
    Mr. MAXTON: On a point of Order. I wish to put it to you, Mr. Speaker, that the squabble which has arisen in the last five minutes arose out of the special request to you from my hon. Friend the Member for Camlachie (Mr. Stephen) that the established right of back benchers in this House should be conceded on this point, that where a Cabinet document has been quoted, Members have a right to ask that that document should be printed in extenso, and that the House
    1020
    should have the opportunity of seeing it. I put it to you that the use which the Prime Minister made of this document was a quotation making certain specific statements that the Admiralty could only accept a cut on the Navy if a substantial cut were made in unemployment benefit. That is, I submit, a quotation and not a mere casual reference to a document, and I ask you that you rule that it is necessary so as to preserve the order in this House, that that document shall be printed for the use of Members.
    Mr. SPEAKER: I have often ruled on similar questions, and I rule now, that if quotations are made from a document, the demand can be made for its production in this House. That is a rule which has always been in existence for years, but if there is no document, it cannot be produced.
    Sir BASIL PETO: On a point of Order. It is not a question, I submit, of there being no document; there was no quotation. The Prime Minister prefaced his remarks in my hearing by saying: "So far as I can charge my memory." No words whatever were quoted from any document.
    Mr. SPEAKER: I said that if there is a quotation from a document, it must be produced.
    Mr. MACLEAN: Is it not the case that the Prime Minister when talking on this matter used the following words to describe the medium by which the various intimations were carried to and from the different Departments—"According to the communication "—he used the word "communication"—[Interruption.] May I give my point?
    Mr. SPEAKER: I cannot allow the time of the House to be taken up with this.
    Mr. MACLEAN: My point of Order—
    Mr. SPEAKER: The point of Order does not arise. I have given my Ruling on this question, and I have nothing to add to it.
    Mr. MACLEAN: Your Ruling was that if a, document were in existence and were quoted, it ought to be printed for the use of Members of this House. I am submitting to you that by the Prime Minister's own words there are docu-

    1021
    ments in existence, that he made a, particular quotation from the communication that, passed between the Admiralty and himself, and, consequently, on your Ruling, the document should be printed.
    Mr. SPEAKER: I have already answered that question.
    Mr. W. J. BROWN: On a point of Order. Are we to assume that the Prime Minister can first of all refer to the existence of a document, and that, secondly, he can quote the broad effect of a document, but that, if he refrains from actually textually quoting any particular sentence from it, therefore he is not bound by the Rules of the House to produce the document? I suggest that that is exactly what has taken place.

    POOR LAW INSTITUTIONS (MAINTENANCE COST).
    Mr. PERRYasked the Minister of Health the average cost of maintaining a man and his wife and two children in an institution under the control of a Public Assistance Committee?
    The MINISTER of HEALTH (Mr. Chamberlain): The specific information desired by the hon. Member is not available. Details showing the average weekly cost per inmate in general Poor Law institutions administered by late boards of guardians are contained in Table 13 (c) of Part I of the Local Taxation Returns, England and Wales, for the year ending 31st March, 1929. (A copy of this publication can be obtained at the Vote Office.) Later information as to these institutions as administered by Public Assistance Committees is not yet available.
    Mr. PERRY: Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether the cost is more than 32s. 9d. which would be the amount of unemployment benefit?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I have told the hon. Member that the information for which he asks is not available.

    QUESTIONS TO MINISTERS.
    The following Questions stood upon the Order Paper:
    Mr. ALBERYto ask the Minister of Health how many areas have now been
    1022
    cleared under the Housing Act, 1936; and how many houses have been constructed up to date under this Act?
    27. Commander BELLAIRS to ask the Minister of Health the proportion of preservatives in the Soviet Russian fruit pulp sent to this country; and whether the Ministry is considering the prohibition of all imports of a deleterious character?
    Mr. ALBERY: On a point of Order. May I ask, Mr. Speaker, if you called Question 26?
    Mr. SPEAKER: I called upon the hon. Member to ask Question 26 and also upon the hon. and gallant Member for Maidstone (Commander Bellairs) to ask Question 27, and, as there was no response, I was bound to call the next question on the Paper.
    Commander BELLAIRS: May I point out, Sir, that it was quite impossible to hear, owing to the amount of noise in the House?
    Mr. ALBERY: On a point of Order. May I submit that if I missed the calling of my question it was due to the remarks of hon. Members opposite?
    Mr. SPEAKER: Hon. Members must remember that the noise is not confined to one side of the House.
    The following Question stood upon the Order Paper:
    37. Mr. BATEY to ask the Minister of Health whether he proposes to take any steps to alleviate the distress among the mining community of the county of Durham during the coming winter?
    Mr. BATEY: On a point of Order. This question was addressed to the Prime Minister, and it appeared yesterday on the Order Paper as being put to the Prime Minister. Last night, I learned that the Prime Minister had given orders that the question was to be transferred to the Minister of Health. I wish to ask you, Mr. Speaker, whether the Prime Minister can do that; and whether it is in order for a question, which has appeared on the Order Paper to be changed in that way?
    Mr. SPEAKER: This is a very old story. Questions are always put down

    1023
    to the Minister, or at any rate are answered by the Minister to whose Department they relate.
    Mr. BATEY: May I draw your attention, Sir, to the fact that this is not a Departmental question. It is one which I want the Prime Minister to answer. If I withdraw this question now, am I entitled to put it down again, addressed to the Prime Minister?
    Mr. SPEAKER: It may not be answered by the Prime Minister. The hon. Member will get an answer from the Minister particularly responsible.
    Mr. BATEY: I understand that the Minister responsible is the Prime Minister. He has still an interest in Durham.
    Mr. SPEAKER: Is the hon. Member going to ask the question now?
    Mr. BATEY: If you insist upon it, I will, but with all due respect to the Minister of Health, I desire an answer from the Prime Minister. I withdraw the question.

    RATES, MANCHESTER.
    Mr. PERRYasked the Minister of Health if his attention has been called to the estimated increase of local rates in the city of Manchester by the reduced rate of unemployment benefit to be paid to those who have already to be assisted by the Manchester public assistance committee; and the estimated additional charge throughout the country on local rates?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The answer to both parts of the question is in the negative.

  PUBLIC HEALTH.

    MILK SUPPLY SERVICE.
    Dr. MARION PHILLIPSasked the Minister of Health whether, in view of the proposed reductions in the amount of unemployment benefit, he will advise local authorities to extend the provision now made by them for supplying milk to necessitous mothers and children?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I do not think it is necessary for me to address any special communication to local authorities
    1024
    on this subject. The extension of this service is now a matter within the discretion of those authorities, and in considering the question they will no doubt pay regard to such circumstances as are mentioned in Circular 1222 and in particular to the question whether an extension of the service is required on urgent grounds of public health.
    Dr. PHILLIPS: Does not the circular to which the right hon. Gentleman refers, urge, not extensions but economies in this service; and, in that case, will the local authorities not take it to mean that they are advised against extensions, and that they ought not to think of making them, unless they are told that they will be considered suitable exceptions?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: No. I do not think that that would be a fair interpretation of the circular.

    MATERNITY SERVICES.
    Dr. PHILLIPSasked the Minister of Health whether Circular 1222, issued on the 11th September, 1931, urging local authorities to make further economies in their work, is to be taken by them as superseding the circular issued in December, 1930, urging them to extend their work for the saving of maternal and infant life?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The answer is in the negative. The view of the Government, as stated in Circular 1222, is that local authorities, in considering whether development of any services cannot safely and properly be slowed down till better times, should pay special regard, interalia, to the question whether a service is required on urgent grounds of public health. It will be for each local authority to consider, by reference to the relevant circumstances of its area and to the stage of development already reached, whether further development of its maternity services is required at the present time.
    Dr. PHILLIPS: Does the right hon. Gentleman propose to carry out the intention of his predecessor, in inquiring from those authorities who have not yet answered this circular, what they intend to do; and whether it is not more likely that after the second circular they will drop the matter altogether?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I cannot answer as to NN hat the intention may be.
    Miss WILKINSON: In view of the fact that the last published returns of maternal mortality show the lowest figure yet reached in this country, will the right hon. Gentleman call the attention of the local authorities to the advisability of maintaining that record?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The circular was issued by my predecessor as lately as December of last year. I have no reason to suppose that the local authorities are not giving their close attention to the subject.
    Miss WILKINSON: Does the right hon. Gentleman's answer mean that he desires local authorities to make no change in the policy that was being pursued under the circular to which he refers?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: There is no change in the policy.
    Mr. THOMAS LEWISasked the Minister of Health whether, having regard to the number of preventible deaths of mothers during child-birth, it is the intention of the Government to proceed with the scheme for the development of the maternity service now before the Ministry of Health?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I assume that the hon. Member is referring to the maternity scheme which was considered by the Committee on National Expenditure. That scheme could not in any event be brought into effect for a considerable period. In the circumstances progress will have in the immediate future to depend on the development of the maternity services to which I have referred in the answer given to the hon. Member for Sunderland (Dr. Phillips).

    SMALL DWELLINGS ACQUISITION ACTS.
    Mr. EDEasked the Minister of Health the total amount of the loans sanctioned to local authorities for the purposes of the Small Dwellings Acquisition Acts; the amount so sanctioned for the urban district council of Mitcham; and will he inform the House of the proposals he has to make whereby the situation with respect to the mortgages under these Acts may be eased for those who
    1026
    have experienced, or are to experience as a result of Government action, a, reduction in income accompanied by an increased tax on their income for last year?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The total amount of the loans sanctioned since 1919 to local authorities for the purpose of making advances under the Small Dwellings Acquisition Acts, together with direct advances made by the London County Council, is £47,560,750. The total amount so sanctioned for the urban district council of Mitcham is—2,109,876. No action in the direction suggested in the latter part of the question is under consideration.
    Mr. EDE: Will the right hon. Gentleman consult the Chancellor of the Exchequer as to whether it will be possible for these people to pay their mortgage instalments due on 31st December and their Income Tax on 1st January, under the altered conditions?

    NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE.
    Mr. T. LEWISasked the Minister of Health if he proposes to bring in legislation extending the provisions of the National Health Insurance (Prolongation of Insurance) Act, 1930; and, if not, what other steps he proposes to take to meet the position of unemployed persons who would normally go out of insurance on the 31st December, 1931?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The matter is under consideration, but I am not yet in a position to make a statement as to the steps which will be taken.

    FLOODING, DONCASTER.
    Mr. T. WILLIAMSasked the Minister of Health if he is aware that, owing to the recent floods, several hundred people have been rendered homeless at the Toll Bar, Bentley, near Doncaster; and, if so, can he state what steps have been taken by the responsible authorities to find housing accommodation for the people and to deal with the cause by improving the drainage in that area?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I have received a report from one of my inspectors who has visited the district, and I am informed that steps have been taken by the local authorities to accommodate in the

    1027
    local schools the persons who have been rendered homeless. The local drainage authorities have under consideration a scheme of drainage for the area.
    Mr. WILLIAMS: As a large number of people in the Doncaster district are constantly subjected to serious flooding, will the right hon. Gentleman, in cooperation with the Minister of Agriculture, insist on the drainage committee carrying out remedial measures, since they have now had powers for 2½ years and practically nothing has been done?
    Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: That is a matter which is entirely under the jurisdiction of my right hon. colleague. Perhaps the hon. Member will put a question to him.

    SLAUGHTER OF ANIMALS BILL.
    Mr. D. G. SOMERVILLEasked the Prime Minister whether the Government proposes to proceed with the Slaughter of Animals Bill?
    The PRIME MINISTER: As has already been announced by the Government, it will not be possible in present circumstances to give facilities for Private Members' Bills.
    Mr. LAWTHER: Does the Prime Minister not think the Slaughter of Animals Bill, or the matter contained therein, would be more human than the inhuman methods adopted with the unemployed?

    GOLD STANDARD (INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE).
    Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHYasked the Prime Minister what is the attitude of His Majesty's Government to the proposal for the holding of an international conference of representatives of Governments on the gold standard, in order to follow u the preliminary work of the gold delegation of the Financial Committee of the League of Nations; and whether any steps are contemplated?
    The PRIME MINISTER: I would refer the hon. and gallant Member to the observations made by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his speeoh on the 15th September, to which I have nothing to add.
    Lieut. - Commander KENWORTHY: Will the right hon. Gentleman be good enough to answer the last part of my question, as to whether any steps are contemplated; in other words, is any action going to be taken? [interruption.] This is very important. I have asked very few questions this afternoon.
    Mr. SPEAKER: This must he an exceptional day.
    Lieut. - Commander KENWORTHY: But is this not a very exceptional occasion?
    Mr. SPEAKER: Mr. O'Connor.
    Mr. W. J. BROWN rose—
    Mr. SPEAKER: I have called on the next question.
    Mr. BROWN: With great respect, I desire to put a perfectly legitimate supplementary question.
    Mr. SPEAKER: There cannot be any more supplementaries to this question.

    CIVIL SERVANTS (INCOME TAX PAYMENTS).
    Mr. W. J. BROWNasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he is able to make arrangements to permit of civil servants being able to spread over a longer period the increased Income Tax payments due under the new Budget instead of being obliged to find three-quarters of the whole year's tax by 1st January?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: I will look into the matter.
    Mr. SPEAKER: Mr. Campbell.
    Mr. BROWN: May I have an answer to number 51.
    Mr. SPEAKER: The answer was given.
    Mr. BROWN: I am very sorry—
    HON. MEMBERS: Name! Sit down!
    Mr. SPEAKER: There was a great deal of noise going on and the hon. Member could not have heard the reply.
    Mr. BROWN: I have received no reply whatever, and no reply has been given since I rose in my place to put Question 51. I desire to ask that that Question should be answered.
    HON. MEMBERS: It was answered!
    Mr. HARDIE: The same thing applied when the Chancellor was making a reply to me. I could not hear. Did I understand him to say that he was going to look into the matter?
    Mr. BROWN: On a point of Order. I wish to put it to you, Mr. Speaker, that from the moment that I rose in my place to put Question 51, which I did in a perfectly audible voice, there has been no reply of any kind from the Chancellor, and I ask you to see that the question is answered.
    Mr. SPEAKER: The Chancellor of the Exchequer replied—[Interruption.]
    Mr. BROWN: On a point of fact—[Interruption.] We will fetch the Navy to you fellows before you are done.
    Mr. SPEAKER: I will invite the Chancellor of the Exchequer to reply again, but I do not think that the hon. Member can ask any more questions.
    Mr. SNOWDEN: I will refer the hon. Gentleman to the answer I have given already.
    Mr. BROWN rose—
    Mr. CAMPBELL: I wish to ask No. 52, Sir.
    Mr. BROWN: On a point of Order. I desire to submit to you that the latest observation of the Chancellor in referring me to an earlier reply, which either has not been given at all or, if given, was inaudible, implies disrespect to the Chair. I ask you to request the Chancellor of the Exchequer to give the reply to Question 51 in terms which are intelligible and audible.
    Mr. ALBERY: Arising from that point of Order. Is it not a fact that the hon. Member has little more cause for complaint than I have, because I did not hear the answer?
    HON. MEMBERS: Answer!
    Mr. SPEAKER: It would he very much better if we got on with Questions.
    HON. MEMBERS: Answer!
    Mr. BROWN rose—
    HON. MEMBERS: Name!
    Mr. BROWN: On a point of Order. I understood you to request a few moments ago that the Chancellor of the Exchequer should repeat the reply which he says he gave. His answer to that was to refer to his previous reply which, if made, was quite inaudible. I do not desire to occupy the time of the House—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"]—but I respectfully, but firmly, request that there should be a reply to Question 51.
    Mr. SPEAKER: The Chancellor gave a reply.
    HON. MEMBERS: No.
    Mr. BROWN: On a point of Order. I desire to submit to you that it is the right of Members of the House to put questions on the Paper with due notice, and to receive a reply. Question No. 51 was given with due notice. I rose in my place to ask the question as soon as I understood you to call upon me, and I have not yet received an answer. I beg that you will exercise your authority and request that an answer be given.
    Mr. STEPHEN: I would like to submit that the confusion has arisen from the fact that when the Chancellor of the Exchequer was answering this question he was thought by hon. Members over here, owing to the noise, to be answering supplementary questions to the previous question. Would it not be ordinary courtesy for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in these circumstances, to repeat the answer?
    Mr. ARTHUR HENDERSON: May I say that I heard what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said, but that I thought he was replying to the supplementary question of the hon. Member for Spring-burn (Mr. G. Hardie)? In the circumstances, I think the matter would be cleared up by the Chancellor of the Exchequer repeating the answer.
    Mr. SPEAKER: I have said before that when the question was asked originally the Chancellor of the Exchequer replied. I saw it myself. Whether the hon. Member heard it or not is another matter. I did not hear it myself, but that was not my fault; it was because the noise in the House was so great. Hon. Members themselves are really their worst enemies. If they did not make so

    1031
    much noise, they would hear the answers. It seems to be a very small thing about which to make a fuss.
    Mr. SNOWDEN rose—
    Mr. SPEAKER: I will finish what I am saying. The hour for questions will be concluded shortly, and I am sure that if it be the wish of the House that he should do so, the Chancellor of the Exchequer will repeat the answer.
    Mr. SNOWDEN: Out of respect for you, Mr. Speaker—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"]—I do so. The answer is that the matter is under consideration.
    Mr. BROWN: I am much obliged for the reply.

    CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETIES (TAXATION).
    Mr. CAMPBELLasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he can give an estimate of the amount of taxation which would be payable by co-operative societies if they were taxed on the same basis as private trading companies?
    Mr. P. SNOWDEN: The only estimate available of the additional tax that would be paid by co-operative societies is that furnished in reply to a question by the hon. Member for Wycombe (Sir A. Knox) on the 8th May, 1930. On the basis of the trading results of 1928 and a standard rate of 4s. it was then estimated that the additional tax amounted to about £352,000.
    Mr. CAMPBELL: Will my right hon. Friend bear in mind the weight of taxation upon private traders and see that the co-operative societies are taxed in the same way as private traders?
    Mr. SNOWDEN: I am aware that there is a widespread demand on the part of private traders, for such a change as is implied in the hon. Member's question. This matter has often been discussed in the House of Commons, and it certainly cannot be adequately discussed in reply to a question.
    Mr. WISE: Will the right hon. Gentleman say what would be the amount of profits to be given back to their customers by private traders if they followed the practice of the co-operative societies?
    Mr. LONGDEN: Is the Chancellor of the Exchequer aware that the Royal Commissions of 1905 and 1918 came to the decided conclusion that co-operative societies do not enjoy undue exemption from Income Tax?

MOTIONS FOR ADJOURNMENT.
Mr. THURTLE: I gave notice to you earlier, Mr. Speaker, that I wished to raise a point of Order in connection with the right of Members of this House to move the Adjournment of the House. It will be within your recollection that yesterday my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Central Portsmouth (Captain W. G. Hall) asked leave to move the Adjournment of the House in regard to the unrest then prevailing in the Atlantic Fleet. According to Standing Order No. 10, a Member may move the Adjournment of the House on a definite matter of urgent public importance. On reference to Erskine May's "Parliamentary Practice," I find that the Speaker may refuse to accept such a Motion if in his opinion the subject brought forward is not definite, urgent, or of public importance. For our guidance as to the future, when we may wish to bring forward a, similar Motion, I would like you, if you would be good enough, to explain to the House whether you regarded the Motion yesterday as not being definite, or as not being urgent, or as not being of public importance.
Mr. SPEAKER: I have in mind the practice under the Standing Order and the passage to which the hon. Member has referred in Erskine May, and the Ruling which I gave yesterday is one which is specially referred to in Erskine May. The question is not whether the matter is definite, urgent, or of public importance, but whether it would not be better left over, until further information is available, to be discussed, not on that day, but perhaps on the next day or the day after that. There was a Ruling not very long ago in which the Speaker of that time said that he was not prejudiced either one way or the other if the question were raised on a subsequent occasion.
Mr. THURTLE: In the light of that reply, would you explain to the House whether any obligation devolves upon the

1033
Chair in such circumstances to see that an early opportunity is provided for the discussion of the matter in question?
Mr. SPEAKER: I think that the hon. Member is mistaken. Even if the Speaker does not allow the Motion to be moved on that occasion, he is not prejudiced in any way from, perhaps, accepting the Motion on a subsequent day.

ATLANTIC FLEET UNREST.
Captain HALL: I beg to ask leave to move the Adjournment of the House for the purpose of discussing a definite matter of urgent public importance, namely,
"The unrest in the Atlantic Fleet."
The pleasure of the House not having been signified, Mr. SPEAKER called on those Members who supported the Motion to rise in their places, and, not less than 40 Members having accordingly risen—
The Motion stood over, under Standing Order No. 10, until half-past Seven o'clock this evening.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE.
Mr. A. HENDERSON: May I ask the Prime Minister what will be the business for next week?
The PRIME MINISTER: On Monday, consideration of a Motion allocating time for the remaining stages of the Finance and National Economy Bills and Supplementary Estimates.
On Tuesday, if the Time Table Motion is passed by the House, Finance Bill. Second Reading.
On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: Committee (first, second and third allotted days) on the National Economy Bill.
On any day, should time permit, other Orders may be taken.
It might be for the convenience of the House if I also say that it is hoped that the Time Table Motion will be handed in at the Table to-night. Copies of the Finance Bill will be available in the Vote Office to-morrow, and the Supplementary Estimates referred to are those mentioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his Budget speech, namely, the two Supplementary Estimates which are required
1034
under the Government's proposals dealing with Unemployment Insurance and the Road Fund.

CIVIL ESTIMATES (SUPPLEMENTARY ESTIMATE, 1931).
Estimate presented, of a further sum required to be voted for the service of the year ending 31st March, 1932 [by Command]; to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.

SUPPLY.
Resolved, That this House will, Tomorrow, resolve itself into a Committee to consider of the Supply to be granted to His Majesty.—[Sir Bolton Byres Monsell.]
Ordered,
"That the Civil Supplementary Estimate, 1931, presented to the House this day, be referred to the Committee of Supply."

HOUSING (FINANCIAL PROVISIONS) ACT (1924) AMENDMENT BILL.
"to amend the Housing (Financial Provisions) Act, 1924," presented by Commander Bellairs; supported by Brigadier-General Sir Henry Page Croft and Rear-Admiral Beamish; to be read a Second time upon Monday next, and to be printed. [Bill 225.]
ORDERS OF THE DAY.

  WAYS AND MEANS.
  REPORT [10TH SEPTEMBER].
  Order read for Consideration of Eighth and subsequent Resolutions.

  ENTERTAINMENTS DUTY.
  8. "That—

  (a) as from the ninth day of November, nineteen hundred and thirty-one, entertainments duty shall be charged at the following rates:—

  Where the payment for admission, excluding the amount of duty—

  Does not exceed 2½d.—One halfpenny. Exceeds 2½d. and does not exceed 5d.—One penny.

  Exceeds 5d. and does not exceed 7½d.—Three halfpence.

  Exceeds 7½d. and does not exceed 10d.—Two pence.

  Exceeds 10d. and does not exceed 1s. 0½d.—Two pence halfpenny.

  Exceeds 1s. Old and does not exceed 1s. 3d.—Three pence.

  Exceeds 1s. 3d.—Three pence for the first 1s. 3d. and one penny for every 5d. or part of 5d. over 1s. 3d.

  (b) entertainments duty shall not be charged on payments for admission to an entertainment if the Commissioners of Customs and Excise are satisfied that the entertainment is provided only for children, that no person is admitted other than children and persons in charge of children, and that the charge for admission for each person does not exceed two pence.

  And it is hereby declared that it is expedient in the public interest that this Resolution shall have statutory effect under the provisions of the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act, 1913."

INCOME TAX.

  HIGHER RATES OF TAX FOR 1930–31.
  9. "That—

  (a) section six of the Finance Act, 1931, which determines the higher rates of Income Tax for 1930–31, shall have effect as if each of the amounts specified in the second column of the Table contained in that section were increased by ten per cent.; and

  (b) such amendments shall be made in the Income Tax Acts as are consequential on the said increase."

  RELIEFS.
  10. "That—

  (a) the reliefs by way of deductions from tax for which provision is made by section forty of the Finance Act, 1927, and the reliefs in relation to life assurance
  1052
  and other matters provided by section thirty-two of the Income Tax Act, 1913, as amended by any subsequent enactment, shall be varied as Parliament may provide by any Bill of the present Session relating to Finance; and

  (b) such amendments shall be made in the Income Tax Acts as are consequential on any variations which may be made in the reliefs aforesaid."

  PROFITS ON CONVERSION OF GOVERNMENT SECURITIES.
  11. "That it is expedient to make provision as to the Income Tax payable in connection with the conversion of United Kingdom Government Securities owned by persons carrying on any trade which consists wholly or partly in dealing in securities."
  Eighth Resolution read a Second time. Mr. SPEAKER: Mr. Rhys Davies.
  Mr. MARCH: On a point of Order. I would like to ask whether there is a possibility of a Member discussing the whole question before any Amendments are moved in connection with this matter?
  Mr. SPEAKER: On the Report stage, Amendments must be moved before I put the Question, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution." When that Question is put from the Chair, hon. Members are at liberty to discuss the whole Motion.
  Mr. RHYS DAVIES: I beg to move, to leave out lines 5 and 6.
  It is rather a strange coincidence, after what has transpired this afternoon, that the House should be asked to give consideration to the question of an amusement duty. The Eighth Resolution proposed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer is now before us, and, if the House will bear with me, will try to make clear the intention of this Amendment, which stands in my name and in those of other Members sitting behind me. There has been in existence in this country since 1916 what has been known as an Entertainments Duty, a tax upon tickets of admission to places of amusement. That tax has been varied from time to time, but the House of Commons has always set its face against the imposition of this duty on the very lowest prices paid for entry into these places of entertainment; and it has been left to this Government, for the first time since 1916, to propose a

  1053
  duty on seats even at the price of 1d. That is to say, if a place of amusement is open, and tickets are to be sold at the price of 1d., or, indeed, ½d. or even ½d., a duty of ½d. will be imposed on such a ticket up to the figure of 2½d.
  The Chancellor of the Exchequer, in trying to balance his Budget and in endeavouring to bolster up the pound sterling, has gone to the breweries, the public houses, the tobacconists' shops, the petrol pumps, and everywhere where he thought there was money lying idle, and he has taxed them all; and then he thought he would take a look round the children, whose little money-boxes he has found, and he is going to rob the children's money-boxes by this taxation. As has already been said in this House, the imposition proposed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which I am now opposing, is about the meanest and most niggardly thing that was ever proposed by any Chancellor of the Exchequer, as I shall try to show.
  It will be noticed that, up to the 9th November of this year, all seats in a place of entertainment the price of admission to which does not exceed 6d. are exempt from taxation. Let me make this point clear, in order that the House may see exactly what cur Amendment means. No ticket securing admission to any place of amusement or entertainment—cinemas, theatres, dog racing, concerts, boxing bouts or anything else—is taxed at the moment if its price is less than 6d., and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is endeavouring to let us down gently by making it clear that the new tax on the lower-priced scats will not be imposed where the concert or entertainment is intended for children only. That, apparently, is the concession that he is to make. Then he proceeds to say that this tax, which he is now imposing for the first time on tickets up to the price of 6d., will not be imposed in the case of adults who are entering a show in charge of children. I should imagine that it would be fairly easy for all the adults in a village to be in charge of all the children, and so get their seats at a cheaper rate, and I feel sure that in some parts of the United Kingdom—I will not mention any territory in particular—all the people will be in charge of children at all the entertainments.
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  The hon. and gallant Gentleman who is in charge of the Debate this afternoon will probably be able to tell us how much of this tax imposed in respect of adult persons in charge of children will be expected from Scotland. I think that that is a very proper question. The Resolution says that, where art adult, is in charge of children, this, taxation in respect of the lower priced seats will not be imposed. I should like to know how far the hon. and gallant. Gentleman can guarantee that all the adults, in Scotland in particular, will not be in charge of infants and whether he can expect the same amount of revenue pro rata to the population in Scotland as he will get in England, and certainly in Wales. Apart from that, I think the House is entitled to know how much revenue is expected from this new impost up to 6d. I understand the total revenue from the Entertainment Duty runs to £7,000,000 or £8,000,000 per annum. Seats from ½d., 1d., 2d. and 2½d. will henceforth be charged with an impost of ½d. I have an impression that the trade itself is not very much enamoured of these proposals in respect of the lower priced seats. I understand that a deputation was appointed to meet the Treasury today to see whether they could not go hack to the straits quo in respect to starting prices at 6d. and not going below that sum.
  I do not remember speaking on any Budget proposals before and I may be pardoned if I put what I understand are the principles and canons of taxation and try to find out whether this new impost. harmonises with them. I understand the hon. and gallant Gentleman who is in charge of the Debate is very well versed in economies, political economy, political geography and all the rest of it. I feel sure he will be able to tell me whether I am right in saying that the canons of all taxation in civilised communities are classified in different ways as follows: There is direct and indirect taxation, there is a beneficial and an onerous tax, and there is proportional, regressive and progressive taxation. I am trying to find out under which category this ½d. tax falls. I understand it was Adam Smith, the father of all economists, who laid down these canons and I cannot find whether this tax is direct or indirect. Whether it is bene-

  1055
  ficial or not I cannot tell, but I am sure it will be onerous. This is undoubtedly another blow at the people who are unable to pay a very high price for seats at entertainments. I shall be able to show how unfair the tax is and how it weighs unduly proportionally on a percentage basis as against the poor and in favour of the rich. It seems to me to be a combination of both direct and indirect. It will certainly be beneficial to the State but very onerous to the poorest of the community, and I am certain that it is not proportionate. A tax of any kind must produce revenue, and I am wondering whether the bankers have had anything to do with asking the Treasury to impose this halfpenny tax. Imagine the Governor of the Bank of England and the President of the Federal Reserve Board coming down in a Rolls-Royce to Whitehall and demanding that the Treasury should put a tax of a halfpenny on a 2d. entertainment ticket. I should imagine that that may have happened and we are entitled to ask whether the banks have had any influence whatever in calling for the imposition of this tax.
  I am sorry I do not seem to make much impression on the hon. and gallant Gentleman but I will try once again. I will come a little nearer to him. We both belong to the Celtic race and we have a great deal of imagination. I think he will be able to see my point before I sit down. I shall be glad if he will follow me into a little arithmetic. One thing astonishes me in speeches of Members opposite talking about high finance, banking and investments. They look down upon us as if we knew nothing about it. I was in Berlin for a week when the German mark was 82,000,000 to the pound. I know a little about the, value of the pound sterling. I am in charge of a great deal of investment for my society and I know exactly how investments can deteriorate or appreciate. It is not right, therefore, that hon. Members, simply because they are better educated than we are, should assume that we do not understand anything at all about this balancing business, the value of the pound sterling and so forth. I want to show how disproportionate this new tax is. A 3d. seat will carry a charge of 33 per cent., so I understand from the arithmetic that I was taught at school. There was no charge at all on a 3d. ticket
  1056
  under the old scale. We all thought that the National Government would improve the situation, but this is a downward tendency in respect of these amusement taxes. When you come to the higher prices, the tax on a 6d. ticket is 23 per cent., and so on right up the scale. The higher the price of admission the lower the percentage of the tax. That, of course, is typical of Tory policy throughout in throwing the burden upon the poorest of the poor. It is very much easier for some men to pay 10 shillings for admission and 10 shillings tax than for others to pay 6d. and a penny. That is understood, at any rate by those who come from working-class homes.
  There is another point about this tax. It is not a tax on income but on expenditure. It means in effect that going to a cinema show is regarded as a luxury by right. hon. Gentlemen opposite. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is a Yorkshireman and his deputy is a Scotsman; I am wondering whether this is a combination of the attributes of Yorkshire and of Scotland. This tax was introduced during the War period and it has gone on until now. I suppose the greatest Empire in the world, the Empire upon which the sun never sets, and in which wages never rise, is going to be sustained by ½d. taxes on entrance to places of amusement. I do not know how the Treasury is going to distinguish between adults who are and who are not in charge of children. I do not remember anything so petty, so small, so mean as this new impost. I trust the hon. and gallant Gentleman will have an interview with the Chancellor before we close and will withdraw this very ridiculous proposition, because I cannot see how the revenue is going to gain very much from it. If you exclude all the children attending entertainments provided exclusively for children, and also all those adults who are in charge of children, I do not know how much revenue can possibly be gained thereby. We shall be obliged if the hon. and gallant Gentleman will enlighten the House as to the amount that he thinks will be available from this impost. I should like the hon. and gallant Gentleman and the Chancellor to be magnanimous enough to say that they have thought the matter over, that the people engaged in the business of providing

  1057
  entertainments are opposed to it and that, in view of all the circumstances, they will withdraw it. In any case, this is a blow at the children. I cannot conceive many places of amusement with fees for entrance very much under 6d., consequently I think we are right in pleading the cause of the children. The hon. and gallant Gentleman will secure the gratitude of many poor people if he will, before the day is out, declare that this part of the Budget, at any rate, is withdrawn.
  Mr. ARNOTT: I beg to second the Amendment.
  I look upon this as evidence of the same policy that has been embodied in one or two other Resolutions which I oppose. It is not only bad in itself but is one of a series of taxes and reductions in income levied upon certain sections of the community with the direct object of impoverishing them in the interest of national economy. I am not sure that my hon. Friend has realised the full implications of the Resolution, because he suggests that in Scotland, to which I originally belonged, and in Yorkshire, where I now reside, the tax will be evaded because all the adults will be in charge of children. Unfortunately the Chancellor of the Exchequer has looked after that point and the adult only escapes if the charge is 2d. If it is in excess of 2d. he has to pay the full charge and the tax as well, so that in the majority of cases, even in Yorkshire or in Scotland, the adult will not escape while he is in charge of children.
  This tax is, moreover, an attempt to do something which even the majority of these proposals do not do. We have heard a good deal about equal sacrifice. Equal sacrifice at the best is presented to us in the terms of equal proportionate increases. In this case even that rule is abandoned. You are not increasing existing taxes as far as concerns the part of the Resolution with which the Amendment deals. You are imposing entirely new taxes, so that it is not a case of adding 10 per cent. to something that already exists but of reaching certain people who hitherto have completely escaped and who are to be reached in various other ways. One can imagine that a person who can only afford to pay 2d. or 6d. is not likely to squander his money in riotous living. In these circumstances,
  1058
  it is intended to reach a class of people whom until now we had always considered to be completely outside the range of taxation, at least as far as the Chancellor of the Exchequer's views were concerned. I can remember him quite distinctly in days gone by laying down the dictum that there were some people in the country whose income was so low, whose standard of life was so little removed from absolute destitution that it was nothing less than a crime to impose any taxation upon them whatever. That was his philosophy in the days gone by. I do not know whether he has entirely abandoned that philosophy now. In those far off days he often concluded his speeches in exactly the same way as he concluded his speech on the Budget by quotations from a poem. In those days he did not quote Swinburne but he sometimes quoted Gerald Massey and William Blake. One of those quotations is a very familiar one and is an explanation of his attitude on this particular proposal. He used to say:
  "I will not cease from mental fight,
  Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
  Till we have built Jerusalem
  In England's green and pleasant land."
  I think that this is his latest attempt to establish Jerusalem in this pleasant land. He has taken great strides towards it in connection with the levies upon the unemployed and the taxation of other commodities, and he finally taxes the poor people who cannot afford more than 3d., 2d. or even 1d. for their entertainment. There is only one addition required in order to make this a perfect Budget, and that is, to take something from the old age pensioners, who, I understand, are all falling over each other to help the Chancellor in his need. This is a clear indication that, though in his peroration the Chancellor of the Exchequer told us that England yet will stand, he believes that England can only stand by depriving a great number of people of a great proportion of their incomes and then imposing a tax of this description. I say that advisedly, because I should have imagined that, having tried to deprive the poor people of a considerable proportion of their income, the Chancellor of the Exchequer ought to have encouraged people to seek recreation in order that they might be as cheerful as possible.

  1059
  I do not say that the picture palace provides the same class of entertainment as that which one can get at grand opera, but at any rate the picture palace may be a very satisfactory substitute for less satisfactory means of entertainment. In this case there is a uniform imposition on all poor people who desire to forget their sorrows in any way whatever, and I am very sorry, in those circumstances, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has forgotten, not merely his past practice—because I believe the Chancellor of the Exchequer was responsible for abolishing the tax on small-priced entertainments in days gone by—but has actually abandoned all his professions as well. I regret this very much, and I hope that the House will resist this and similar taxes, not merely on their merits or demerits, but because of the accumulative effect of the taxation. We have not only got double taxation but treble and even quadruple taxation, and the same people are paying all the time.
  Sir ALFRED BUTT: At a time when most of us think that this House should be occupied on much graver matters I do not propose to trespass upon the time of the House for more than a few minutes, but I rise to oppose the Amendment which has been moved. I would point out to the hon. Gentleman who moved the Amendment and painted such a pathetic picture of poor children being deprived of their entertainment unless they were able to pay an additional ½d., or were accompanied in every case by adults, that we do not know at the present moment that they are likely to be called upon to pay the tax at all. A very large proportion of the entertainments provided for children at that price are cinematograph entertainments, and I believe that the cinematograph entertainments are well able to make a charge inclusive of the very small amount of tax. The hon. Member, in proposing the Amendment, endeavoured to create class prejudice once more by suggesting that the tax was much more excessive on the lower stages than it is higher up the scale, but he forgot to remind the House that since 1927 visitors to entertainments where the seats were priced below 6d. have escaped altogether, quite unfairly, any contribution to the Entertainments Duty.
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  The entertainment industry as a whole, I feel quite certain, do not welcome this tax, and I believe that many theatrical undertakings and many theatres will be hardly hit by the additional expenditure that is to be placed upon their patrons, because there is no doubt that the spending power of the public must diminish. At the same time, I believe that the theatrical world are as ready as any other class of citizens to bear any sacrifices, and for that reason I do not propose to oppose the additional taxation.
  I am going to make an appeal to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury upon another matter. Until 1927 royalties in this country from plays and entertainments imported from abroad escaped all taxation. I think that we are all agreed that art is world-wide and has no nationality, and that. we have benefited in this country very much by foreign art, and we do not want in any way to exclude it, but I appeal to the Financial Secretary to consider the question of film renting. I believe that he will find that, consequent upon the Amendment of the Finance Act, 1927, the revenue now received from royalties on foreign plays is very considerable. I am informed—
  Mr. SPEAKER: It would not be in order on this Amendment to refer to the subject which the hon. Member has raised. It would come more suitably on the Motion "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution." That is the subject of the whole question of the tax.
  Sir A. BUTT: I will not pursue the subject in face of your Ruling, but I understood that this was for the purpose of obtaining additional revenue from entertainments, and in, those circumstances I thought that to refer to the fact—
  Mr. SPEAKER: When we come to the whole Resolution will be the time to raise that point and not on this Amendment, which is very definite.
  Sir A. BUTT: I am sorry, and I will not pursue my argument on this particular Amendment. I merely say that I hope the Financial Secretary will resist the Amendment to exempt entertainments where the admission is below 6d, from any taxation.
  Mr. MARCH: I asked you, Mr. Speaker, some time ago whether we should be able to speak upon the general question of the tax, but I think that I shall be able to get in a few words upon this Amendment which will satisfy my constituents. I am in favour of the Amendment. [Laughter.] Hon. Members may laugh but there are a large number of persons in my constituency who will not be able to pay this tax in conjunction with the other taxes which are going to be imposed upon them. There are a very large number of poor people in my constituency; many of them are casual workers receiving very low wages. The result is that they will not be able to go to the cinema as often as formerly. Perhaps hon. Members opposite may say that that is one of the sacrifices which they ought to make, but in my opinion the Treasury are not going to reap any benefit out of people staying away from the cinemas.
  By a very ingenious method the framers of this tax have proceeded in stages. There are twopenny entertainment charges for children at what is generally called matinees, and adults will be able to go with children, according to this proposition, in order to look after them. The matinee entertainments which are given to children in the East End are not suitable for parents at all because they are different from the entertainments given for the benefit of adults. Therefore, there will not be many adults attending those matinees. You will get the children, as you get them now, by the hundreds. It is proposed to go from 2½d. to 5d. You pass over the 4d. admission, which is very often the admission for adults. They will have to pay an extra penny. Then you go from 5d. to 7½d. The usual prices of admission are 2d., 4d. and 6d. There are, of course, higher prices, but of these I am not going to complain because they only affect those who can well afford to go to entertainments. The poor people cannot afford to pay any more than what has been charged for the lower priced seats. The result will be that these people will not be able to go to the cinema to pass away their time and so relieve their monotony as often as they have done previously.
  There was a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer used to say in this
  1062
  House that when the Treasury wanted money they went to the place where it was to be found. I presume that he has forgotten all about that now that he has joined the Tory ranks, and since the Tories are backing him and have been enabled to stand up in the House and wave their papers because of the glorified speech he made in this House in connection with this and other taxes. He has gone into the camp where they have always thought that the money should be obtained from the poorer classes of the community. We have always been taught that the best way to get money, if it is wanted for the Treasury and the upkeep of the nation, is to obtain it from those who have plenty. I oppose this tax, and I believe that the Treasury will not gain anything by it but will suffer more than if they had left it alone.
  5.0 p.m.
  Mr. LONGBOTTOM: My name is associated with the Amendment because I am convinced that, of all the new taxation which the. Chancellor of the Exchequer has proposed, the imposition of an additional tax on entertainment tickets under 6d. is the most miserable and the most parsimonious. The hon. Member for Balham and Tooting (Sir A. Butt) made two statements which are very interesting in view of the present discussion. I understand the hon. Member is to some extent associated with those who provide entertainment at the theatres and cinemas. He said that the Mover of the Amendment was speaking without the book, because the theatre and cinema proprietors had not yet decided whether this additional tax would be passed on to those who visited those places of entertainment. If there be any merit in that statement, my only hope is that the hon. Member is to some extent a prophet and that the people who control the theatres and cinemas will realise that to place this tax upon those who use the cheaper seats will be a real hardship. If the proprietors can bear the new imposition themselves they will prove to those who patronise their shows that they are not wanting all the profits that they are making out of the people who visit the entertainments.
  The second point made by the hon. Member was, that those who have paid for seats under 6d. had escaped the pay-

  1063
  meat of Entertainments Duty. If so, it is only because those who were responsible for the imposition of the Entertainments Duty realised that those who were compelled to sit in seats, many of which are miserable in the extreme, were the very people who owing to their lack of spending power, were incapable of paying any additional amount for their seats by way of Entertainments Duty. Ever since I have had associations with the Chancellor of the Exchequer I have always understood that he has deep regard for the poor. He has always taken the public platforms as a man who at all times would stand in his place in the House of Commons to defend the interests of the working classes. It was the right hon. Gentleman who, giving effect to that principle and policy, made it possible for the Entertainments Duty to be withdrawn from some of the cheaper seats. Now, we find him re-introducing the Entertainments Duty on the cheapest seats occupied by working class people who, assuming that they need to visit an entertainment, are compelled to sit in the cheapest seats.
  It may be true that hitherto that section of people have escaped the payment of the tax, but surely it is too late in the day, with the spending power of the workers diminished as it is, to use this opportunity to place upon these poor people this very great hardship if they wish to attend entertainments in the future. It is provided that for children's entertainments no tax shall be payable, and that will apply to those who accompany the children, in case the admission fee does not amount to more than 2d. There are many cinema entertainments provided specially for children in the way of Saturday afternoon matinees. The provision in question will give the children and those who accompany them some advantage. I wonder if the Chancellor of the Exchequer knows the development there has been in the home life of the people; a development which is most admirable and which we ought to encourage as much as possible. It is a common and pleasant thing to see the father and the mother, on Saturday evenings or on evenings during the week, taking their children to the cinemas. Contrast that with what happened some years ago, when the
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  children were left to roam the streets and to follow their own bent and desires. That is a step in the right direction. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, at one fell swoop, has made it impossible for those people of limited resources to follow that line in the years to come.
  If the Financial Secretary to the Treasury is a family man, by the grace of God he is not having to live under the conditions that apply to millions of people in this country. He must realise the small amount that the working classes have at their disposal to enable them to look after their children and to bring them up in the right way. I hope that he will go to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and say: "We have made a great mistake in interfering with this new development in the home life of the people. Let us do everything we can to encourage that family life." The hon. Member for Balham and Tooting spoke about people having hitherto escaped this tax. Does he know the village life of this country? Does he know that when the village football club has a match on a Saturday afternoon the price charged is 3d. for adults and 1d. for boys up to the age of 14? What is going to happen? Under this recommendation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer we are going to go to the little fellow who in the past has spent his Saturday penny in going to the village football match and seeing what he considers the finest football team in the world, and we are going to ask him to pay an extra halfpenny. This imposition is miserable in the extreme, and I urge the Financial Secretary to beg the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the sake of the home life of the people, to remove it. If he will do that, he will do something that will redound to the credit of every Member of this House.
  Mr. D. G. SOMERVILLE: While everyone has the utmost sympathy with the people who have a very small sum to spend on enjoyment, and whose only chance of enjoyment is to go to the cinema, one has to realise that £2,500,000 in a full year is a sum worthy of the attention of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in these times. While the lower-priced seats must be raised, I would suggest that the higher-priced seats should be raised still further. We

  1065
  have to realise that the majority of the profits made in the cinemas go to America and that very little British labour is employed in the cinemas. If we increase the tax on the higher-priced seats in the cinemas it might be possible to reduce the tax on the theatres. That would encourage the theatres and would encourage the employment of British theatre artistes, who to-day are having an extremely bad time. That would encourage employment in this country and reduce the amount of money that is sent out of this country. The profits on the showing of most of the films, which are to a great extent produced in America, are exacted for the benefit of America. The Chancellor of the Exchequer ought to take every possible means of increasing employment in this country, at a time when unemployment is increasing and, I am afraid, must continue to increase.
  Mr. McENTEE: This tax was imposed during War time by the late Mr. Bonar Law, as a temporary measure. At that time it was definitely stated that it was intended to be temporary. I am informed that the reason given by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on that occasion was that there were great numbers of foreigners in this country and that they ought to make some contribution to the taxation of the country. This was one of the means by which the Government sought to make them con- tribute. The present Chancellor of the Exchequer was one of the most vehement opponents of the introduction of the tax. I am also informed that the right lion. Member for Epping (Mr. Churchill), who himself has been a Chancellor of the Exchequer, was also opposed to any taxation on the amusements of the people. It is extraordinary how people when placed in different circumstances change their views, and it would be well if the Financial Secretary, who is now so well supported on the benches behind, would represent to his new right hon. Friend and quite recent bitter opponent—I mean politically—that in the past he opposed this tax on principle.
  Mr. HOLFORD KNIGHT: What is the principle?
  Mr. HAYCOCK: The hon. Member for Nottingham South (Mr. Knight) can change his principle.
  Mr. McENTEE: I quite agree. I am sorry that the hon. Member for South Nottingham (Mr. Knight) has put his question. It would not be in order for me to answer him, but I think he certainty has given much consideration to the question of principle; he must have made a study of it. Certainly the principles which he was advocating a few weeks ago have been forgotten and deserted.
  Mr. KNIGHT rose—
  Mr. J. JONES: Sit down. You have been looking for a job ever since you have been here.
  Mr. KNIGHT: In ordinary circumstances, I should call your attention, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, to such an impertinent observation, but considering the quarter from which it comes I make no complaint. I merely wish to ask the hon. Member for Walthamstow West (Mr. McEntee) to do me the justice to believe that I have not changed my principles, and in a friendly way to ask him to mention the principles to which he is referring.
  Mr. McENTEE: I did not make any reference to the hon. Member. He made an interjection and I was merely replying to it. He now asks to what principle I am referring; I will tell him how it strikes me. He and I in the past have always stood for the principle that there should be some equality of sacrifice in taxation. I still stand by that principle, and all I say is that it occurs to me that the hon. Member has forgotten it. No one can argue that there is any equality of sacrifice in the Entertainments Tax which we are now discussing. The hon. Member who spoke last admitted that there was no equality of sacrifice. That is at least one principle which I should like to discuss, but it would not be relevant to this particular Amendment.
  In regard to the tax itself, the hon. Member for Balham and Tooting (Sir A. Butt), said that it was quite possible that the children and adults who usually go to the cheaper seats in cinemas would not be called upon to pay the tax at all, that possibly the proprietors of cinemas would pay the tax themselves. That may be true. It may be quite true that certain cinemas which are prosperous may be able to meet the tax themselves, but it is also true that there are many cinemas which are owned by people who

  1067
  cannot afford to pay the tax themselves and who will be compelled to pass it on to those who, after all, it was meant to be imposed upon, the very poor people. This is one of an accumulation of taxes which are to be imposed upon poor people. They are to be taxed on their food, not directly but indirectly, on their beer, if they drink it—I hope they will not, I do not drink it myself, although I have no objection to anyone drinking beer if they desire to do so—and they are to be taxed on their tobacco if they smoke a, pipe, as I do regularly. And, in addition, if they indulge in any form of amusement they are to be taxed. I hope the Financial Secretary, who is not paying the slightest attention to what I am saying—
  The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the TREASURY (Major Elliot): Indeed I am, and I can repeat the speech of the hon. Member word for word. I was calling for a memorandum to confute the powerful arguments which the hon. Member is putting forward.
  Mr. McENTEE: If the hon. and gallant Member can repeat my speech I should have some assurance that he had heard it. I think it is very necessary to point out that this is a direct additional tax on the very poor and that it will not be borne by the people who own cinemas. If that had been in the mind of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, obviously, it would have been imposed on the people who own the cinemas and not on the people who occupy the seats. But why should the cinema owners bear this tax? They are hearing, we are told, their equal share of sacrifice, and to suggest that they should bear this additional tax, meant to be imposed upon the very poor, would not put their sacrifice more on an equality.
  There is one other point I desire to make, and I make it with the knowledge that in the poorer districts of the towns in the United Kingdom, including the town which has sent me to this House, the very poor people go into the cinemas, particularly in winter time, and stay there until the very last moment, paying the lowest price they possibly can because they cannot afford the higher priced seats, for the definite purpose of keeping warm. There are hundreds and thousands of people who find it cheaper to sit in the
  1068
  cinema and keep warm in the winter months during the frost and rain and snow because of the inadequacy of their clothing. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was associated with me in a movement which still professes—the movement does, not the Chancellor of the Exchequer—to represent these people, and I ask the Financial Secretary to see the Chancellor of the Exchequer again and remind him of his speeches and writings in the past, when he appeared to me to be concerned about the very poor, and ask him whether even now he cannot sacrifice the small sum of money which he expects to get from the poorest of the poor who go to the cinema.
  Major BRAITHWAITE: The hon. Member for Walthamstow West (Mr. McEntee) will forgive me if I do not follow him in his argument. I join with him and with most hon. Members in regretting that it is necessary to impose these additional burdens. I rise for the purpose of asking the Financial Secretary a question in connection with the season tickets which have been purchased by people in connection with the large football clubs throughout the country. I am associated with one which was once in the first division of football, but which is now struggling in the second division, and is not in a very happy state of affairs financially. Any serious inroad on our revenue in this way will react seriously on this particular club. There is no great source of profit in football, although I notice that some of the London clubs do much better than provincial clubs. We have a hard struggle to keep first class football before our public and it is not always possible to balance our accounts.
  Personally, I should like to see taxation of this sort taken away altogether, but I realise the serious financial position of the country and the fact that we shall all have to do our share in trying to pull national credit together. I do not believe that any of those who go to football matches will regret having to pay a little more if they feel that it is necessary in the public interest. A great many clubs sell a large number of season tickets. They are sold early in the season and are very helpful in paying summer wages. The ticket operate until next May. The question I want to ask is this: Is a football club to be called upon

  1069
  to pay in this financial year the additional tax upon that ticket? We cannot collect it from the man who has the ticket, he has already paid for it, and the club cannot bear the extra expense. I hope the Financial Secretary will give me an answer on this point, because it is a matter of importance to all football clubs.
  The Chancellor of the Exchequer is looking forward to the revenue that he will obtain from this Entertainments Duty. I should have thought that he would have applied his knowledge of taxation to the taxing of those who go abroad for holidays. Such holidays are a source of entertainment; people go abroad for entertainment, and if they can afford to neglect the many places where they could spend their holidays this country, it is not unfair to ask them to contribute a little towards the national exchequer by paying some sort of duty on visits to casinos and other places of amusement abroad. If the right hon. Gentleman would apply his ingenuity to the framing of a tax of that sort it would be supported by most Members of the House. Finally, as an alternative to going abroad, I would suggest that holiday makers would find my own constituency a likely place to visit.
  Mr. J. JONES: I am one of those who believe, with the late Lord Salisbury, a very great philosopher, that "People do not want politics. What they require is bread and circuses." Evidently, according to the new philosophy in politics, people do not want circuses; they do not want cinemas; they simply want to pay to get the Government out of its difficulties. Balance the Budget—I have listened for a week to discussions upon that subject. I have heard about the flight from the pound. As far as I am concerned the pound has been flying from me ever since I was born, and I have not caught up with it yet. On any Friday night I am as far away from the pound as I was the previous Friday. An hon. Gentleman opposite spoke about the woes of the foreign producers who come into this country to provide entertainment. He knows full well that he is one of the persons most responsible for bringing these foreigners into this country. I would like to see him prepare a Budget to tax himself for bringing foreign singers and actors into the
  1070
  country. He has not proposed such a thing up to now.
  Sir A. BUTT: What I said precisely was that art was world-wide and that plays and entertainments imported from abroad should be taxed, and I included royalties on films.
  Mr. JONES: I withdraw my statement quite frankly, because I know quite well that the hon. Gentleman has his eggs in both baskets. I know that his interests are not national but international, and that what he loses on the swings he gains on the roundabouts every time of asking. He is not a national theatre proprietor but an international theatre proprietor.
  Sir A. BUTT: I am extremely sorry to interrupt the hon. Member again, but his statement is absolutely untrue. I never had one penny of interest in a theatre outside the United Kingdom.
  Mr. JONES: If I have made a mistake, I withdraw it at once. I am only taking the professional Press for it. It states that certain people in this country are organising international combines in the matter of entertainments.
  Sir A. BUTT: The "Daily Herald."
  Mr. JONES: Not the "Daily Herald." I read the "Era." I am speaking here for the common and garden people of this country, the people who have to go to the ordinary cinema, particularly in times like this, when trade is bad and we have a large number of people out of employment. The Government say to the unemployed workman, who has very little to spend and has to look at every penny before he can spend it, "If you now go to a cinema you must pay a tax of 20 per cent. on your tickets." What is he going to do? He cannot go to the public house. A lot of my comrades are glad of that, I know. The price of beer has gone up to such an extent that he cannot afford to drink beer now. The only alternative is the cheapest seat in a cinema. Then he has to pay proportionately the same increase in taxation as he would have to pay upon a pint of beer. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is going to gain I do not know how many thousands of pounds. I do not care whether it is millions or thousands. What he loses or gains in the matter of finance is nothing compared with what he will lose in the sense of the satisfaction of the people.

  1071
  We in the, East End run Sunday evening entertainments. Some of us take our wives and children to a cinema. I do not, for I am very seldom at home on Sundays. I am on the missionary platform on those occasions, carrying the gospel to foreign parts, and I am sorry that I have not converted some of my old-time colleagues, who have forgotten 30 and 40 years ago. What is the position of a man with a wife and a few childern, who takes them on Sunday evenings to the entertainments provided in the locality and has to pay a halfpenny or a penny more for each seat in addition to what he has already to pay on tobacco and beer? I know that beer is not a welcome subject to some Members of this House, but beer, after all, is a substantial addition to the glories of the British Empire. Many a Tory Government would not have existed if it had not been for "Beer, beer, beer." We ask the Government to realise that this tax is a stomach tax in reality. It is circumscribing the opportunity of the ordinary people to enjoy life. They have very little enjoyment.
  The Government are telling the local authorities that they have to cut down all their expenditure. One of the things we do in the East End is to provide bands in the parks and various other entertainments. According to the latest information we have received we must cut all that down in the interests of economy. What it amounts to is that the people who can least afford to make the sacrifice are called upon to make the greatest sacrifice. There is no equality of sacrifice. The Government call upon a man with a wife and children, a man who is lucky if he works three days a week at the docks, to pay 1s. more a week for the entertainment of his wife and children. That is not equality of sacrifice compared with the case of the man getting £5 or £6 a week who is able to please himself what kinds of seats he takes. The hon. Gentleman who interrupted me just now may know more about the West End of London and about theatrical enterprises than I know, because I do not know anything, but I do know that the cinema has provided a happy hunting ground for the people who have money. I remember the first cinema established in my division. It was a little shop which would not hold more than 50
  1072
  people. Now a great cinema costing many thousands of pounds is on the same site. All over our borough we have these huge establishments. I do not know who controls them, but I have a slight idea that they are not Britishers. A large number of them are cosmopolitan patriots who sing "God save the King" in broken English. A large number of them are the people who now say "Keep out American films." When you inquire you discover that they are interested in America as much as they are in Great Britain; they have eggs in both baskets.
  I hope that the Chancellor in his calmer moments, when he gets back to his old philosophy, will relieve the poor of this taxation, and that he will find some other means of balancing the Budget. The people I represent have never been able to balance their budget. On the 31st December they are where they were on 1st January—a year in pawn. It is ridiculous that there should be this kind of taxation on the theory of equality of sacrifice. There is no equality in the Budget. The people who can afford it are escaping. I did not speak yesterday on the Beer Duty. I was not allowed to do so because I am an expert on beer. Some of my friends think that I live on it. They cannot live without it. The Government may ask the workers to carry the baby but they cannot carry it for ever. This particular tax is about the meanest tax in the Budget. It goes down to the very bottom of the poverty problem, so far as the great masses of the people are concerned. The poorest are paying the biggest portion of the tax.
  All through the Budget the same principle rules. A penny a pint on beer. What are the champagne drinkers going to pay, and those who drink fancy drinks, cocktails? Some of them ought to have their tales told for them. Those people can get away. The only tax for them is the Income Tax, and they dodge that. They grumble about the Death Duties, but they have not to pay them until they are dead. Working people pay all their duties when alive. They have to pay the duties before they get the stuff. We are entitled to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer to reconsider the whole position. Instead of increasing the taxes on the poor he should ask the other people who are so patriotic that they want to see the nation saved and the Budget

  1073
  balanced. Let the right hon. Gentleman give the worker a chance to balance his budget. As a trade union official I have to meet many bodies of employers. My union has 130 different sections of people in it. We are being asked once again to meet the employers in order to discuss the possibility of further wage reductions. Wages have been reduced since 1920 up to now—
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER (Captain Bourne): The hon. Gentleman is getting rather wide of the Entertainments Duty.
  Mr. JONES: Yes, but I am entertaining you, Sir, and am not asking for any tax upon it. My argument is that in addition to the taxes of the Budget these reductions in wages are taxes also. We are expected to meet higher taxation on a lower income. The poorest of the poor, in addition to suffering a reduction of in- come, are suffering an increase of taxation. There are others who seem to think that they are the only people who pay, but I believe, with John Ruskin, that the working-class is the nation, and that all other classes live upon it. This tax is the worst tax of all upon the working-class. These entertainments are not luxuries. They are necessities if you want to keep the people in a civilised condition. The Government propose to put this tax on the people in districts like mine, who have very few opportunities of seeing the better things of life. These entertainments lift them up to a higher standard, but by this proposal you are asking them to pay in greater proportion than those who are better able to afford it.
  Mr. LOVAT-FRASER: I rise to ask the Financial Secretary two questions. Can he say how much of the money taken at cinemas goes to the United States, and if he does not know the exact amount will he agree that many millions in that way go across the Atlantic? Secondly, will he say whether any portion of the tax will fall indirectly on America?
  Mr. TOOLE: Before those questions were put the argument had been used on the other side about money going to America from cinemas. There is a great deal of truth in it, but you are not going to stop that process by taxing the poor people in this country. I regard this as purely an industrial ques-
  1074
  tion. This is a tax which immediately and in a large degree affects working men and women in this country and thinking of it merely in terms of a halfpenny will not meet the situation. A halfpenny or a penny or twopence or threepence a week may be vital in a working-class home. I have seen huge strikes in the Manchester district for 6d. or a 1s. per week advance in wages. If this tax is increased to the poorest section of the people it is equivalent to a reduction of their wages. It is an interference with their spending power.
  There is a tendency in the House of Commons and other places to regard London as the centre of the cinema industry, but, looking at London exclusively, one gets a false impression of that industry. In the centre of London there are palatial cinemas, almost luxuriously furnished. If a king 100 years ago had lived in a palace such as the picture house in Leicester Square, people would have come hundreds of miles to look at it. Those cinemas are patronised by people who can well afford to pay the tax. Some time ago I tried to get into a cinema in the Strand, and I found that the seats were priced at 8s. 6d. each. I did not pay that price, but anybody who can afford to pay it can afford to pay a substantial tax. It must not be forgotten, however, that over 3,000 out of 3,750 cinemas are in the industrial districts and that most of these are owned not by syndicates but by private individuals. In many cases the private individual who owns a cinema has a great struggle to make it pay. I believe these proprietors are going to endeavour to meet some part of the additional tax themselves, but it will be impossible to meet the 1½d. tax, which will have to be passed on to the picture-going community.
  I remember how valuable a penny was in my young days. That was before there were cinemas and the only entertainment in which some worthy people indulged then was their pint in the evening, and reading the newspaper. There were very few open spaces or parks, and when I was a boy I remember how about half-past nine o'clock I used to be called in from the street and instructed by my father to go to the local public house. He gave me one

  1075
  penny and told me; "Go down to the public house, bring me a pint of beer, ask the man for a clay pipe and to lend you the evening newspaper and what is the time." The utility of a penny impressed itself upon me then and to-day one penny is as much to people in these poor districts as a pound is to many other people.
  We ought to remember what the cinema has done for the poor. Very few indecent films are shown in the poor districts. If you want such films you have to go to London where they are exhibited to people who can afford to pay fancy prices, but the poor people of the industrial districts do not go to London. Generally speaking the cinema has been a great educational factor among the working-class community. It has brought foreign scenes to the slums. Children who had never seen the sea have been able, by means of the cinema, to realise what the sea is like. It has been educative in the highest sense of the term. It has brought forest scenes and pictures of all kinds of animals before children who formerly could only read about them.
  Why should hon. Members opposite tell us that it was necessary to impose this tax on the very poor? It was not necessary at all. This Budget has been as illconsidered, as hasty and as panicky as the removal of the last Government. The motor industry I know expected a 6d. or 8d. tax on petrol. The argument was that as petrol was 4s. 6d. a gallon during the War and 3s. 6d. a gallon just after the War, and had now fallen to 1s. 3d. a gallon, there was room for an additional tax of 6d. or 8d. But to my astonishment the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the man who is regarded in Lancashire and Yorkshire as the patron saint of the cheap cinema, because he was the first to take the tax off the low-priced seats, has gone to the poorest section of the population to fleece them for 1½d. which they can ill-afford.
  I would put another point of view to the Financial Secretary. While many interested in the industry and owning the cheaper theatres may be willing to pay 1d. on the 2½d., I want him to consider that by line 6 of the Resolution you are going to cause chaos and confusion not only in the industry but among the
  1076
  general public. What you are doing there is fiddling with a, ½d. Cinemas in industrial districts usually run two shows a night, one concluding at twenty past eight and the other beginning at twenty minutes to nine. If this tax is left at 1½d. on 6d.—
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: I must point out to the hon. Member that the matter with which he is now dealing is the subject of another Amendment dealing with the tax of 1½d. At the moment we are on the question of the taxes of ½d. and 1d.
  Major ELLIOT: I think that the discussion so far has been more or less a general discussion covering the various points raised by the Amendments, and I had hoped that it would be convenient to hon. Members to take a general discussion of the subject on this Amendment and to deal more specifically with the others when they arose. The discussion has surveyed a very wide field, covering almost all the points which could be raised either by this Amendment or the others.
  Mr. W. R. SMITH: May I point out that in the early stages of the Debate Mr. Speaker ruled against a wide discussion taking place on this Amendment, and pointed out that certain arguments which hon. Members wished to use could only be brought forward when the discussion on this Amendment was closed.
  Major ELLIOT: I do not wish in any way to suggest any limitation of the Debate. I am merely pointing out that the Debate has ranged a little wider than the original Ruling of Mr. Speaker indicated.
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: I had no indication from Mr. Speaker when he left the Chair that he was allowing a wider discussion on this Amendment than its actual terms require. Of course I am to some extent in the hands of the House, but I must point out that I do not see present the hon. Members in whose names the next Amendments stand, and if this discussion is allowed to include those Amendments then they can only be moved formally.
  Mr. MARCH: May I say that I asked Mr. Speaker before this Amendment was moved whether I could discuss the whole subject on this proposition and he said

  1077
  "No." He said that the general subject could only be dealt with when the Resolution as a whole was put, and therefore that I was limited to the first Amendment.
  Mr, DEPUTY-SPEAKER: I was not present when Mr. Speaker gave that Ruling, but in the circumstances I think it would be better to confine ourselves to the Amendment which is now before the House and not to trespass upon that which comes next.
  Mr. TOOLE: I take it then that I cannot discuss the question of the 1½d. on 6d.?
  Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: That is so.
  Mr. TOOLE: Then I address myself to the question of the halfpenny. You are charging one halfpenny on 2½d. That is easy to collect, but if the Chancellor had made it ½d. on 3d. that would have been very difficult to collect. I do not enter into any discussion now about the 1½d. on 6d., that having been forbidden, but I must point out to the Financial Secretary that when he comes to deal with that point he will be faced with the same difficulty—that it is practically impossible to collect it. If you had put the ½d. on 3d. instead of 2½d. the cinema owners would have found it physically impossible to get the people into the second house at the theatre without the utmost confusion. I put it to the Financial Secreary that the Treasury would not miss it if they dropped one halfpenny in this tax. I think it would mean about £50,000, and they could afford to allow that for the sake of the efficiency in getting the people into and out of the theatres. Taxation is now being imposed in other directions, upon the middle-class sections as well as others, and those who have been paying 1s. 3d. and 1s. 6d. for seats will be driven to 6d. seats. In consequence the Treasury might get even more from this tax if they did away with the halfpenny and made confusion less confounded.
  6.0 p.m.
  I suppose it is almost useless to make an appeal because the mind of the Treasury has been made up on the general question but I would point out that the cinema is practically the only entertainment which poor people have. The cinema and the football match are
  1078
  their only entertainments. I wonder how many hon. Members know how the poor enjoy themselves. That is the trouble in this place ever since I have been here, that people do not understand how the poor live—they have not lived among them, they have not lived their lives—but when you do you recognise the great joy with which small boys go to a football match in a big city or a local village, where they have special arrangements for them. I have been connected with football, both as a player and am associated with a team that used to do well, for many years, and nothing gives us greater delight and joy in the industrial districts than to see what we term the "penny rush" filling up on Saturday afternoons. The "penny rush" is an enclosure specially reserved for small boys, and we know very well that unless we can develop the small boy "gate" we are not going to have a "gate" when they grow up to be men, so we make special arrangements for them and charge a penny. That is the "penny rush." With a halfpenny on them, you are charging a halfpenny on the children's Saturday penny.
  It is a common practice in our large working class centres, when dad comes home on Saturday with his wages—and he will be coming home with a little bit less after the present Government have had their way with him—for the children to jump on to his knee, if he is a decent father, as he was in my own case, when he has a week's hard earned wage, for the children to say, "Daddy, what about my Saturday penny?" He gives them the pennies, as much as he can afford, and Billy and Tommy go to the football match; and this Government, through the Chancellor of the Exchequer, bred among the poor, reared by the poor, put where he is by the poor, has so much forgotten his responsibilities as to tax, not only the poor, but the very poorest of the poor.
  That is the truth, and nobody can deny it. That is what astonishes me in these Debates this week. I can forgive anything; I can forgive a man changing his principles; I can understand the difficulties facing the Government and those that faced the last Government; I can understand the haste in the crisis that compelled them to take a certain line of

  1079
  action, but I can never understand, and never will forget, as long as I live, two men in this House—and it is time that the gloves were off in this business and that we said something about it—one of them taxing the poorest of the poor, from whom he came and among whom he was born and bred, and the other bringing himself to the microphone to tell the unemployed that when he took 10 per cent. from their wages they would be better off. That statement showed as little understanding of working class conditions as does the Chancellor of the Exchequer's tax on entertainments, because whatever the Board of Trade figure may say about the rise or fall in the cost of living, whatever those gentlemen who are civil servants and who are paid to say it may tell us on a graph, the fact is that when the cost of living figure falls there is something that happens between the point of production and the kitchen table. Somebody gets it. It is because of these things, and because of the hardships that the people would have to bear, that I am opposed to this tax and am delighted to support the Amendment.
  Sir BEN TURNER: I wish to support the Amendment in the interests of the very large number of people in the unemployed and semi-employed districts. I come from a, district that has been as hard hit through unemployment as any part of Great Britain. Some little joy needs to be put into the lives of these people who are partly employed or totally unemployed, and this tax will be another barrier against part of the enjoyment that these people occasionally get. In the district that I come from nearly 40 per cent. of the people are unemployed or semi-employed, and one of the joys that the people have on a Monday is to go to a cheap entertainment at the cinema, at a cheap price arranged for them. This is going to be an additional tax on that cheap price in those cinemas, and I do not see where the equality of sacrifice comes in in putting an additional burden upon that class of people.
  On a Saturday afternoon a very large number of children hope to get to the cinema, but I am afraid that if this halfpenny is put on, many parents will be prevented from letting their children have the entertainment. Then again on
  1080
  a Monday and a Thursday in certain industrial towns provision is made for special cheap entertainments for old age pensioners. They can go in at a cheaper rate than on ordinary days, and this very halfpenny is going to be another barrier against some of them having that little enjoyment that elderly folk are entitled to before they pass away from this earth. I do not see any equality of sacrifice in this proposition. Beer, entertainments, tobacco, are three of the essential things for a bit of human pleasure among the poorest of the poor. I am a teetotaler and can speak with frankness when I say that thousands and thousands of persons would feel a loss in life if they were deprived of their gill or pint of beer.
  I come from a working-class family; I am of the working class myself. The greatest joy of my life in my poorer days, when my father and mother lived with me, was to be able to provide a few coppers for my father to go out on Saturday and Sunday to have his pint of beer and his chat with his pals and his colleagues in the public-house. It was not a crime or a sin. I do not need it, I do not require it, I do not desire it, but I know of thousands of decent folk who do, and equality of sacrifice is not coming along to that class of the population. I come from the county of Yorkshire, where the employers have imposed reductions of wages amounting to 21 per cent. in the past 18 months, and many of those persons, because of that reduction of wages, have not been able to have this little enjoyment that comes from the cinema arid similar entertainments. This is going to be an additional burden to them. They have been sacrificed on the altar of low wages, and they are to be sacrificed now on the altar of extra taxes that are absolutely out of proportion if the phrase "equality of sacrifice" means anything at all.
  Mention has been made by the hon. and gallant Member for Buckrose (Major Braithwaite) of the football question, and I agree with him. I happen to be a non-football player, and I do not understand football, but I go and shout with the rest of them, as I did on Saturday afternoon, when our own team won, because that is the time when you can shout with joy. [Interruption.] Yes, Batley, one of the best teams in Great Britain! What happens on Saturday afternoons? We have, just outside the football

  1081
  grounds, a number of people who cannot raise the contribution to go in at the beginning at the full price, and you see them waiting around until half-time comes along, when a cheaper price is allowed for them. We shall have another amount put on to the tax there. They were going to lower the price of entry last week but one, when the whisper went round that some taxes were going about. They were going to allow it because of our unemployment crisis and suffering, and to give them a natural local pride in their own football team, but the directors have been compelled to reconsider things, and in place of lowering the price, they may have to raise it to meet the extra tax.
  It seems to me that this proposition on the part of—I am going to say quite frankly—my dear old friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, because even if certain persons run off the rails, as I think both he and the Prime Minister have done, I am not going to forget my friendships of the past, even though I dislike the present proposition; but I want to appeal to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister and those who understand working-class life not to add these extra burdens to the bit of enjoyment that people are entitled to have, but to spread the burden where it can best be borne. Take your beer. Why not tax cocktails 2d. per cocktail? It would stop a very bad habit. [Interruption.] The cocktail habit is a very bad habit; it will he the ruin not alone of the digestion but of the morals of folk, and a tax there would be more prudent and proper than a tax on beer. All this is part of the whole picture of taxation, placing the burden more heavily on the working folk, and I therefore support the Amendment.
  Mrs. MANNING: I rise to speak on this Amendment because of its effect upon working-class life in the slum areas. Of all the mean taxes that have been outlined by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, this is perhaps the meanest and the smallest. It is small-minded in a man who knows what the life of a working-class mother in an overcrowded slum district is on holidays and Saturdays, when she has all her children at home and not under the care of the teacher, who is the mother's best friend in this country, although the teacher is
  1082
  going to be cut as if she were not a loyal and useful person in the community. The life of a working-class mother in a poor home is extremely difficult on Saturday, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer seems to think he has done his whole duty by excluding children's entertainments from the list of entertainments which will be subject to this tax.
  As a matter of fact, children go just as often to the cinema during an open entertainment as they do to a children's entertainment, and if they are not to go—I do not think there are many who will be able to afford to go under the altered conditions in working-class homes—because they cannot afford to pay this extra tax, they have either to sit in a little stuffy dwelling with their overworked mother or to go into the street to play and be out of her way. There they are under the nose of the traffic, or in the gutter, or providing some other kind of entertainment for themselves, which certainly is not going to be in their interests. I have not in the past particularly supported the ordinary cinema entertainments as being suitable for children—I think very often they are unsuitable—but I am sure that a cinema on a wet winter afternoon is an infinitely better place for a child than either the dirty wet streets, with all their dangers, or the stuffy, slummy homes in which so many of these poor children have to be reared.
  It is about the meanest of all the taxes which the Chancellor has imposed, especially at a time like this, when the lot of the children, as far as the discomfort in their homes and their hunger and their poor clothing are concerned, is so bad. To hit at these poor little kids when they are being hit at through their stomachs, and starved in education, and when the new schools that were being built under the reorganisation of education are to be stopped down, is another cut on the children. We are talking about double and treble cuts in this House, but the children of this nation have to pay time and time again for the disgraceful behaviour of their elders during the last 25 years. I never knew a House or a Government which so carried out the Mosaic law of visiting the sins of the parents on the children as the present Government have done. For the War, for the peace, these children are not responsible, but the Government

  1083
  intend to make then pay by starving them, by cutting off their educational facilities, and now by making it more difficult for them to get their little tiny bit of pleasure, which at least will give them comfort and warmth when out of school. It is the meanest of all the taxes which a mean Chancellor has put on the children of this nation.
  As far as football is concerned, unfortunately we have not got nearly as many playing fields in this country as we should like to have, so that boys can get a football at the end of their own toes. That is what they would like to do better than anything else, but if they cannot get a football at the end of their toes, it gives them immense pleasure to watch a football match. The hon. Member for South Salford (Mr. Toole) spoke about the "penny rush" outside a football match at Manchester. Imagine taxing a little boy who wants to look at a football match! I really think there must have been some imp of disagreeable malice on the shoulders of the Chancellor of the Exchequer when he conceived this increase. That imp sits on his shoulders very often, but there must have been one on each shoulder when he designed this wretched, mean and despicable tax on the poor children. The teachers of the country have tried to give the children a love of sport, and they have done it in their own time. The work of the teachers does not conclude at 4.30 and begin at 9, or run for only five days a week. They spend a great deal of their own time trying to inculcate the spirit of sport in their boys and girls. A boy who cannot get a football on the end of his toes as much as he likes, gets immense pleasure in watching rival teams. To tax a thing like that is particularly mean and contemptible.
  There are a lot of other things on which I should like to see money saved. I should like to wipe out the Economy Bill altogether, because I realise how fantastic the whole of this legislation is, but we have an iron Chancellor who will not listen to any of our pleadings. Perhaps, however, he will listen to the fact that there are boys and girls who, during this coming winter, are to be extremely hard hit, and that their mothers will be worse hit, because the mothers of the working class will take much more than
  1084
  the 10 per cent. of the cut upon their own shoulders. The mothers will suffer most. In the distribution of the cut in working-class homes, the mother will go much shorter of food and clothes than anyone else, and she will have to be burdened also with her little family on Saturday afternoons because the Chancellor wants a halfpenny tax from their children. I utter my protest, but I do not suppose it will be much use. Perhaps the Financial Secretary is a little more kind-hearted.
  Major ELLIOT indicated dissent.
  Mrs. MANNING: What a lot we have on the opposite benches! I always thought that the hon. and gallant Gentleman was a kind-hearted man. I am sorry that I have been mistaken. I thought, perhaps, that he would add a little plea to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to remember these overworked mothers, and the boys and girls who want a little entertainment on Saturday afternoons.
  Mr. DIXEY: I listened to the plea of the hon. Member for East Islington (Mrs. Manning) with great sympathy, because no respectable, ordinary person looks upon this tax with other than feelings of great disgust. It is a bad thing for us to tax the children who properly like to be entertained. I would remind hon. Members opposite, however, that the responsibility is not that of hon. Members on this side of the House. We never asked for this tax. A large number of Members look upon this as a panic Budget, framed entirely by an incompetent Front Benches of the party opposite. [Interruption.] We are quite frank about it, and the gloves must be off. An attack has been made on the Chancellor of the Exchequer by the hon. Member for South Salford (Mr. Toole), and it is only right that we on this side should reply. What is the reason we are here debating this tax?
  Mr. MILLS: God only knows!
  Mr. DIXEY: We are discussing this tax because the hon. Gentleman's Government, having been in office for two years, reduced the financial position of the country to the state that it is in at present. When they were actually confronted with a situation unparalleled in the economic life of this country, they

  1085
  called midnight meetings, and right hon. Gentlemen who belong to the Labour party came back from playing golf, and from distant parts, to do what? To frame a supplementary Budget and to bring in an Economy Bill. That party admitted that £56,000,000 of economies were necessary. Undoubtedly their approval had to be obtained by their own Chancellor of the Exchequer, a gentleman whose name is a household word in that party, who had been in office as their only Chancellor with the unanimous support of the party. He is their own Chancellor, a man bred among the working class and thrown up by the Socialist party to get justice in the world—not a friend of mine or of hon. Members on this side of the House; he is the gentleman whom we are called upon at this moment to support because there is a national emergency. I, for my part, want to make my position clear. I deprecate most of these taxes. I think that they are entirely unnecessary. Had we had a Chancellor who was a Protectionist, a large portion of these new taxes would not have been imposed. As far as we are concerned, we have no responsibility for voting for these taxes, and only do so because there is a national emergency and because we know we cannot put into operation what we think would be the only successful way of dealing with the situation. That is why aye grudge giving our support to these taxes.
  Mr. MILLS: Towards midnight last night we were endeavouring to get the Minister of Transport to alter the decision to save £7,500,000 by throwing on to the local authorities the burden of the upkeep of roads. We got very little change, because the Minister was without a brief. It was not his fault, so we could only make our protest and await the Estimates. To-day we are asked to support an addition to the Entertainments Duty which the Chancellor said will bring in £2,500,000. This Amendment provides that the tax shall not be charged if the Commissioners of Customs and Excise are satisfied that the entertainment is provided only for children. Other speakers in the Debate have given the experience of their areas. The hon. Member for East Islington (Mrs. Manning) spoke with a lifelong experience as a school teacher. I speak as one who,
  1086
  since the days of playing, have done my best to help the children to inculcate a sporting spirit. Every Saturday for years, to my knowledge, teachers and men and women belonging to the educational staffs of London, have given their time and organising ability to this end. For a small sum the boys who are not picked to play are able to attend the various matches that are held all over London. I commend that to the Financial Secretary as a reason to be put before the Chancellor why the Amendment should be accepted.
  The money involved is a very small proportion of the £2,500,000. The additional tax will be a tremendous handicap to those who are endeavouring to run sports and entertainments for the children, and is therefore anti-social in its character. The hon. and gallant Member for Buckrose (Major Braithwaite), a director of the Leeds United Football Club, dealt with the hardships of football clubs. In the Dartford division we have three amateur clubs, one of them a famous club which has finished in the final of the Amateur Cup—Erith and Belvedere. The Erith and Belvedere, Bexley Heath and Dartford clubs are trying to provide a form of entertainment during the big industrial depression in an area which was fifth in the list of necessitous areas in all Britain. Dartford is a devastated area of commerce and employment, and it will suffer the effects of every economy that the Economy Committee put forward. That Committee's report has been flung at us as the cause of the crisis, and has led to one of the biggest tragedies in the Labour movement, causing us to be in opposition to men with whom we have lived and worked practically all our lives. The net sum of it all must be that whether it be in education, on the Road Fund or in any other direction, the expense will have to be met out of local rates instead of made a national burden and placed on the taxpayers.
  Surely there are alternative ways in which the Chancellor could raise £2,500,000. What happened in Germany this year? A £5 holiday tax was placed on every family leaving Germany for their holidays, because of the terrible position in the economic life of Germany. If people are well enough off to be able to afford to leave their country and to spend their money in another country—
  Mr. SPEAKER: That has nothing to do with the Amendment before the House; we are dealing with the Entertainments Duty.
  Mr. MILLS: I can only say in extenuation that the discussion has gone over a wide range. We shall fight for the principle in this Amendment right through, because it is a violation of the spirit of equality of sacrifice which has been so widely advertised by Government spokesmen in every cinema—a shameful exploitation of their power.
  Major ELLIOT: We have now had a full discussion of the Amendment which deals with the incidence of the lower level of the tax, and I do not complain of that, because it is right that this tax should be fully considered, and certainly there is great substance in the case which has been made out this afternoon. Why put a tax upon what is, after all, if it be a luxury, a small luxury; if it be a privilege is a tiny privilege? Why should we not remit this tax altogether or, if not, remit a substantial portion of it? The argument was also brought forward that the suggested remission would not represent a substantial portion of the whole amount which the Chancellor expects to obtain from the tax. There are other Amendments on the Paper to which it would be out of order for me to do more than refer in passing, and on which I may say a word later. At present I can only say that the sum total of the taxes which the Chancellor of the Exchequer expects to obtain this year is £40,500,000, and he does not expect to obtain more than £1,000,000 from this tax.
  Mr. MILLS: £2,500,000 in a full year.
  Major ELLIOT: But then he expects to get £81,500,000 from all the taxes in a full year. I am speaking of the present year, and I ask whether it is unreasonable to obtain £1,000,000 from entertainments out of a total of £40,500,000? It is the necessity of raising revenue, and only the necessity of raising revenue, which has compelled the Chancellor of the Exchequer to lay these proposals before the House. They are not unreasonable proposals. They amount to 1d. in the 6d. The hon. Member for Westhoughton (Mr. Rhys Davies) said that according to his arithmetic it is a very awkward form of taxation. I do
  1088
  not know that it is. If you have to pay 6d. the Chancellor takes 1d., and if you pay 1s. he takes 1d. out of each 6d. I do not know that that is unreasonable, or that it justifies all the elaborate arithmetic which the hon. Member submitted to the House. It is simple, it is easy to understand, and if it be obnoxious, it is obnoxious only in the sense that all taxation is obnoxious.
  A further point brought forward was that certain of the proposals would be unworkable. The hon. Member for South Salford (Mr. Toole) treated us to a speech of great energy. If he charged down the football field with as much energy as he charges his opponents across the Floor of the House, I have no doubt his onslaughts were as much feared in those circles as they are undoubtedly dangerous to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. He said, arguing with great skill, that although he was discussing this ½d., it was not this ½d. he was talking of but another ½d., which it would be out of order to discuss now. By that cannon off the halfpenny, he argued that 6½d. would be an inconvenient tax, and that it would be necessary in rush conditions to think of some other method of dealing with these problems. Those are practical problems to which, no doubt, those of us who are examining these proposals will have to give our closest attention; but the general argument brought forward, and the particular accusations advanced against the tax, have not been able to shake the decision of the Government that this is an Amendment which they do not find it possible to accept.
  It is possible for me, however, to reassure one or two hon. Members as to the effects of this tax in its various aspects. The hon. and gallant Member for the Buckrose division of Yorkshire (Major Braithwaite), speaking for a great football club, asked what was the position of those who had taken season tickets. He said the club sold season tickets in the summer, and that it would be awkward for them if they found taxation laid upon those tickets now. The hon. Member for Dartford (Mr. Mills) supported that view. I can reassure them. Season tickets which have been paid for before this tax becomes operative will not be subject to the new tax. That will save confusion in the minds of the

  1089
  clubs. The hon. Member for West-houghton, while remarking that the trade was not enamoured of the tax—no trade is enamoured of any tax—said that it would be unworkable because of the concession to the effect that adults having charge of children would not be charged admission to these entertainments. He said that in my native country of Scotland all adults would be found taking charge of children, and that it would be almost impossible for anybody to determine whether an adult had or had not charge of a child. I think it is one of the easiest things to determine whether an adult has charge of a child or not. It is not a question of deluding some softhearted inspector, because although the population of Scotland may be Scottish the tax gatherers will be Scottish also, and it will be very easy for them to determine whether, in fact, an adult has charge of a child in any given case.
  The general proposition which has been brought forward that the cinema has been, on the whole, an elevating influence in our social life is one to which I shall not take exception, although it is not the argument brought forward from all sides of the House when other aspects of our national life are under consideration. The hon. Member for West-hougihton, who has been Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, will remember that the influence of the cinema is often mentioned in the courts and elsewhere as a fertile cause of lawlessness, if not of something worse—of demoralisation—among the junior population. But I do not propose to found my argument for this tax on any social or moral advantage to be derived from keeping people out of cinemas. If we can allow the inhabitants of these islands to vary the ordinary round of existence with a little luxury which is a consolation to them, none of us would wish to stand in the way of their doing so. However, I come back to what I have said before, that to ask £1,000,000 from the cinema industry out of a total of £40,500,000 of new taxation is not unreasonable.
  Mr. RHYS DAVIES: Can the hon. and gallant Member tell us what amount of revenue is expected—approximately if he likes—from the new impost on seats up to the price of 6d.?
  Major ELLIOT: No record of admissions to cinemas having been kept it is practically impossible to give the hon. Member the figure which he desires.
  Mr. HAYCOCK: These seats were taxed before, and it would be quite possible to find out the amount obtained previously.
  Major ELLIOT: They were taxed en bloc; and, in any case, cinema proprietors, in the interviews they have had with us, have made it clear that the conditions when these taxes were first imposed and the conditions nowadays are quite different. Therefore, it would not be possible to draw any conclusions from the figures, it is true to say that a substantial amount of revenue will be derived from these admissions, but without taking some census of admissions it is impossible to say more. I think I have dealt with all the points raised from various parts of the House. The real accusation has been made by hon. Members like the hon. Member for South Poplar (Mr. March), the hon. Member for Silvertown (Mr. J. Jones), the hon. Member for Halifax (Mr. Longbottom), the hon. Member for East Islington (Mrs. Manning), and other hon. Members for divisions where many poor people are congregated together. If it were possible to avoid these new taxes none of us would be more pleased than the Chancellor of the Exchequer and myself. The Chancellor was the man who remitted a great block of these taxes when he found himself in a position to do so, and we may be sure that, he will keep these taxes under close scrutiny. That he will keep them in mind against better times is a pledge which, I am sure, he would give to the House. But here and now, in the conditions in which we find ourselves, I would ask the House to let us come to a decision on this Amendment, because it has been fully argued, and I am afraid it is not possible for the Government to alter their view.
  Mr. W. R. SMITH: Those of us who sit on this side of the House wi11 be greatly disappointed by the observations of the hon. and gallant. Member. He spoke of a total revenue of £1,000,000 for this year, but I gather that is the total that will be raised from the whole of the increases under the Entertainments Duty, and that he realises that the great

  1091
  bulk of that, £1,000,000 must come from entertainments other than those referred to in this Amendment. If he had been able to examine this subject in greater detail than has been possible, apparently, from the lack of information at his disposal, I think it would have been found that the revenue coming from the sources which have been under discussion in connection with this Amendment will be, relatively speaking, a very small sum indeed. While making all allowance for the fact that the times are exceptional, and that therefore exceptional methods have to be adopted, it is greatly to be regretted that this tax should have to be carried to the extent of imposing additional difficulties upon the opportunities of entertainment for the children of this country.
  He referred to this subject in terms of its being a luxury or a privilege, but I suggest that recreation and entertainment for the younger part of our population hardly come under those headings. In most large industrial centres, and, indeed, in the small ones, it has become part of the social problem to know how best to provide entertainment for the younger people, in order to prevent them from spending their time in the more or less aimless fashion they do when playing in the streets. In recent years many people have taken steps to get special forms of these entertainments provided for them, at low prices to meet what is a real social need. However much difficulty there may be in regard to other Amendments which may be moved subsequently, a means of adjusting the Entertainments Duty so as to allow of this concession ought to be found.
  I do not think that I have ever before listened to a Debate in this House where the speeches in support of an Amendment have shown less party spirit. Many sound and important arguments have been put forward which have indicated that we are dealing with a subject which cannot be limited to mere financial considerations, that it is a matter which definitely affects the social side of the people, and demands better consideration than that which has been given to it by the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. It may be that my appeal in this respect will meet with the same fate as the appeal which has
  1092
  been made by other speakers on this side of the House, but I emphasise the point that if anything is done which is going to limit the opportunity of our young people participating in entertainment it will have a disastrous effect.
  I know it has been suggested that this tax will not be passed on to those who go to the entertainments, and that it will be met by the proprietors, but I know that the class of cinemas which provides entertainments for poor children is one that has great difficulties in making both ends meet. The bigger cinemas, which have a monopoly of the better-class films, will not suffer in the same way as the smaller cinemas. One of the disadvantages of the smaller cinemas has been the difficulty of getting the right class of films to improve their takings, and in almost every case those cinemas have been in the poorer districts. For these reasons it will not be possible for them to bear this extra tax, and it will have to be passed on to the customer. Therefore, I ask the Financial Secretary to give this subject further consideration to see if the sum of money which it is proposed to raise by this tax cannot be obtained in some other way instead of placing it on the shoulders of the children.
  Mr. BUCHANAN: I earnestly request the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who represents the same city as I do, to reconsider this matter. The question I wish to put is whether this tax is justifiable. I represent a large city in which there is the greatest poverty, and in many respects shocking housing conditions. There are other large towns in the same position, but they cannot be blamed for that. I remember in 1925 Lord Thankerton stated that, with regard to crime in the case of boys above 21, the statistics showed a constant decrease, but in the case of boys between 14 and 18 years of age there was an increase of crime of a certain kind. There is no doubt, as Lord Thankerton put it, that the real remedy for this was to encourage entertainments and sport. I ask the Financial Secretary to the Treasury to consider whether he is really effecting a saving by closing cinemas to the younger population and throwing the young people on the streets, a process which will entail the

  1093
  expense of additional police and criminal proceedings.
  By excluding these young people from cinema entertainments and other forms of entertainment you must inevitably find that there will be an increase in crime—it is really not crime, but such offences as playing football in the street and obstructing at street corners. That is not crime in the same sense as picking pockets. I have had much experience with prison officials in trying to get these young people out of prison. Very often these young people are not bad at all, and what I fear by the passing of these proposals is that, although the Chancellor of the Exchequer may get his £2,500,000 by the Entertainments Duty, he will find that his proposal has produced increased expenditure in other ways. Surely it is possible to raise the money which the Chancellor of the Exchequer requires in some other way.
  In the city of Glasgow the young people run a number of junior football clubs. I am not concerned with organisations like the Chelsea Football Club and the Woolwich Arsenal Football Club. Those clubs do not cause me any deep concern, and to tax their supporters does not raise the same resentment with me as reducing unemployment benefit. It is the junior clubs that concern me most. In Glasgow a considerable amount of money has been spent providing young fellows with parks, but what is the use of providing these parks if the Government come along with a tax of this kind? Only last week a park was opened in my own Division in the city of Glasgow provided by the Playing Fields' Association in order that the young people might enjoy themselves. Now the Government, by proposing this tax, are doing their best to keep the young people out of the parks. I ask the Financial Secretary, who is well aware of the state of things in Glasgow, to consult the police and others in authority in the West of Scotland who have to deal with these young people, and they will demonstrate to him the good effect of healthy sport among these young people. I ask the Government not to do anything that will tend to bring these young people into contact with crime, and I hope the Chancellor of the Exchequer will agree to accept this Amendment.
  7.0 p.m.
  Mr. HAYCOCK: The Financial Secretary has told us that if it were possible to avoid this tax nobody would be happier than himself, but he says that this imposition is necessary because we are face to face with an emergency and a crisis. My comment upon that is that we must be faced with a very real emergency. Is there no other way of raising this money except that of taxing by 50 per cent. the spending powers of the kiddies belonging to the working classes? It must be a real crisis if it is necessary to tax the kiddies who go to football matches. I think it is possible to avoid doing that. I suppose that it is proposed to raise £2,500,000 by these taxes, and a rough estimate will show that about £1,000,000 will be derived from the portion of the tax which we are proposing to delete. Surely orders from Wall Street have not demanded that we should tax our kiddies 50 per cent.? I know there are some people mean enough to steal candies from a baby. One million pounds out of an £800;000,000 Budget! A national emergency has taken us to the very edge of the precipice, and we are going to prevent ourselves from toppling over into the abyss by taking 50 per cent. from the kiddies of the poorest of the poor. Some people ought to hang their heads in shame. [Interruption.] Well, there are some people without any shame!
  We know now what a poor deal we are giving to our kiddies. The first thing that struck me when I came to this country was that the joys of childhood were not possible for the kiddies. There was no place to play in. That is why we welcomed the cinema. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury, in order to make some sort of apology, said that there were some films that were not too elevating, and that the cinemas were a fertile cause of lawlessness and crime. What has that to do with taxation? If there are undesirable films it is a question for the censor, and not for the Chancellor of the Exchequer. If there are undesirable films, stop them. There are many desirable films. The cinemas might be just about as valuable an educational factor as the schools. The cinema ought to supplement education in the schools. It is marvellous what we now can get from the cinema. If there are bad cinemas, do not tax them; prohibit them. If the Government proposed to do

  1095
  that, there would be lots of support for them from this side of the House. I do not believe that either children or grownups ought to see some of the cinema shows which are now being exhibited.
  The note struck by everybody on the other side of the House is typified by what was said by the hon. Member for Penrith and Cockermouth (Mr. Dixey), who told us that he dislikes this taxation intensely, and that our Front Bench enjoy the patent rights of this taxation because they discussed it when they were Members of the last Cabinet. If he dislikes it so much, it, is quite possible for him to vote against it. If he is to be logical, he must not try to get away by blaming our Front Bench. That applies to other hon. Members who say they dislike this tax. They should vote against it. That is their proud privilege, and I would like to see that mood of independence. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is very enthused about the matter. Hon. Members who do not like the Chancellor, do not like any of his works. I would say to each of them: "Courage, courage, brother!" and I would urge them to vote in the right harness. There is nothing to prevent anybody voting against this mean, shabby, small, contemptible tax, invented by very small minds and small people. It is the meanest and most contemptible tax. It is a tax upon happiness—
  Mr. SPEAKER: I would remind the hon. Member that there is a rule in this House against repetition. He is now saying the same thing over and over again.
  Mr. HAYCOCK: There will be lots of repetition of this argument outside before it is finished.
  Mr. SPEAKER: So far as it occurs in this House, I shall be able to deal with it.
  Mr. HAYCOCK: I agree. I will endeavour not to transgress the rule. I was saying that there is sufficient misery and unhappiness in this country and in the world without the Government making people more miserable and un-
  happy. The workers of this country are now walking the roads. There is mighty little joy in their lives. They are being tortured through the sense of insecurity. They do not know what is going to happen to-morrow or the day after to-morrow. Those in work are being worried, and the others are living, metaphorically speaking, in the Garden of Gethsemane. If we could help them to get away from this hell upon earth by means of a little joy in the cinema, we should, and I cannot understand the mental make-up of the person who would deprive them of it and make their lives more miserable than they are. We want people who can make them forget their torture. One good comedian to-day is worth four Prime Ministers. Charles Chaplin is one of the greatest benefactors the world has ever known.
  There are women who will be tortured and who will sob their pillows wet, because before them there is nothing but despair. Now we are making it harder for them to enjoy themselves. I am not a prophet, nor am I the son of a prophet, but I believe the common people will understand and will not forget, and that when they get an opportunity they will send a message to those who would steal joy from them and would make their trials and tribulations harder. There will be a day of reckoning as soon as people can express themselves. They have had no opportunity of expressing themselves on this situation. There has been no mandate. If the people had a say on it, they would not accept the position at all.
  This Motion is not necessary. We have an income of £4,000,000,000, and we are taking £1,000,000 of it in this way. Far better take a little more from Dives than steal the joys of Lazarus. There will be a day of reckoning, and this last thing will be responsible for unrest. The people will understand how mean and contemptible this is, and when they first get the opportunity they will repay.
  Question put, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Resolution."
  The House divided: Ayes, 280; Noes, 214.

  Division No, 477.]

  AYES.

  [7.9 p.m.

  Acland-Troyte, Lieut,-Colonel

  Allen. Lt.-Col. Sir William (Armagh)

  Astor, Maj. Hon. John J.(Kent, Dover)

  Altchison, Rt. Hon. Craigle M.

  Amery, Rt. Hon. Leopold C. M. S.

  Atkinson, C.

  Albery, Irving James

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

  Baldwin, Rt. Hon. Stanley (Bewdley)

  Alexander, Sir Wm. (Glasgow, Cent'l)

  Aske, Sir Robert

  Balfour, George (Hampstead)

  Balfour, Captain H. H. (I. of Thanet)

  Forestler-Walker, Sir L.

  Merriman, Sir F. Boyd

  Balniel, Lord

  Fremantle, Lieut.-Colonel Francis E.

  Millar, J. D.

  Beamish, Rear-Admiral T. P. H.

  Galbraith, J. F. W.

  Mitchell, Sir W. Lane (Streatham)

  Beaumont, M. W.

  Ganzoni, Sir John

  Monsell, Eyres, Com. Rt. Hon. Sir B.

  Bellairs, Commander Carlyon

  Gault, Lieut. Col. A. Hamilton

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

  Bennett, Sir E. N. (Cardiff, Central)

  George, Major G. Lloyd (Pembroke)

  Morris, Rhys Hopkins

  Berry, Sir George

  George, Megan Lloyd (Anglesea)

  Morrison, W. S. (Glos., Cirencester)

  Betterton, Sir Henry B.

  Gillett, George M.

  Muirhead. A. J.

  Bevan, S. J. (Holborn)

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

  Nail-Cain, A. R. N.

  Birchall, Major Sir John Dearman

  Glassey, A. E.

  Newman, Sir H. H. S. D. L. (Exeter)

  Birkett, w. Norman

  Glyn, Major R. G. C.

  Newton, Sir D. G. C. (Cambridge)

  Boothby, R. J. G.

  Gower, Sir Robert

  Nicholson, O. (Westminster)

  Bowater, Col. Sir T. Vanslttart

  Graham, Fergus (Cumberland, N.)

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

  Bowyer, Captain Sir George E. W.

  Granville, E.

  O'Connor, T. J.

  Boyce, Leslie

  Grattan-Doyte, Sir N.

  Oliver, P. M. (Man., Blackley)

  Bracken, B.

  Gray, Milner

  Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. William

  Braithwaite, Major A. N.

  Greaves-Lord, Sir Walter

  Owen, Major G. (Carnarvon)

  Briscoe, Richard George

  Greene, W. P. Crawford

  Peake, Capt. Osbert

  Broadbent, Colonel J.

  Grenfell, Edward C. (City of London)

  Penny, Sir George

  Brown, Ernest (Leith)

  Gretton, Colonel Rt. Hon. John

  Percy, Lord Eustace (Hastings)

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

  Griffith, F. Kingsley (Middlesbro' W.)

  Perkins, W. R. D.

  Buchan, John

  Gritten, W. G. Howard

  Peters, Dr. Sidney John

  Buchan-Hepburn, P. G. T.

  Gunston, Captain D. W.

  Peto, Sir Basil E. (Devon, Barnstaple)

  Bullock, Captain Malcolm

  Hacking, Rt. Hon. Douglas H.

  Power, Sir John Cecil

  Butler, R. A.

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

  Pownall, Sir Assheton

  Cadogan, Major Hon. Edward

  Hamilton, Sir George (Ilford)

  Pybus, Percy John

  Campbell, E. T.

  Hamilton, Sir R. (Orkney & Zetland)

  Ramsay, T. B. Wilson

  Castle Stewart, Earl of

  Hammersley, S. S.

  Ramesbotham, H.

  Cautley, Sir Henry S.

  Hanbury, C.

  Rathbone, Eleanor

  Cayzer, Sir C. (Chester, City)

  Hannon, Patrick Joseph Henry

  Rawson, Sir Cooper

  Cayzer, Maj. Sir Herbt. R. (Prtsmth, S.)

  Harbord, A.

  Reid, David D. (County Down)

  Cazalet, Captain Victor A.

  Harris, Percy A.

  Remer, John R.

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

  Hartington, Marquess of

  Rentoul, Sir Gervals S.

  Chadwick, Capt. Sir Robert Burton

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

  Reynolds, Col. Sir James

  Chamberlain, Rt.Hn.Sir J. A.(Birm.,W.)

  Haslam, Henry C.

  Rhys, Hon. C. A. U.

  Chamberlain, Rt. Hon. N.(Edgbaston)

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

  Richardson, Sir P. W. (Sur'y, Ch'te'y)

  Chapman, Sir S.

  Heneage, Lieut.-Colonel Arthur P.

  Roberts, Sir Samuel (Ecclesall)

  Christie, J. A.

  Hennessy, Major Sir G. R. J.

  Rodd, Rt. Hon. Sir James Rennell

  Church, Major A. O.

  Hills, Major Rt. Hon. John Waller

  Rosbotham, D. s. T,

  Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston Spencer

  Hope, Sir Harry (Forfar)

  Ross, Ronald D.

  Clydesdale, Marquess of

  Hore-Belisha, Leslie

  Runciman, Rt. Hon. Walter

  Cobb, Sir Cyril

  Horne, Rt. Hon., Sir Robert S.

  Russell, Alexander West (Tynemouth)

  Cockerill, Brig-General Sir George

  Howard-Bury, Colonel C. K.

  Russell, Richard John (Eddlsbury)

  Cohen, Major J. Brunel

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

  Salmon, Major I.

  Colfox, Major William Philip

  Hunter-Weston, Lt.-Gen. Sir Ay mer

  Samuel, A. M. (Surrey. Farnham)

  Collins, Sir Godfrey (Greenock)

  Hurd, Percy A.

  Samuel, Rt. Hon. Sir H. (Darwen)

  Colman, N. C. D.

  Hutchison, Ma).-Gen. Sir R.

  Samuel, Samuel (W'dsworth, Putney)

  Colville, Major D. J.

  Inskip, Sir Thomas

  Sandeman, Sir N. Stewart

  Conway, Sir W. Martin

  Iveagh, Countess of

  Sassoon, Rt. Hon. Sir Philip A. G, D.

  Cooper, A. Duff

  Jones, Lleweliyn-, F.

  Savery, S. S.

  Courtauld. Major J. S.

  Jones, Sir G. W. H. (Stoke New'gton)

  Scott, James

  Courthope, Colonel Sir G. L.

  Jones, Henry Haydn (Merioneth)

  Shakespeare, Geoffrey H.

  Cowan, D. M.

  Jowitt, Rt. Hon. Sir W. A. (Preston)

  Shepperson, Sir Ernest Whittome

  Cranborne, Viscount

  Kedward, R. M. (Kent, Ashford)

  Simon, Rt. Hon. Sir John

  Crichton-Stuart, Lord C.

  Kindersley. Major G. M.

  Sinclair, Rt. Hon. Sir A. (Caithness)

  Croft, Brigadier-General Sir H.

  Knight, Holford

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

  Crookshank, Capt. H. C.

  Lamb, Sir J. Q.

  Smith, Louis W. (Sheffield, Hallam)

  Culverwell, C. T. (Bristol, West)

  Lambert, Rt. Hon. George (S. Molton)

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

  Cunliffe-Lister, Rt. Hon. Sir Philip

  Lane Fox, Col. Rt. Hon. George R.

  Smith-Carington, Neville W.

  Dalkeith, Earl of

  Law, Sir Alfred (Derby, High Peak)

  Smithers, Waldron

  Dalrymple-White. Lt.-Col. Sir Godfrey

  Leigh, Sir John (Clapham)

  Snowden, Rt. Hon. Philip

  Davidson, Rt. Hon. J. (Hertford)

  Leighton, Major B. E. P.

  Somerville, A. A. (Windsor)

  Davies, Dr. Vernon

  Lewis, Oswald (Colchester)

  Somerville, D. G. (Willesden, East)

  Davies, E. C. (Montgomery)

  Liewellin, Major J. J.

  Southby, Commander A. R. J.

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

  Locker-Lampson, Rt. Hon. Godfrey

  Spender-Clay, Colonel H.

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

  Locker-Lampson, Com. O.(Handsw'th)

  Stanley, Lord (Fylde)

  Dawson, Sir Philip

  Lockwood, Captain J. H.

  Stanley, Hon. O. (Westmorland)

  Denman, Hon. R. D.

  Long, Major Hon. Eric

  Steel-Maitland. Rt. Hon. Sir Arthur

  Despencer-Robertson, Major J. A. F.

  Lovat-Fraser. J. A.

  Stewart, W. J. (Belfast South)

  Dixey, A. C.

  Lymington, Viscount

  Stuart, Hon. J. (Moray and Nairn)

  Dixon, Captain Rt. Hon. Herbert

  McConnell, Sir Joseph

  Sueter, Rear-Admiral M. F.

  Duckworth, G. A. V.

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

  Taylor, Vice-Admiral E. A.

  Dugdale, Capt, T. L.

  MacDonald, Malcolm (Bassetlaw)

  Thomas, Rt. Hon. J. H. (Derby)

  Eden, Captain Anthony

  Macdonald, Sir M. (Inverness)

  Thomas, Major L. B. (King's Norton)

  Edmondson, Major A. J.

  Macdonald, Capt. P. D. (I. of W.)

  Thomson, Sir F.

  Elliot, Major Walter E.

  Maclean, Sir Donald (Cornwall, N.)

  Titchfield, Major the Marquess of

  Erskine, Lord (Somerset, Walton s. M.)

  Macpherson, Rt. Hon. James I.

  Todd, Capt. A. J.

  Evans, Capt. Ernest (Welsh Univer.)

  Macquisten, F. A.

  Train, J.

  Everard, W. Lindsay

  Maltland, A. (Kent, Faversham)

  Tryon, Rt. Hon. George Clement

  Falls, Sir Bertram G.

  Makins, Brigadier-General E.

  Turton, Robert Hugh

  Ferguson, Sir John

  Mander, Geoffrey le M.

  Vaughan-Morgan, Sir Kenyon

  Fielden, E. B.

  Marjoribanks, Edward

  Wallace, Capt. D. E. (Hornsey)

  Fison, F. G. Clavering

  Markham, S. F.

  Walters, Rt. Hon. Sir J. Tudor

  Foot, Isaac

  Mason, Colonel Glyn K.

  Ward, Lieut.-Col. Sir A. Lambert

  Ford, Sir P. J.

  Meller, R. J.

  Warrender, Sir Victor

  1098

  1099

  Waterhouse, Captain Charles

  Windsor-Clive, Lieut.-Colonel George

  Wood, Major McKenzie (Banff)

  Wayland, Sir William A.

  Winterton, Rt. Hon. Earl

  Young, Rt. Hon. Sir Hilton

  Wells, Sydney R.

  Withers. Sir John James

  White, H. G.

  Wolmer, Rt. Hon. Viscount

  TELLERS FOR THE AYES.—

  Williams, Charles (Devon, Torquay)

  Womersley, W. J.

  Captain Margesson and Viscount Elmley.

  Wilson, G. H. A. (Cambridge U.)

  Wood, Rt. Hon. Sir Kingsley

  NOES

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

  Haycock, A. W.

  Paling, Wilfrid

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

  Hayday, Arthur

  Palmer, E. T.

  Addison, Rt. Hon. Dr. Christopher

  Hayes, John Henry

  Parkinson, John Allen (Wigan)

  Alexander, Rt. Hon. A. V. (Hillsbro')

  Henderson, Joseph (Ardwick)

  Perry, S. F.

  Alpass, J. H.

  Henderson, Thomas (Glasgow)

  Pethick-Lawrence, F. W.

  Amnion, Charles George

  Henderson, W. W. (Middx., Enfield)

  Phillips, Dr. Marlon

  Arnott, John

  Her Notts, J.

  Pole, Major D. G.

  Attlee, Clement Richard

  Hicks, Ernest George

  Potts, John S.

  Ayles, Walter

  Hirst, G. H. (York, W. R., Wentworth)

  Price, M. P.

  Baker, John (Wolverhampton, Bilston)

  Hirst, W. (Bradford, South)

  Quibell, D. J. K.

  Barnes, Alfred John

  Hoffman, P. C.

  Raynes, W. R,

  Barr, James

  Horrabin, J. F.

  Richardson, R. (Houghton-le-Spring)

  Batey, Joseph

  Hudson, James H. (Huddersfield)

  Riley, Ben (Dewsbury)

  Bennett, William (Battersea, South)

  Jenkins, Sir William

  Riley, F. F. (Stockton-on-Tees)

  Benson, G.

  John, William (Rhondda, West)

  Ritson, J.

  Bondfield, Rt. Hon. Margaret

  Jones, J. J. (West Ham, Silvertown)

  Romeril, H. G.

  Bowen, J. W.

  Jones, Morgan (Caerphilly)

  Rowson, Guy

  Bowerman, Rt. Hon Charles W.

  Kelly, W. T,

  Salter, Dr. Alfred

  Broad. Francis Alfred

  Kennedy, Rt. Hon. Thomas

  Samuel, H. Walter (Swansea, West)

  Brockway, A. Fenner

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

  Sanders, W. S.

  Bromley, J.

  Lansbury, Rt. Hon. George

  Sandham, E.

  Brooke, W.

  Lathan, G. (Sheffield, Park)

  Sawyer, G. F.

  Brothers, M.

  Law, Albert (Bolton)

  Scrymgeour. E.

  Brown, Rt. Hon. J. (South Ayrshire)

  Law, A. (Rossendale)

  Sexton, Sir James

  Buchanan, G.

  Lawrence, Susan

  Shepherd, Arthur Lewis

  Burgess, F. G.

  Lawrie, Hugh Hartley (Stalybridge)

  Sherwood, G. H.

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

  Lawson, John James

  Shield, George William

  Cameron, A. G.

  Lawther, W. (Barnard Castle)

  Shiels, Dr. Drummond

  Cape, Thomas

  Leach, W.

  Shillaker, J. F.

  Carter, W. (St. Pancras, S.W.)

  Lee, Frank (Derby, N.E.)

  Shinwell. E.

  Chater, Daniel

  Lee. Jennie (Lanark, Northern)

  Short, Alfred (Wednesbury)

  Cluse, W. S.

  Leonard, W,

  Simmons, C. J.

  Clynes, Rt. Hon. John R.

  Lewis, T. (Southampton)

  Sinkinson, George

  Cocks, Frederick Seymour

  Lloyd, C. Ellis

  Sitch, Charles H.

  Compton, Joseph

  Logan, David Gilbert

  Smith, Ben (Bermondsey, Rotherhithe)

  Cove, William G.

  Longbottom, A. W.

  Smith, Frank (Nuneaton)

  Cripps, Sir Stafford

  Longden, F.

  Smith, Lees-, Rt. Hon. H.B.(Keighley)

  Daggar, George

  Lunn, William

  Smith, Tom (Pontefract)

  Dalton, Hugh

  Macdonald, Gordon (Ince)

  Smith, W. R. (Norwich)

  Davies, D. L. (Pontypridd)

  McElwee, A,

  Sorensen, R.

  Davies. Rhys John (Westhoughton)

  McEntee, V. L.

  Stephen, Campbell

  Day, Harry

  McKinlay, A.

  Strauss, G. R.

  Devlin, Joseph

  MacLaren, Andrew

  Sullivan, J.

  Dukes, C.

  Maclean, Nell (Glasgow, Govan)

  Taylor, R. A. (Lincoln)

  Duncan, Charles

  MacNeill-Weir, L.

  Toole, Joseph

  Dunnico, H.

  McShane, John James

  Tout, W. J.

  Ede, James Chuter

  Malone, C. L'Estrange (N'thampton)

  Turner, Sir Ben

  Edmunds, J. E.

  Manning, E. L.

  Vaughan, David

  Edwards, C. (Monmouth, Bedwellty)

  Mansfield, W.

  Viant, S. P.

  Edwards, E. (Morpeth)

  March, S.

  Walkden, A. G.

  Egan, W. H.

  Marley, J.

  Walker, J.

  Freeman, Peter

  Marshall, Fred

  Watkins, F. C.

  Gardner, B. W. (West Ham, Upton)

  Mathers, George

  Watson, W. M. (Dunfermline).

  Gibbins, Joseph

  Maxton, James

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

  Gibson, H. M. (Lanes. Mossley)

  Messer, Fred

  Wellock, Wilfred

  Gill, T. H.

  Middleton, G.

  Welsh, James (Paisley)

  Gossling, A. G.

  Mills, J. E.

  West. F. R.

  Gould, F.

  Milner, Major J.

  Whiteley, Wilfrid (Birm., Ladywood)

  Graham, D. M. (Lanark, Hamilton)

  Montague, Frederick

  Whiteley, William (Blaydon)

  Greenwood, Rt. Hon. A. (Colne)

  Morgan, Dr. H. B.

  Wilkinson, Ellen C.

  Grenfell, D. R. (Glamorgan)

  Morley, Ralph

  Williams, David (Swansea, East)

  Griffiths, T. (Monmouth, Pontypool)

  Morrison, Rt. Hon. H. (Hackney, S.)

  Williams, E. J. (Ogmore)

  Groves, Thomas E.

  Morrison, Robert C. (Tottenham, N.)

  Williams, Dr. J. H. (Llanelly)

  Grundy, Thomas W.

  Mort, D. L.

  Williams, T. (York, Don Valley)

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

  Muggeridge, H. T.

  Wilson, C. H. (Sheffield, Attercliffe)

  Hall, G. H. (Merthyr Tydvil)

  Murnin, Hugh

  Wilson, J. (Oldham)

  Hall, J. H. (Whitechapel)

  Naylor, T. E.

  Wilson, R. J. (Jarrow)

  Hall, Capt. W. G. (Portsmouth, C.)

  Noel Baker, P. J.

  Wise, E. F.

  Hamilton, Mary Agnes (Blackburn)

  Noel-Buxton, Baroness (Norfolk, N.)

  Young. R. S. (Islington, North)

  Hardie, David (Rutherglen)

  Oldfield. J. R.

  Young, Sir R. (Lancaster, Newton)

  Hardie, G. D. (Springburn)

  Oliver, George Harold (Ilkeston)

  Hastings, Dr. Somerville

  Palin, John Henry

  TELLERS FOR THE NOES.—

  Mr. Charleton and Mr. Thurtle.

  Tenth Resolution read a Second time.

  Mr. SPEAKER: I think that the next two Amendments, standing in the name
  1100
  of the hon. Member for paisley (Mr. J. Welsh)—to leave out line 7, and insert:

  1101
  "Exceeds 5d. and does not exceed 6d.—One penny,"
  and, in line 7, at the end, to insert the words:
  "Exceeds 6d. and does not exceed 7½d—Three halfpence,"
  might be discussed together. I might remind the House that we have had a pro- longed discussion on another Amendment which to a very large extent deals with the same question, and I hope that that discussion will not be repeated.
  Mr. JAMES WELSH (Paisley): I beg to move, to leave out line 7, and to insert instead thereof the words:
  "Exceeds 5d. and does not exceed 6d.—One penny."
  In view of your indication, Mr. Speaker, I propose to be very brief in moving this Amendment, and the second Amendment is consequential. I think we are all agreed that an Entertainments Duty should follow a scale that is not difficult for the public to understand and for the trade itself to operate. The popular 6d., which up to the present has been entirely free of tax, is now to be subject to a tax of 1½d., or 25 per cent. on that particular investment. That would involve the raising of the price of admission to 7½d., if the tax is to be passed on to the public. I suggest to the Financial Secretary that the small modification proposed in this Amendment is one which he could quite readily accept, and which would make the duty more workable for the industry and better from every point of view. It may be said that the way out is for the entertainment industry either to cut off the ½d. or to add an additional ½d., but I think that those who know anything about the conditions in the cinema industry and the other entertainment industries will agree that on such figures it would be impossible for nine-tenths of the establishments to be carried on.
  Mr. MILLS: I beg to second the Amendment.
  The arguments which have been used in relation to the tax upon children who went to football matches or cinemas apply with equal or greater force to this particular tax, because it obviously includes a wider range of people. We oppose the tax because as a party we have always been opposed to the idea of indirect taxation. As a party we believe to-day that, if a national emergency
  1102
  exists, and if a hypothetical sum is to be raised in order to meet this hypothetical emergency, it ought to be raised on the principle of ability to pay; and a direct tax levied according to that ability is, I submit, the fairest way. That, therefore, is one of our main grounds of opposition to this duty. I think that, if there were time to dig up the arguments used by the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, the present Secretary of State for the Dominions, and the present Prime Minister, when they were in Opposition, against this tax, we could make some very entertaining quotations which would show how far they have departed from the principles that they used to uphold.
  My main objection to this tax is, however, one that will apply in the big industrial areas, namely, that by common consent the May Committee, like the Geddes Committee, are proposing the securing of economies from the taxpayer as a taxpayer, and the putting of the burden on to the ratepayer in the urban areas. Just in proportion to the size of an industrial constituency and the amount of unemployment existing in the area, so the incidence of the rate burden will fall upon the ratepayer as well as upon the shopkeeper, the cinema owner and other members of the community. As I have said, the tendency of every one of these so-called acts of economy is to inflict further and heavier burdens upon the resources of each community. This tax is going to hit the teacher who goes to a cinema, and who, equally, as a ratepayer, will have to pay his proportion of the local costs which are met out of the rates. We shall hear something presently of the soldier and the sailor. If there are any people who can be certain of having to pay this tax doubly every time they go into a cinema, they are the married man, the soldier and the sailor. Very few soldiers or sailors ever go into a cinema alone, and, consequently, out of the very small wages that a soldier or sailor may enjoy from the State, it is certain that they, as well as the married man, will be called upon to pay a double tax every time they enter a cinema. I oppose this tax for that reason, and for the larger reason that in this emergency the cleavage of the burden should be clear-cut and beyond dispute, and should carry with it no

  1103
  imputation of an unbalanced theory with regard to the bearing of such burdens.
  Major ELLIOT: The argument in favour of this Amendment is one which was put before the Chancellor of the Exchequer this morning by the deputation of the Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association, and it has also been put to me privately by hon. Members in many quarters of the House, including the hon. Member for Paisley (Mr. J. Welsh). It certainly seems that his underlying case is a reasonable one, and, if he can show how the revenue can be obtained, or practically the same revenue, in a more convenient manner, we are most anxious to meet the convenience of the trade. The hon. Member will not expect me at this moment to give any further undertaking than that the matter shall certainly be considered, and that I will go into it with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, if we can make any modification along the lines suggested, or along other lines, I shall be very glad to do so. I am sure that the hon. Member will not expect any more of me at this stage. There will be an opportunity for discussing the matter on the Committee stage of the Finance Bill.
  Mr. WELSH: In view of the Financial Secretary's sympathetic reply, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.
  Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
  Mr. BENSON: I beg to move, in line 1, to leave out from the word "That," to the second word "the" in line 3.
  I move this Amendment because I feel that, of all the blunders that the Government have made in their Budget, the re-grading of the allowances is undoubtedly the greatest. The English Income Tax is undoubtedly the most powerful engine of taxation that the world has ever seen. Since it was instituted, 130 years ago, it has been steadily improved, until now, as an instrument of power for raising enormous sums, and an instrument of
  1104
  extreme delicacy in placing the burden upon the taxpayer where that burden should be, it is unequalled in fiscal history. The strength of the Income Tax has always been that it has carried public opinion with it. The delicacy of the machine, and the fact that it is so precise in the burden that it lays upon individual backs, has given it public confidence, and has enabled it to work as powerfully as it has worked.
  It being half-past Seven of the Clock, and leave having been given to move the Adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 10, further Proceeding was postponed, without Question put.

  ATLANTIC FLEET UNREST.
  Captain W. G. HALL: I beg to move, "That this House do now adjourn."
  No one regrets more than I do the fact that I find myself in the position that I do to-night. It can be no satisfaction to any of us, certainly not to myself, that the unfortunate events which have recently occurred in His Majesty's Fleet have led to a good deal of publicity in the Press, to questions having been asked in this House, and to your leave, Sir, being given for me to move the Adjournment to discuss them. I have the honour, in company with two hon. and gallant Gentlemen who sit on the other side of the House, to represent the oldest and largest naval port in the world, and it is, therefore, a matter of the supremest importance to the people I represent that matters affecting their conditions and the livelihood of themselves and their dependants should be, as far as possible, and as reasonably as possible, ventilated in the mother of Parliaments. I have been warned by many friends in all quarters of the House that I should be dealing with what is a very delicate subject. No one realises that more than I do, and I hope to deal with the subject with restraint, simplicity and, as far as l can, as I see it, with fairness.
  What are the facts? Last night at midnight, so the newspapers tell us, the Atlantic Fleet sailed from the Cromarty Firth for their home ports. That was the culminating point in a swift chapter of incidents which might have been fraught with very great possibilities for

  1105
  ill. I saw the news, in company with other Members of the House, on the tape on Tuesday night. We read that the Atlantic Fleet, which has been carrying out exercises off the coast of Scotland, had been recalled, and later we heard that a certain amount of unrest had eventuated among the ratings. We are told—I do not know whether it is true—that this trouble began on Sunday, so that for some days a considerable portion of His Majesty's fleet, to wit 15 ships, have been in a state of unrest, and I suggest that it is only fair, right, and proper that we should discuss such an untoward incident in the life of the British Navy. We are also told that ratings occupying various positions on board those ships have carried out what might be described as passive resistance.
  These are the brief facts known to all of us and from them certain definite things emerge. The first is that this gesture was not the work of a few, or taken part in only by a few, but was universal throughout the whole of the Atlantic Fleet as far as the ratings were concerned. Another thing that emerges is that the Commander-in-Chief, in the absence of Admiral Hodges, who is unfortunately ill, acted with promptitude, with despatch, and with great common sense. We remember previous incidents that have happened in the Navy when officers in charge have perhaps not seen their duty so clearly as the present Commander-in-Chief. Another fact that I should like to bring out is that the sole reason for this action, so far as I see it, was the decision taken by the Government of the day to make certain alterations in the rates of pay for all ranks under the Economy Bill.
  I should like to deal with certain conclusions which I think arise from these facts. The first is, given that the unrest is due to variation in the rates of pay, we should ask ourselves, as the supreme Legislature of the country, and, therefore, responsible for the Navy and the condition of the men who give their service and their lives to it, whether these cuts were just, whether they broke any obligation made to the men, and whether there was any other remedy open to them other than the action that they took. First of all, are the cuts just? They are based, of course, on the findings of the Anderson Committee. The rates of pay
  1106
  of the men in the Navy were based on the findings of the Jerram Committee, which reported in March, 1919. That report was acted upon by the Government of the day in May, 1919. It is on the recommendations set up then that 75 per cent. of the men still serving receive their remuneration. In 1923 the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bewdley (Mr. S. Baldwin) set up the Anderson Committee, which reported at great length both on the remuneration paid to members of the Civil Service, and to the remuneration paid to the members of the Fighting Services. I should like to read two brief extracts from the report. They say on page 14 that:
  "The standard of remuneration should be such as will induce a continuous and sufficient flow of suitable candidates and keep them in a contented state while in the naval service."
  Lower down on the same page they say:
  "All evidence seems to show that the pay of naval ratings was not too low in 1914."
  In parenthesis, may I say that, the ordinary seaman then got 1s. 3d. and the able seaman 1s. 8d.
  "It is now too high, and, in our judgment, it should be reduced parallel with reductions in the pay of the rank and file of the Army and in correspondence with -the wages now paid in civil employ."
  It is the rates which came into force later on as the result of the findings of that Committee to which exception is now taken, as I understand it, by about 75 per cent. of the ratings of His Majesty's Navy. A Labour Government came into office in 1924. It had a very short term of office, and in the following year the Conservative party was returned and the Anderson Report was implemented. It was not put into operation so far as men then serving were concerned. The decision was that the new rates of pay based upon the Anderson Report should operate for all men coming into the Service from October, 1925.
  The economies suggested and the variations recently promulgated in Fleet Orders, which bring the pay and other allowances of naval ratings down to the level set up in 1925, is the root cause and the only cause of the unrest that we are now discussing. The Admiralty, in a statement issued yesterday not only acknowledge that unrest exists, but they admit that there are certain anomalies

  1107
  which penalise very severely certain sections of the men of the lower deck. When they come to give the percentages, it would appear that the cut proposed in the pay of able seamen is not so drastic as the figure that appeared so widely in the Press. Taking pay alone, the reduction in that one rating is at the rate of 25 per cent. The Admiralty in their new figures take emoluments and allowances to which sailors are entitled and make the percentage deduction a good deal less. They bring it down, in the case of a married man, to something over 10 per cent. and in the case of an unmarried man to 13.6 per cent.
  May I say that argument does not altogether hold water. With a naval rating it is not so much the emoluments that he gets, necessary and good as they are; it is the amount of pay that goes into his home, and it is the salaried part of it to which his wife is, or should be, entitled to which exception has been taken. The Admiralty argument breaks down, too, when we remember that a good deal of the unrest which has been engendered is due to some men marrying before they are entitled to the marriage allowance, and the result is that they do not get it. The fact that, in addition to their not getting it, they have family ties and responsibilities, coupled with the fact that this drastic cut has come upon many of them suddenly, has made their plight extremely serious. A letter was published in the Press this morning addressed from the men of the Atlantic Fleet to the First Lord and the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty:
  "We, the loyal subjects of His Majesty the King, do hereby present to my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty our representative to implore them to amend the drastic cuts in pay which have been afflicted on the lowest paid men of the lower deck. It is evident to all concerned that this cut is the forerunner of tragedy, misery and immorality amongst the families of the lower deck, and, unless a guaranteed written agreement is received from the Admiralty and confirmed by Parliament stating that our pay will he revised, we are resolved to remain as one unit refusing to sail under the new rates of pay. The men are quite agreeable to accept a cut which they consider reasonable."
  If I turn to my own constituency paper, the "Portsmouth Evening News," it pub-
  1108
  lished last night a leader which gave in very sane and reasonable language pictures from their own postbag of the sort of difficulty from which the homes of many of the men on the lower deck will now suffer in consequence of the cuts. I, too, have had quite a number of letters and I take it other hon. Members have also had letters, human documents from people pointing out how this thing has fallen upon them suddenly, through no fault of theirs, and how now they are finding themselves with perhaps 2s., 3s., 5s. and very often less than 10s. a week with which to buy food.
  The next point I should like to make is: Did they break their contract? I mean, of course, did the Government break their contract? I do not wish—nothing is further from my desire—to bring heat into this discussion, but I think that all who are fair-minded must admit that the State has a very definite obligation towards the men who have entered at the higher rates. I would remind the House that the history of the Anderson Committee shows that this point has been ever present in the minds of successive Governments since the War. The Labour Government in 1924, through its spokesmen, laid it down very definitely that they felt that there was this obligation towards the men who entered the Service under the higher rates of pay—that so long as they serve under the agreement signed by them the State has an obligation to them which should be kept. I believe that a previous First Lord of the Admiralty, now transferred to another place, very definitely was of the same opinion, and his own Government and his own party held the same view. I will read a letter which the present Prime Minister wrote just before the last election to my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Central Hull (Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy). I make no apology for reading it because the letter was widely published at the time and appeared in many periodicals, and I am sure I shall not be reading anything which was private and which was not meant for universal consumption:
  "I am much obliged by yours of the 16th, telling me that a story is being put about in naval ports that, in the event of a Labour Government coming into power, Service pensions would be abolished, and also that the

  1109
  Navy would be reduced without consideration for any section of the staff, that officers and men would be turned adrift without any provision for their future.
  These statements are, I regret to say, part of a regular campaign of falsehood against us which is being conducted all over the country and adapted to local needs. My reply is brief and effective: the whole thing is absolutely untrue.
  A Labour Government, from its nature, is a Government which will carry out obligations, and every right acquired in the course of service will he rigidly observed."
  1 therefore submit to the House that that obligation has been broken, and that we should he very jealous of our honour and the honour of our country when matters of this sort are under consideration. The final point I wish to make is this. Had the men any other remedy I noticed that in a very well-known newspaper this morning the leading article was headed: "Steady Boys! Steady!!" do not know whether that advice was directed to the men of the Navy or to the gentlemen who now adorn the Front Government Bench. At any rate, I should like us to realise how serious it is that a section of law-abiding men feel that the State has broken its contract with them and has gone back on its sacred word. I think—other Members may disagree with me—in the circumstances, knowing how cumbersome is the machinery in the Navy for ventilating grievances, that the action taken by the men was not, as that one newspaper this morning described it, mutiny. I think that all things considered the men acted with great restraint. They took, as far as they could, the usual channel by approaching their officers. I have read the papers very carefully and nowhere have I found any instance of rioting or anything of that sort. I think, too, that we should also remember that when the men had to consider the remedy at hand they were faced with the fact that those orders had been promulgated by the Admiralty. The thing, as far as they knew, was finished and done with, and all they had to do was to accept the variations laid down. Some of them perhaps remembered—I personalty remember and I hope all here will remember—that the present Government for reasons known to all the House are going to put the economies through by Orders-in-Council. It is therefore very difficult, if not impossible, for this House, as a House, to
  1110
  deal with such a situation. It is quite conceivable that had the men taken the slow and cumbersome method open to them, the House might have risen, stood adjourned or prorogued for some months, and by that time the thing would have been in operation for some considerable time and the whole point of their protest would have been lost. May I also say, and here I address my remarks to hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite, that they perhaps more than any other party in the State lay great stress upon the need for keeping the British Empire together and of keeping it solid and strong and alive. In this connection may I quote a statement by the late Lord Birkenhead who for so many years adorned this House. He said in the course of a speech:
  "We acknowledge the debt of gratitude we owe to those who, placed in power suddenly, became the trustees of the majestic fabric of the British Empire and of whom, will say plainly and frankly, were not unworthy trustees of the British Empire. I have in mind men of the calibre of Mr. MacDonald, Mr. Snowden and Mr. Thomas."
  I should like in the light of the words which I have just read to include the three right hon. Gentlemen who until recently were such shining lights and leading Members of the last Government. It would therefore appear that both among the Conservatives and among the Labour Members of the present Administration you have men who have all through been looked up to by the men on the lower deck as men who are anxious, not only to keep their word, but to see that the fair fame and name of the British Empire remains unsullied. Filially, may I, in particular, address my remarks to the First, Lord of the Admiralty. The First Lord, in my view, has, like the Commander-in-Chief, acted as a British gentleman should. He has by the statement which was issued in the Press to-day acknowledged that these cuts operate very unfairly and has definitely promised the men on the lower deck that their case shall be looked into. May I ask this House, and through this House, the First Lord of the Admiralty to implement the implied terms in all that has been said to the men.
  I ask the Admiralty to go into this matter afresh and not to penalise other men in the Service in order to keep the cuts within the amount which has

  1111
  appeared in the Paper which has been circulated. If necessary, I would beg of the First Lord to remember that, although I have spoken chiefly of the men of the lower deck and although the incidence of the cut seems to hit them much more hardly than the officers, still all ratings and all ranks are suffering under those cuts. Obligations have been entered into by all of them and we should in fairness treat them all alike. May I ask, although I am sure there is really no need for me to do so, the First Lord not to penalise any of these men. It is perfectly obvious that in an incident of this sort, some men must have been ringleaders and the others purely passive in what took place, but I ask the First Lord to remember that they were suffering under a very definite sense of grievance and took the only remedy which they thought open to them. They thought of their women folk at home. In the light of all these things, I ask him to go into this matter sympathetically, to shift the incidence of the cuts as far as he can, and, if possible, not to penalise other ratings or ranks in the Navy in so doing, and to remember that, although some men were ringleaders, they were all in it together, and that we want to keep the Navy what hon. and right bon. Members think it should be, namely, a contented Service, a Service proud to be where it is, and a Service proud to wear the uniform that it does. Do not penalise any of them, but help them to be what they want to be, members of a contented and a useful Service.
  Lieut.-Commander KENWC RTHY: I beg to second the Motion.
  I believe that I shall be expressing the views of all parties in the House in congratulating my hon. and gallant Friend upon the lucid, restrained and moderate statement that he has made. He has covered the ground so well that in seconding the Motion I need not detain the House for very long. I will try and keep to certain essentials. In the first place, I am sure that I am speaking for all on this side of the House when I say that it must not be taken that we are in any way condoning or supporting insubordination or indiscipline among men wearing the King's uniform. I had the honour to command a ship in His Majesty's Fleet for five years. I served
  1112
  for 17 years as an officer, and I know the difficulties which the officers must have had to go through in these few days, the events of which we are now discussing. I am sure that the House must feel very great sympathy indeed for the officers and all ranks of the Navy as things are in the extraordinary and almost unprecedented events that have occurred.
  I am very glad indeed that my hon. and gallant Friend has brought this matter forward It is easy to say, "Oh, the least said the better," but the newspapers have contained a great deal of information about these events on the north-east coast of Scotland. I have a Conservative paper here, the "Glasgow Evening News" of the 15th September, giving a most sensational account, some of which I have reason to believe is altogether false. We know that the Continental newspapers have shown little restraint in reporting these events, and I really think that from every point of view it is far better that the First Lord should have an opportunity of explaining the situation and making everything clear and letting us know exactly what has happened and what—most important of all—it is now proposed to do. I for one agree with the leading article in the London "Daily Mail" this morning which was mentioned by my hon. and gallant Friend, in which it was said that the men of the Royal Navy have, after all, their remedy through Parliament. They are citizens. To-day, they are voters when they are out of their ships; they are on the register. They can appeal to and they have the right to look to Parliament to see that they are safeguarded and do not suffer oppression or injustice. If this House was not fit to discuss a matter of this kind—and it should be discussed—there would be an excuse for men in the Forces to think that only by direct action would they be able to get their rights. That is not the case. I believe that Parliament has a duty in this matter and that my hon. and gallant Friend has performed a service to the country and to the Fleet by moving the Adjournment.
  8.0.p.m.
  I would ask the following questions additional to those of my hon. and gallant. Friend of the First Lord of the Admiralty: Will he not only explain the situation but also inform us what steps were taken to inform the men of the cuts and

  1113
  to explain to them what was in contemplation? Was there just a Fleet Order issued, and was it then left to the officers to explain to the men as best they could, or was it clearly expounded to them in some suitable way? Above all, what steps were taken to ascertain how the cuts would actually operate? My hon. and gallant Friend referred to the case of the younger unmarried seamen and stokers who are under the age to receive a marriage allowance. There are hard eases of that kind. In the Admiralty statement which was published in the papers this morning an attempt is made to minimise the disparity in the sacrifices which the officers and the men are called upon to face. Taking into account the messing allowances, lodging and the value of uniform, allowance, accommodation and the rest of it, the married able seaman with two children has a percentage reduction of 10.5 per cent. and the unmarried able seaman 13.6 per cent. When we come to the petty officers, we find that in the case of the chief petty officer, with a wife and two children, the percentage given by the Admiralty is 7.7. There is an attempt to explain the matter in the Admiralty statement, but that should have been done before the trouble occurred. That is my criticism, which I cannot avoid making, of the First Lord of the Admiralty.
  Take the case of the officers. I would remind the House that the officers have been very shabbily treated by successive Governments over the promised marriage allowance, which was voted by this House under the late Conservative Government when Mr. Bridgeman, now Viscount Bridgeman, was First Lord of the Admiralty. Against the vote of Parliament their marriage allowance was withdrawn. In the case of the officers, it will be seen that the Admiral has a cut of 7 per cent., and the Lieut.-Commanders—the backbone of the Navy—3.7 per cent. only. The chief petty officer has a basic rate cut of 11.8 per cent. and the able seamen, as has been stated in the newspapers, a cut of 25 per cent. The able seaman, I would remind the House, is the general rank of the men of the Service. If a man is a good seaman, you usually make him an able seaman at the age of 18 or 20. If he does not get promotion to the rank of petty officer, he goes on for 12 or 20 years, with an allowance of 1d. a day extra for the first good conduct badge
  1114
  and 2d. a day for the second badge and so on. He may become a gun layer or other specialist and get a little extra, but his basic rate is 4s. a day, from which it is proposed to take away is day, or 25 per cent. It is the money that he can afford to send home to his wife that really matters.
  The whole standard of life, the whole method of living in the Navy have undergone a tremendous change. In the years just, before the War the Fleets were far more in home waters. The men were not actually encouraged to marry, hut they did marry much earlier. In the old days one heard of men going ashore on their infrequent leave, getting drunk, painting the town red, and so on, but those days are gone. It is a sober, clean-living Navy that we have to-day. The men marry young and build up their little homes, of which they are proud and are eager to go to them and to keep them decent. They are well-educated self-respecting men. The old idea of the drunken adventurous Jack Tar no longer exists. The modern seamen are a very fine class. Many of them are seamen by heredity. In numerous instances fathers and sons have been Warrant Officers, coming in as boys and rising to the rank of Warrant, Officers. They are a fine class of men and they feel a cut of the kind proposed most severely.
  Nothing will excuse men disobeying orders and defying their officers, but when I hear of cases of insubordination in the Navy I ask, what was the order that was given, who gave it, and in what manner was it given? Usually in a case of disobeying orders or an act, of insubordination there is some misunderstanding on the part of the man or lack of judgment or tact, on the part of the superior officer. That is what I fear has been the case in this instance. The superior officer here is the First Lord himself. I hope the right hon. Gentleman will not try to ride off by saying that he found certain draft instructions when he came into office. I have some sympathy for him. He was pitchforked into this very honourable post which he took at, very short notice, and he had to act quickly. That I appreciate, but he cannot divest himself of his responsibility by saying that he found a certain draft instruction, or whatever it was. That does not excuse

  1115
  him from a course of events for which I think some blame is attributable to the Board of which he is the head.
  There will be, perhaps, some very hard things said about these men. I am sorry to see that one of the Commanders of the Army, one of the Army Divisional Commanders, has issued a sneering message about the officers and men of the Atlantic Fleet—the most powerful and most modern unit in the Navy. Many of the men and the petty officers are senior ratings and must have served in the Great War, and they have the same traditions now as they had then. I would remind the House that during the whole of the Great War there was not one case of concerted insubordination in the Royal Navy. The men of the Navy were on service under tremendous strain. The pay was very low. The 1914 rates were miserably low and were not raised substantially until after the War. There was, however, no failure on the part of the men of the Navy and no concerted insubordination during the whole War. It was the German Navy, with its military methods, with its boast of iron discipline, that broke in the end. Therefore, when hon. Members are inclined to follow the example of this gallant General and to sneer at the men of the Atlantic Fleet, I hope they will remember these facts. Do not let us sneer.
  I would once more plead that in all these matters we must hold on to the constitutional manner of doing things as to an anchor. There has been a lot of loose talk for some years about a dictatorship, either of the right or of the left. So long as this Parliament is supreme, so long as its Constitution remains, the men of the Royal Navy and the officers will be able to look here for ultimate justice. I end by quoting the words that have to be read out by regulation once a quarter on the quarter deck of every man-of-war flying the pennant:
  "It is upon the Navy, under the providence of God, that the safety, honour and welfare of this nation do chiefly depend."
  I believe that history will show that that was true in the last few days, just as much as it has been in the past.
  The FIRST LORD of the ADMIRALTY (Sir Austen Chamberlain): I desire at once to express my appreciation of the
  1116
  way in which the hon. and gallant Member for North Portsmouth (Captain Hall) treated a very delicate subject. I shall address myself to him in the spirit which he showed, and I do not think that he will require more than I shall be able to say. I was particularly glad to hear the hon. and gallant Member pay a tribute to the senior officer commanding the Atlantic Fleet during these anxious days, in the absence of the Commander-in-Chief who, unhappily, is ill in hospital. The Admiralty have already conveyed to him their full approval of the action which he took and of his service during these times. The compliment which the hon. and gallant Member paid to him is one that is well-deserved and which, I am sure, will be most warmly received by the men of the Fleet.
  The hon. and gallant Member went on to say—I believe with perfect truth—that there had been no disrespect shown to officers, no violence of any kind, and, although there was action which cannot be excused, I might almost say that, if such action were taken at all, it speaks well for the general discipline of the Fleet that it should have passed so quietly, without any disturbance except to the actual routine duty. There is one further observation that I want to make, because I think the statement which has appeared in the Press that the Fleet was recalled appears to have conveyed to the lay mind an inaccurate impression of what took place. When the unrest showed itself on the ships in harbour, certain ships had already proceeded to sea in pursuance of the routine work. The Admiral, in the circumstances, thought it desirable to recall those ships and to concentrate the Fleet. That was the whole of what is described as the recall of the Atlantic Fleet, in various statements that I have seen.
  There was one sentence in the hon. and gallant Member's speech to which I take exception. I think he said that in this matter all were together, and the Fleet was a unit. That is not fair to the many who remained perfectly loyal, to the whole body of petty officers and chief petty officers who never deserted their duty, or, at any rate, the great part of them. So much I wish to say on the facts of what took place. Now I turn to the particular case which the hon. and gallant Member

  1117
  made, not in justification, but in palliation of what a portion of the Fleet did. It was profoundly distasteful to my colleagues and to myself—I am speaking of my political colleagues in the Government and of my colleagues on the Board of Admiralty—to have to ask these sacrifices of the men in the naval service just as it was profoundly distasteful to us to have to impose the other sacrifices which the financial situation of the nation renders necessary. The whole country is paying now for a course of policy to which each party, I am afraid, has contributed. No party can be considered wholly free from blame. It can be summed up in the words that we have been living beyond our means at times when our means are decreasing, and a remedy not having been applied earlier the actions which are necessary to provide a remedy when the crisis has arrived are necessarily more drastic and bitter than they would have been if suitable action had been taken earlier. Therefore, solely on the ground of a national emergency, which calls for sacrifices from all, are we asking this sacrifice of the officers and men in the naval service.
  I have mentioned the officers. Let me say that as far as I know there has not been one word of complaint by the men of differential treatment of their officers, and the spirit between officers and men has been the spirit of comradeship and sympathy which has always characterised the Navy. It is not fair to make that comparison without at any rate recalling the fact that while the men's rates of pay have remained unaltered the officer's pay has been cut again and again. This is a cut on a cut, unlike the case of the other ranks to whom a cut is applied. What is the cut? It is not the establishment of a new rate of pay unknown to the Navy hitherto. What the Government asked was that the men who had enlisted previous to 1925 and enjoyed the rates which followed the Jerram Committee should now accept the rates which men in similar positions and doing the same duty receive if they have entered at any time after 1925. It is nothing more than that. It is not a general reduction in the scales of pay in the Navy; it is an assimilation of the pay of men who entered before 1925 to the men who entered after 1925. That is the whole of the change which is made in the pay.
  1118
  That does not quite close the question; that I admit. The men may have been reasonably assured of the stability of their conditions. In some cases they have undertaken liabilities, and these cuts, which places them exactly on a level with men who never had these higher resources, renders their position one of exceptional hardship and unfairness. That is just the kind of case which has been represented and into which we are going to inquire, and I hope we shall find a method of alleviating the hardship. It is clear that the limits within which we can do that are fairly clearly marked out.
  The general scheme of economy laid down by the Government and for which they are asking the sanction of Parliament is in their view required in order to give us any prospect of restoring national prosperity and regaining national credit. We cannot allow that scheme to be eaten away in detail. We are quite ready where there is a particular class, within the general scheme applied to their Service, as I think there is in the Navy, who stiffer exceptional hardship to look into that case and provide a remedy if we can. That is the purpose of the inquiries which will be opened at the earliest possible moment after the arrival of the ships at their home ports by the respective commanders-in-chief. We shall instruct the commanders-in-chief and inform the Fleet that it is our desire that these inquiries shall be conducted with the greatest expedition possible in order that we may have the benefit of the results which they may reveal, so that the final decision of the Government may be given at the earliest possible moment. It is in the interests of everybody to take care that a fair opportunity is given for those concerned to make their representations. It is quite as much in their interests as anybody else that the inquiries should not be prolonged beyond the point which is necessary to elucidate the facts required to form a reasonable judgment.
  I return for a moment to the question of the pay. The hon. and gallant Member says that it is not quite fair to take the loss which a man suffers as a percentage of his emoluments as contrasted with a percentage of his pay. I think it is the fairest test you can apply. The Jerram Committee, whose rates are

  1119
  affected, based their recommendations not on pay alone but on emoluments, and the hon. and gallant Member's ease was that where there are hard cases it was in the effect on the salary alone. If there were no emoluments the sailor would have to find out of his pay what he now gets out of emoluments, and if the pay remained unchanged he could not allot what he has been habitually accustomed to allot. You cannot arrive at the sum he can allot, and has power to allot if he desires, and is willing to allot it, unless you consider not merely his pay but his emoluments, which are part of the resources of his life. These provisions, but for these emoluments, would have to come out of his pay, which would have to be readjusted if it were not for these emoluments.
  It is of course true that the confidence which the men affected by the application of the 1925 rate to the pre-1925 rate feel in the security of the pay to them as individuals as contrasted with the Navy as a whole was not unreasonably founded. When the new scale was introduced in 1925 for all new entrants it was thought very undesirable to disturb the men who had already entered under the expectation of a higher scale of pay. When the Prime Minister wrote the letter which the hon. and gallant Member quoted, the parties in this House, without exception, felt equally the inexpediency of disturbing the arrangement made with these men. I felt its inexpediency then, and I felt it even while I accepted the recommendation. Nothing justified the action we have taken but the national crisis and national necessity. Sacrifices are called for from everyone, from every class. The man in the Navy does not stand alone. Neither the right hon. Gentleman nor I would have stood at this Box With any Ministerial responsibility if it had been sought to solve the nation's difficulty at the exclusive expense of the men in any of the Services. We could only assent to that as part of the general sacrifice. I believe that when the men of the Fleet realise what the national position is, how universal is the sacrifice required, and when particular cases of unequal hardship on particular classes have been dealt with, they, like other citizens, and they before all other citizens in conse-
  1120
  quence of their great tradition, will loyally and cheerfully make their contribution to the nation's need.
  The hon. and gallant Member made an appeal that for what was past there should be no penalisation. The past is past. It is in the interest of everyone in the Navy or out of it to forget it. I am not going to look back. I am going to look forward, and I count confidently on the tradition of the Service and of the men of to-day loyally to uphold them. In that case there will be no looking back to what has happened on this occasion, hut we shall go forward together in the service of the country.
  Mr. A. V. ALEXANDER: I should like, first of all, to pay my tribute to the hon. and gallant Member who introduced this Motion, on the tone of his speech and the tone which has therefore been set to the whole Debate. It would have been a most serious position if a Debate of this kind had developed into anything like an acrimonious discussion of the events of the past few days. No one can have been called upon to servo in any position of responsibility in connection with the British Navy without having grown to love the Service, to love the gentlemen of all ranks in the Navy, and to appreciate the service which they have always rendered to the State. I think my hon. Friends on this side will agree that, in view of what has taken place in the Debate up to now, it will not be necessary to extend it in the direction in which some people feared it might be extended at an earlier period of the day. The statement which has been made by the First Lord means that he is implementing his promise of yesterday of an inquiry into grievances, that there shall be no prolongation of the inquiry, and that therefore any action which will be taken, remedial of the grievances, will be early. He has made what, I think, is a very great gesture by putting the events of the past few days into the past completely. That is an act which will be very much appreciated, and is one which I, having been at one time at the head of the Admiralty, feel is the right one in the circumstances, and one which the whole country will feel is the right thing to do.
  I have only two other things to say to-night, in view of the course that the Debate has taken. The first is that if

  1121
  we are in a position to look back tonight without very serious regret at the events of this week, it is due first to the great stability and loyalty to service of the men themselves, and, secondly—it has been referred to in two quarters—to the very great service rendered in this crisis by Admiral Tomkinson. The sympathetic and tactful action which the acting Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet has taken is only what I would have expected of him from my knowledge of him.
  The right hon. Gentleman has said that the cuts, which are now to be reconsidered with sympathy from the point of view of trying to meet grievances, are in his judgment necessary to meet the national crisis, and must be within the general scheme of economy which the Government consider is necessary for the crisis. I am sure the right hon. Gentleman will not quarrel with me if I sit down with this remark—that we must be free to decide, on another occasion in discussing the details, as to whether we agree that the scheme of economy presented by the Government is the one which would otherwise have been adopted.
  Mr. MILLS rose—
  HON. MEMBERS: Agreed, agreed!
  Mr. SPEAKER: I think the House is now ready to pass to the next business.
  Mr. MILLS: I do not wish to make a speech and to introduce a note of acrimony into the proceedings, but the First Lord made a statement with regard to the petty officers and other officers, and I wish to ask a question.
  Mr. SPEAKER: The First Lord was not the last speaker, and the hon. Member might have put his question when he was speaking.
  Mr. MILLS: I wish to end this discussion as quickly as anyone. I merely want to ask a question relating to those members of the union to which I belong, namely, the engine room artificers, and the complaints that have been made. If, as the First Lord states, they took no part in this disturbance, their claim, having regard to their skilled status, might well have that consideration for which they have asked.
  Mr. LAMBERT: As an old Member of Parliament and one who has been connected with the Navy, I think that the House has done itself credit in its treatment of this Debate. I would pay a great tribute to the hon. Gentleman who moved this Motion, and also express my gratitude to the First Lord and the late First Lord. I would suggest that it would be to the advantage of the House and of the Navy if the Motion could now he withdrawn.
  Captain HALL: I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Motion.
  Motion, by leave, withdrawn.
  Mr. BROCKWAY: On a point of Order. May I draw attention to the fact that when you asked the House whether leave be given to withdraw the Motion, there were lend and persistent shouts of "No"?
  Mr. SPEAKER: They did not reach my ears.

  WAYS AND MEANS.
  REPORT [10TH SEPTEMBER].
  Postponed Proceeding on Consideration of Tenth Resolution, resumed.
  Mr. BENSON: The point which I was trying to make, in connection with the Amendment in my name to the Budget Resolution dealing with Income Tax allowances, is roughly this. The extraordinary efficacy of our British Income Tax depends upon the fact that its working and incidence have the confidence of the taxpayer, and that confidence in the justice of the Income Tax as a method of raising Government income depends upon the extraordinary nicety and delicacy in the way in which the burden may be placed upon the back that is capable of bearing it. This confidence in the equity of the Income Tax is, I maintain, its strongest and most effective buttress. The graduation in the incidence of tax as the income to be taxed grows larger, is, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his Budget speech remarked, achieved largely by the method of allowances, covering such things as personal allowance, earned income allowance, and similar allowances which I need not mention. This system of personal allowances is the basis of our graduation of Income Tax.

  1123
  Under this Budget Resolution the system of allowances is to be altered very drastically, along the lines foreshadowed by the Chancellor in his Budget speech. By that variation of allowances he proposes to widen the net of Income Tax so as to bring in ranges of income which have hitherto remained untaxed, and to increase the burden which all Income Tax payers must bear. Let me say right off that as far as the aim is concerned, I have no criticism whatever to make. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Central Edinburgh (Mr. W. Graham) in a forecast of what the Labour party would do to meet the deficit, specifically mentioned that he was prepared and that the Labour party were prepared to reduce the level at which Income Tax might be paid, and at the same time to vary the allowances and thereby vary the graduation. I move this Amendment to protest not at the object of raising more money but against the variation of the basic principle of our Income Tax, which is a nice appreciation of the amount that ought to be paid by any individual taxpayer.
  The object of the Budget Resolution is to increase the burden upon the Income Tax payers and I hold that the proposal of the Chancellor in laying these fresh burdens does not fall into line with that basic principle of graduation and progressive incidence. I claim that, far from doing so, it violates the basic principle of our Income Tax namely, progressive graduation. I say that there is no relationship between the actual burden imposed by the variation of allowances and the principle of progressive incidence. As a matter of fact, beyond a certain point these new proposals are definitely regressive, and the whole scheme is shot through with the most fantastic and indefensible anomalies.
  In so far as I deal with the incidence of the fresh taxation I am not going to deal with it in percentages. To contrast percentages is a very tricky matter, and one can prove pretty well anything one likes in that way. It is easy to show that an increase of 1s. taxation on one income, may be an increase of 100 per cent. whereas an increase of £1,000 on another income may be little more than 5 or 10 per cent. I propose therefore to eschew entirely the question of percentages, and to confine myself to the question of the
  1124
  absolute and definite burdens that are being imposed. I shall he able to show that even sticking to the absolute burdens the incidence of the fresh taxation is utterly indefensible. Let me take for example the case of the single man with an earned income. The new taxation is progressive until we reach a point somewhere in the neighbourhood of £600. At that point the increased burden of taxation, which is due solely to this re-arrangement of allowances, amounts to £22. That is not the total tax but that part of it which is solely due to the burden of the new allowances. Thereafter it is definitely regressive until we reach £1,500 and then the burden, due to this rearrangement, is £12 on incomes from £1,500 to £2,000 as compared with £22 on the income of £600.
  These figures are worked out to the nearest pound; I do not suggest that they are carried to the nearest shilling. Surely the increased burden ought to be progressive and not regressive, but this system of regression runs right through the whole of these increased burdens. Take the case of a married man with two children. Up to somewhere about £700 income, the fresh burden of tax—again I am speaking purely of that part of it which is due to the rearrangement of the allowances—is progressive; from £700 onwards it is once again regressive, until we come to £1,500, where the burden is £27, as against £36 for the income of £700. That is entirely opposite to the whole principle and policy of British Income Tax.
  It may be said, "That is perfectly true if you are merely isolating that particular part of the tax that is due to a rearrangement of the allowances, but it will be rectified by the fact that the higher incomes suffer an increased burden owing to the increase in the standard rate of tax from 4s. 6d. to 5s." But is that so? If we turn away from the part of the tax which is due solely to the rearrangement of allowances, and turn to the actual increase in the tax itself, we find exactly the same fantastic anomalies running through the increased burden that the Chancellor has placed upon the Income Tax payers. Let me take the actual increase in the tax on a single man. The increase on an income of £500 is £31 fresh tax, and upon

  1125
  £1,000 it is £27, or £4 lower, and when we come to £1,500 the increased burden is £33 10s.; between £500 and £1,500 there is an increase of £1,000 in the income, and that £1,000 bears an increased burden of £2 10s.
  Major ELLIOT: What class is that?
  Mr. BENSON: A single man.
  Major ELLIOT: With an earned income?
  Mr. BENSON: Yes. A man with an earned income of £1,000 pays an increased burden of £4 less than the man with half his income. Let us take the case of a married man with two children, again with an earned income. The increased burden on a married man with two children and with £700 is £33 5s., and on a married with two children and an income of £1,500 it is £43 10s., or a jump of £800 in the income and of £10 in the increased burden of the tax. When we come to an income of £2,000, which is just too low to pay Surtax, we find that the increased burden over the income of £700 is £13 for the fresh tax that is laid upon an income of £2,000 in this category is £56 only. Thus, taking as a basis the married man with two children and £700 a year, a similarly placed married man with an income of 21,300 more pays a beggarly £13 extra tax as his share of sacrifice in the national need.
  Let me take one or two other of these extraordinary anomalies which run through the whole of these new proposals. Take a single man with £1,500 income. 11e pays an increased burden of £33 10s. Take a married man with two children and a similar income of 21,500; is his burden lighter? No, it is £10 heavier. The single man pays £33 10s., and the married man with two children pays £43 10s. Let me take another case to show how little relationship the new taxation has to the status of the taxpayer. Take again the married man with two children and £700 a year. He pays £33 5s. A single man with £1,500 a year pays £33 10s. Does anybody suggest for a moment that the burden of 233 5s. upon a married man with two children is in any way equivalent to the burden of £33 10s. on a single man?
  1126
  These anomalies are simply staggering so far as laying the burden upon the hacks that can best bear it is concerned. Let me give one other instance. Take a single man with £2,000 a year. Under the present taxation he pays £332 tax, and it leaves him with an income of £1,668—a single man without family responsibilities. What is the burden that the Chancellor has put on his back? It is a burden of £46, on a net income of a single man of 21,668. The Prime Minister said that we were to all intents and purposes in a condition analogous to a state of war. I will give the Financial Secretary to the Treasury a slogan which he will probably remember: "Single men first." I think that is a slogan, in view of the that this single man with £2,000 a year pays, which may well take the place of the slogan that the Tory party have made their own in this crisis: "Unemployed men first."
  I now want to revert to the question of the effect of the allowances, and I want to form an impression of the bulk incidence of the tax. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has told us, in reply to a question, that the yield of taxation due to the variation of allowances was £27,500,000 out of the £51,500,000 that he anticipated raising from Income Tax; that is, rather snore than half of the increased yield of the Income Tax is to come from the variation of personal allowances. It is a comparatively simple calculation to find out what proportion of that £27,500,000 is raised from the large incomes of over £2,000 a year and what proportion from incomes under £2,000 a year, and the staggering result of the calculation is that out of the £27,500,000, more than half the total Income Tax, only £2,500,000 comes from payers with incomes over £2,000 a year. From the whole of the Surtax payers the revision of allowances means nothing more than a matter of £2,500,000, roughly, upon the £500,000,000 of incomes that, according to the last figures, were liable to Surtax.
  When we look at figures like this, the less we say about equality of sacrifice the better. I have no figures of the distribution of income below the £2,000 level, but certain deductions can be drawn from general knowledge. We know that the lower the income the larger the number. Thus there are far more incomes of £1,000

  1127
  a year than of £2,000, and far more of £700 than of £1,000. When we examine the incidence of the £25,000,000 which will come from the incomes lower than £2,000, we must bear in mind two facts. The first is that the bulk of the income that is taxable is in the lower range of incomes because they are more numerous. The second is that the individual burden upon the lower income is higher than it is on the higher rate of incomes. If we take £700 as the mean, we shall not be far from the Income Tax range where, to use an electrical phrase, the peak load of this new impost falls; £700 is roughly the point at which the incidence of the tax is heaviest. The individual incomes of £700 downwards will form, undoubtedly, the bulk of the income to be taxed.
  9.0 p.m.
  So we come to this conclusion. The re-arrangement of the personal allowances has fallen with devastating weight upon the lower incomes, and the fresh imposts, whether they be Surtax or the increase in the standard rate, in no way compensate on the larger incomes for the increased burden that is put upon the lower incomes. I want to appeal to the Financial Secretary. We know perfectly well on this side that the Income Tax has to yield more than it was estimated to yield in the last Budget. We know that there must be an increase and some rearrangement of personal allowances. We know that you cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs, and we are not afraid of having eggs broken. There must be increased taxes if you require an increased yield, but surely it is not beyond the powers of the Inland Revenue or of the Treasury to devise some fresh Income Tax impost which is not riddled with the indefensible anomalies that the present proposals show on the slightest examination. Let the suggestions that the Chancellor made in his Budget speech be withdrawn before the Finance Bill is presented, and let us have a fresh scale which is more in consonance with the great spirit of the British Income Tax, and with the suggestion of equality of sacrifice; a scale which he and his leader can feel honestly that they can defend before this House.
  Mr. MORLEY: I beg to second the Amendment.
  1128
  I support the speech which was made by my hon. Friend with such admirable cogency and wealth of detail. We feel that some increased taxation is necessary and inevitable, and that whatever Government had been sitting on the Treasury bench would have had forced on them some increase in the rate of direct taxation. We contend, however, that any increase in direct taxation should be equitable in its incidence over the range of incomes that are affected. Like my hon. Friend, I have made a careful analysis of the increases which will fall upon the Income Tax payer as the result of the diminution of the reliefs and other allowances; and, like him, I have been forced to the conclusion that these proposed increases are extremely inequitable in their incidence. It would appear from a fairly careful analysis that the main burden of the increased incidence of the Income Tax will fall upon the range of incomes from £500 to £700 a year. My hon. Friend has given several instances of direct increases as a result of the diminution in the reliefs and allowances. I want to give a few examples based upon percentage reckoning, though I know that percentages are very often a trap for the unwary, but I have calculated these percentages on as fair a basis as possible.
  Take a married man with two children with an income of £400 a year. Previous to the alteration in reliefs and allowances he paid no Income Tax. Now he will have to pay £10 per year. A married man with two children and an income of £500 previously paid £8 4s.; now he will have to pay £20. The increase in the payment of Income Tax for such a man amounts to 144 per cent. of the previous tax he had to pay. A married man with an income of £700 and two children has his Income Tax increased from £24 18s. to £58 2s. 6d., which is a percentage increase of 142. A married man with two children who is enjoying an income of £900 previously paid £62 2s. 6d., but under the new arrangement he will pay £98 2s. 6d., which is an increase of only 58 per cent. as compared with the increase of 144 per cent. in the case of a man earning £500, and 142 per cent. in the case of a man earning £700. I would like the House to observe that the increase in Income Tax on a married man with two children who is earning £700 a year will be £34 a year, and on a married man with two

  1129
  children in receipt of £900 a year the increase will be £36. A £200 increase in income brings an increase of £2 only in Income Tax. That is definitely a retrogressive form of taxation.
  Next I would take the case of a secondary school teacher earning £600 a year. Before the alteration in the relief allowances such a teacher paid £16 10s. a year in tax. That left him with a net income of £583 10s. With the 15 per cent. cut which is proposed he will now suffer an immediate diminution of £90 in his income, which will bring it down to £510. In addition to that his Income Tax—I am assuming that he is married and with two children—will be increased to £38 25. 6d a year. That leaves him with a net income of £471 17s. 6d. The first of these imposts will come upon him on 1st October, and two-thirds of the additional impost will fall upon him in January. As a result of the cut and of the increase in income Tax he will lose out of his income of £600 the sum of £111 12s. 6d. On the other hand, take a single man receiving £4,000 a year. With the proposed increase in Income Tax his income will be reduced by £111 12s. 6d.—[Interruption]—I am including Income Tax and Surtax—precisely the same reduction as in the ease of the married teacher with two children who is earning £600 a year. Nobody can argue that that is putting into practice the principle of equality of sacrifice.
  I would point out to hon. Members opposite that the class which is most heavily affected by this increase in direct taxation due to the diminution in reliefs and allowances is the class in receipt of incomes from £500 to £800 a year or thereabouts. That class is the middle class, of which hon. Members opposite have always been, in their own estimation at all events, the most inveterate champions. That is the class from which they have drawn the greatest and most constant volume of electoral support, and as a vote of thanks for that support I hope they will follow us into the Lobby to-night in support of this Amendment. [HON. MEMBERS: "Are the middle class complaining?"] I think they will complain, and complain very vociferously, and in all probability they will signal their complaints in a way which will not be pleasant to hon. Members opposite at the forthcoming General Election.
  1130
  In addition to these very inequitable increases in the incidence of Income Tax so far as the salaries of the middle class are concerned, a whole new range of very small incomes will be brought within the scope of Income Tax. A single man earning £150 a year will now be called upon to pay £2 a year Income Tax. If these proposals are adopted, a single man with £150 a year will, from now onwards, pay as much as a single man with £200 a year paid formerly, or a married man with no children with £300 a year. It may be argued that a tax of £2 10s. a year on a single man with an income of £150 a year is no very onerous or unbearable impost, but at the same time that we are imposing this tax of £2 10s. a year on that income we are also increasing the tax upon beer and tobacco. Even if this supposititious single man with £150 a year is most moderate in his consumption of these two luxuries, the increased taxation he will pay will amount to about 6d. a week, or another 26s. a year. In addition to that a man earning £150 a year will almost certainly be in an insurable occupation, and will be called upon to pay an additional 3d. a week as a contribution towards unemployment insurance. Further, whenever he goes to a cinema or a theatre he will have to pay an additional tax upon the seat which he occupies. It may very well be argued that there is a good case for having one tax, the Income Tax, and of levying that progressively upon the lowest income up to the highest incomes, but I say it is unfair to impose an increase in direct taxation upon very low incomes and at the same time to impose a considerably increased contribution in the way of indirect taxation.
  The reliefs formerly available to a single man in respect of assessment to income tax amounted to £135 a year, and to a married man to £225 a year. I do not know how those figures were arrived at, but I assume that the Treasury officials calculated that the net cost of keeping a wife was £90 a year. With the alteration in the standard of relief the single man is relieved of £100 a year and the married man of £150 a year. That is to say, apparently the net cost of keeping a wife has fallen from £90 a year to £50. I do not know that there is any evidence in support of that reduction. We are being told in the Press that women are entering upon an era of in-

  1131
  creasing femininity. So far as we have been able to judge in the past, the more feminine women become the more expensive they are, and I do not think any argument can be brought forward in support of this decrease in the difference in the relief between single men and married men. In conclusion, while I cannot appeal to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury or to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who are not here, I appeal to hon. Members opposite to use their influence with their Front Bench to prevent unjust impositions of inequitable taxation, which will fall chiefly upon the very class which has supported them electorally in the past and to which they will look for their chief support in the forthcoming election.
  Mr. B. RILEY: I wish to associate myself with my two hon. Friends in their statement that we are not objecting to the increase of the Income Tax. I am quite sure that most of us on this side of the House would not object to the rates of Income Tax being placed higher than they are. What we do complain about is the disparity between the relief which this new Budget provides for a single person as against a married person. It would appear that the Government, for some reason, want to promote celibacy and discourage people from getting married. In other words, they say, "Do not get married or we will make it expensive for you." I hope the Financial Secretary may have something to say by way of explanation of what I think will be admitted is an inexplicable disparity between the so-called reliefs to married Income Tax payers and single ones. The facts are that under existing arrangements there is a relief of £225 a year for the married man, plus the first deduction which is made. On the first slice of his taxable income he pays only 2s. on the first £250. His personal allowance is now reduced from £225 to £150, and he will pay half rate on £175. In both cases he loses £75. The married man sustains a net loss of £150 in the way of relief under the new Budget. If he happens to have two children he loses £10 on each child, and that makes an additional loss of £20. Take the case of a single man who has not the responsibility of a family. He only loses £110 as against £180 loss in relief by the
  1132
  married man with three children. The married man now loses £110 in relief. That is what is called equality of sacrifice.
  I ask on what grounds the Financial Secretary can defend that disparity, and I would like to point out that it works out in the lower stages in an equally extraordinary way. Take the case of a married man with an income of £750 and a single person with an earned income of £1,500. The single person under this Budget is asked to pay on £1,500 an extra tax of £33 10s., while the married man with two children and an income of £750 is asked to pay an extra tax of £34 10s. Therefore, the married man in this case, with £750 a year, pays more than the single man who has £1,500. One would have thought that these proposals would have had some regard to equity, but there is nothing in them but inequality.
  Major ELLIOT: The criticisms to which we have listened are not submitted against the Resolution which is before the House as far as relief is concerned, because it is agreed that there must be a regrading of the tax, and the amount to be raised by the Income Tax has already been fixed.
  Mr. B. RILEY: May I remind the hon. and gallant Gentleman that the Amendment which has been moved deals with these reliefs?
  Major ELLIOT: I was coming to the various points which have emerged in the discussion. I think there is general agreement as to the increase of the tax, and agreement that a larger number of taxpayers should be brought in. Therefore, some rearrangement of the reliefs is necessary. All this brings us back to the fundamental question of the raising of the money, and it is from the angle of raising the money that we have to examine this problem. The main accusation of the Opposition, and more particularly the accusation of the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benson), who delivered a well-informed speech full of statistical information, is that the arrangement now proposed leaves differences in the incidence of the Income Tax which it is impossible to defend.
  The very core of our defence is that this grading by means of allowances to which the hon. Member for Chesterfield

  1133
  and other hon. Members made reference, is not by any means such a hoary and antique part of the structure as has been made out. I think there is whole-hearted agreement that the strength of this tax lies in the confidence which the ordinary person has in the justice of the tax, and the way in which it is adjusted to the shoulders of the people who have to bear it. These proposals have been worked out, not by theoretical considerations, but by practical methods, and they cannot be rejected merely in the light of the difficulties and anomalies which have been put forward or by citing this or that hard case. These proposals cannot be examined as an abstract question; they have to be considered in relation to the burdens which have been piled upon the taxpayer in the past. Readjustments must be taken into account in conjunction with adjustments which in the past years, and particularly in the past two years, have been heaped upon the shoulders of the direct taxpayer. The increases of the tremendous burden have come to such a point for the higher range of incomes that the State takes two-thirds of a man's income while fie is living and one half of his estate at death. The hon. Member for Chesterfield said: "That is not enough. Heap greater burdens upon him; he can stand it."
  Mr. BENSON: I do not wish to interrupt the hon. Gentleman except to say that I was most careful not to suggest that a practicable method was the piling of still higher taxes upon the extreme ranges. I am perfectly well aware that you may get into all kinds of trouble such as diminishing returns. It was anomalies in the lower ranges of taxation that I dealt with specially.
  Major ELLIOT: "Lower ranges," of course, is a relative phrase.
  Mr. BENSON: Up to £2,000.
  Major ELLIOT: Some of the illustrations of hon. Members opposite were drawn from incomes such as, or higher than, £4,000 or £5,000. Leaving the matter simply as one of incomes up to £2,000, let us first of all examine them. We are agreed that on those arises the rearrangement of the allowances. Let us see where the allowances arise from. They arise mainly as the result of the Royal Commission on the Income Tax. They are the allowances which were fixed
  1134
  on the direct understanding that they were subject to a review at a later date. The extracts from the report are familiar to hon. Members in all parts of the House. They suggest that the limits should be maintained until there is a substantial change in the cost of living and that they should not fluctuate from year to year. Various Chancellors of the Exchequer came in after those years. The Chancellor of the Exchequer under whom I have at present the honour to serve introduced a Budget which was greeted with great applause by hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite a Budget which they supported then, and for many years afterwards. I am not talking of the Chancellor's position at the present moment, but of his position at that time and for years afterwards, when he was supported by the enthusiastic chorus of those who are now criticising most keenly the present arrangement which he is making. Compare the arrangements which he is making now with the arrangements which he was making then. Take a married taxpayer with three children, and with an income of £135 per year; in 1924–5 he paid no Income Tax and he will pay no Income Tax now. A man in a similar position with £200 per year paid no income Tax then and he pays no Income Tax now. One with £300 paid no Income Tax then, and he pays no Income Tax now. One of the hard cases given by the hon. Gentleman was that of a man with £400 income, the exiguous sum equal to the salary of an hon. Member of this House before the axe fell upon it. That man paid £5 1s. 3d. under the proposals of my right hon. Friend then: he pays less than that now, for under the new proposal he pays £5 net.
  Under what defence can the hon. Member come forward and say that the proposals, which he so enthusiastically supported in those years, are so mean and crushing and anomalous in the present year? The emergency is greater, and owing to the exemptions being allowed the allowance was increased and the tax yield went down. The married man with three children was for years, owing to the easier circumstances of the country, allowed to get off with less. Income Tax. The hon. Gentleman sees that the same kind of impost was exacted in 1924–25 that it is proposed to ask him to take in this present year of grace, and

  1135
  in the presence of this emergency. Everyone must see that a sum recognised as reasonable in those days cannot be regarded as excessive or unreasonable to-day. When we come to incomes of £500 we get into the range of peak increases. In 1924–25, a married man with three children was asked to bear a tax burden of £15 3s. 9d. What is he asked to bear to-day? A tax burden of less than that—£15.
  It seems to me that these examples alone knock the bottom out of the case presented by the hon. Member for Chesterfield and his friends. They expose what is the weakness of the case which they have skilfully argued and presented, namely, that the big increases to the married man are disproportionate to those which have been asked for from other classes of the community. Take a reductio ad absurdum. Bring in a man who last year was not paying any Income Tax, and ask him to pay even £1 of tax, this year, or one penny. The increase is not 1 per cent, or 2 per cent., or 100 per cent., or 1,000 per cent.; it is an increase of an infinity. On the lower ranges of the tax with people who were exempted, the difference is infinitely wide, because it is a gap between a tax and no tax. I submit to hon. Members that comparison between incomes as they were reviewed and as taxation was placed upon them in past years, and the taxes which are placed upon them in the present year, is a juster way of looking at it and more in consonance with the historical position of the Income Tax to which the hon. Member for Chesterfield appealed, than the statistical calculations with which he delighted the House.
  He does not wish me to quote any of the higher ranges. Indeed, it would be only too easy to give examples of taxation which is positively crushing in the upper ranges of taxation. The arguments which have been brought forward do not take into account sufficiently that we are on our way every year towards a juster arrangement of the Income Tax. This year in an emergency we seek an emergency solution. "Withdraw these proposals "says the hon. Member for Chesterfield," and introduce a juster scale." Have we any security that the hon. Member and his friends will not again demonstrate to us that, in a range of cases, they can show just as many
  1136
  anomalies as they have been able to show in the scale which we are presenting to the House?
  Time is running on. Time is a necessary part of this contract. Great administrative changes have to be put through, thousands of forms have to be sent out, assessments have to be made, appeals have to be heard and hard cases examined. We are asked to make an emergency case to deal with an emergency. I have shown that in general the burdens laid upon the taxpayers in this emergency are not greater than the burdens which have been laid upon the shoulders of the taxpayer in the past. We do not pretend that the burdens are perfect or are the ideal solution; after comparing any other scale with the one that we are bringing before the House, it will be agreed that this is as good, fair, and harmonious a scale as can possibly be found.
  "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars."
  the fault is in the burdens that you have to hear. Any of these burdens will be grievous and will be heavy upon the shoulders of the community. Let us not discuss the exact adjustments, but brace ourselves to go forward and shoulder these tremendous burdens and to resolve to get the country as soon as possible into a state in which we can again reduce these allowances and bring down the ranges of Income Tax, as has been done before. That is the task that we have before us. Discussion of trivialities will be sterile, and I suggest that the House might now pass the further stages of the Income Tax Resolution.
  Mr. MUGGERIDGE: We have heard from the Front Government Bench an appeal to which we have become quite accustomed. On that bench, where they have the benefit of the very greatest mathematical skill, they have failed entirely to deal with the, anomalies presented by my two hon. Friends who have moved and seconded this Amendment, and they fall back upon the cry with which as I have said, we are already familiar, that this is an emergency; and when there is an emergency you can, presumably, commit as many arithmetical anomalies as you please, and they will all be excused you. The mere fact that it is an emergency means, surely, that an hon. Member representing a Govern-

  1137
  ment such as that with which we are faced should tread very warily, because, unless, in these matters of taking people's income away from them—which is what taxation means—you proceed very carefully, you will do more harm with your taxation than you can possibly do good by it. Because it is an emergency, I suggest that the cases which have been submitted have raised some very important discrepancies which ought seriously to be looked into.
  We were taken back—and this is another of the old excuses with which we are getting very familiar—we were taken hack, though I am not quite sure that it was by the hon. and gallant Gentleman, to Pitt. When Pitt drew up his scale, he only thought of income. It is a recent development, and very much more scientific, that, when you want to fit the burden to the back, you also take account of the compulsory expenditure. That has been done. These allowances represent an adjustment in respect of those compulsory items of expenditure which every man, married or unmarried, has to meet, and an attempt to adjust them to the back that has to bear them. But we came down to even later history. We came down to 1924, and my hon. Friends are assumed to have overlooked the fact that many of the things that were done by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who happens to be the same Chancellor of the Exchequer that we have to-day, were opposed by the hon. and gallant Gentleman as vigorously as he supports them as a precedent to-day?
  What are the facts that he adduces? They are that the same people who paid no Income Tax then are paying no Income Tax now. I admit that, when you come to compare people who were paying nothing with people who are paying nothing, you cannot make any point about it, but what my hon. Friend did was, not to go to people who paid nothing, but to go a little higher in the scale, where you come across the unfortunate people who have to pay something, and he proved that in many cases those people, when they are married and have the same income as unmarried people, frequently have to bear a, very much heavier burden in relation to the emergency calls upon them than does the man who is unmarried; and that is a point which I think is germane to the
  1138
  discussion. We are not dealing with Income Tax in general, but in relation to this emergency. I am very sorry to have to repeat that word. The hon. and gallant Gentleman must be very tired of it; he has used it so often to explain his own discrepancies and to cover up the tracks of his own mistaken Government. The emergency, we are told, is here, and this House is asked to do its best to meet it; and it is in meeting that emergency, and not in trying to arrive at some mathematical equality, that we think the injustice has been done.
  Let me give one or two instances of my own to show how severely, not this tax, but this alteration of the allowances, operates in quite simple cases. Take the case of a teacher, because his salary can be got at. You know his salary, and that is probably one reason why he has had to suffer such severe cuts. You do not know the income of the man in the City. You have to guess at it, until the Income Tax man wants particulars, which have to be furnished in private. The teacher's salary is not a private matter, but a public matter. We all know the teachers' salaries, and for that reason I go to them for my examples. Take the case of a single man beginning in the profession, coming straight from college, perhaps at the age of 21 or 22, after spending three or four years at a training college. He begins, at the age of 22, at a salary which an ordinary bank clerk would despise, namely, £192. He deducts from that one-sixth—I am giving the figures as they stand to-day, until this reforming procedure. We have proceeded, according to the hon. and gallant Gentleman, to a juster process of taxation by a method of trial and error year by year, and I suppose that this is a new attempt along that road to purity in these matters. Taking the commencing salary of £192, and deducting one-sixth, as he is allowed to do if he pays before the end of this month, that leaves £160. His allowance is £130, so that he has to pay on £30 at the rate of 2s.—not at half the standard rate, but less than half—and his total contribution to the needs of his country is £3. But an emergency has happened. We are told so, and we have to believe it. We are constantly having it dinned into us, and we are beginning to believe that there is an emergency.

  1139
  I will take the same man who is leaving college in the same way. He is now informed that, having begun four or five years ago confronted with a certain scale of salaries and certain expectations, he does not now begin at £192, that there has been an emergency in the interval, and that, as a result of the emergency, his commencing salary will be £153. Then the Chancellor has been gentle. He has said, "We will not allow you one-sixth upon earned income, but one-fifth." That is very kind; it looks very nice on the surface; but you have to beware of this Chancellor who is going in for this process of trial and error in order to arrive at an absolutely just system of taxation, and you have to look this gift horse in the mouth very much. At present it looks very well. One-fifth of £153 is, roughly speaking, £31, and that leaves this teacher, this man who has to fulfil the duties that his country calls upon him to fulfil after six or seven years' training, with £122 of assessable income. His allowance, owing to this kindly disposed Chancellor, is £100, and he thinks, perhaps, that that is a very nice sum, until he compares it with his predecessor, whose allowance was £130. That leaves £22, and £22 at 2s. 6d., which he has to pay now, amounts to £2 15s., as against the other man's £3. But, on the top of the £2 15s., he has suffered a cut of £29 in his salary, and altogether is contributing £31 15s. He has nothing to thank the Chancellor for, at any rate.
  Let us now leave the case of the single men, who, until they get married, can look after themselves, and who, I think, will be less and less disposed, when they see the figures I put before them, to get married. Let us leave them, and come to the quite mature married man who has gone so far as to have two children, and from that point of view may be said to be truly a married man. It may be after 20 years in a school, which has enabled him to arrive at his maximum. His maximum was, until the new scale was applied, £408 a year. From that he is allowed one-sixth, that is £68. That comes to £340. The allowance is £130 for himself, £90 for his wife—I suppose that is the respective value of the two kinds of property—£50 for one child and £40 for the other. That makes a total allowance of £310 and he has £30 left on which he has to pay the half tax. That half tax is 2s.
  1140
  in the £ at the moment and this family man, with two children and 20 years service, at the maximum of his scale, is only called upon to pay £3 Income Tax at the moment. Again his country appeals to him. It calls on him and says, "Make sacrifices equal to the sacrifices of other people." Let us see how that sacrifice works out. His salary now, owing to the sacrifice that he has not so much made but has had forced upon him—there is a very great difference between sacrificing and being sacrificed which, up to the present, the House has not recognised—is reduced from the proud figure of £408 to the rather contemptible sum of £347. From that you take a fifth of the earned income, which is £69, roughly speaking, leaving him with £278 taxable.
  What are the allowances from that? For himself £100, for his wife £50 and for the two children £70. He gets £220 as against £310 if lie had been so fortunate as to live in this country before the emergency occurred. In other words, his allowances have fallen off 30 per cent., which is double the cut in his salary. They were £310. They are now £220. It is the same wife and the same children, but the allowance has gone down. For some reason they have deteriorated owing to the emergency. Now he gets £220, which leaves him with £58. What is his position net? After all, when you are dealing with Income Tax you have to consider what it comes to in pounds, shillings and pence. In his case it comes to £58 at 2s. 6d. in the pound—£7 5s. In other words, the man who has had no cut pays £3, but the man who has had a cut of £61 in his salary has to pay an Income Tax nearly three times the tax that his friend has to pay. That is to me a sure sign that these allowances have not been properly arranged. They are too low. But we are not without our alternatives. It is absurd for the Financial Secretary to ask us to believe that these alterations in the allowances are made for the purpose of improving the machinery of our Income Tax or the system under which it is fitted to the back that has to bear it. I do not believe that was the consideration. It was what was easiest. The right hon. Gentleman himself suggested that, because he said, "There is an emergency. We cannot go into all these nice little calculations. We

  1141
  have not had time." There was an easier and a juster method, which was to have raised by 3d. or 4d., or whatever is necessary, the Income Tax for the whole Income Tax bearing people rather than take the poorer people, give these reduced allowances and throw upon their backs, in addition to the sacrifices they have already made, these much
  heavier sacrifices which they had to make before this Reform Bill was brought into play.
  Question put, "That the words proposed to be left out, to the word 'and', in line 3, stand part of the Resolution."
  The House divided: Ayes, 264; Noes, 190.

  Division No. 478.]

  AYES.

  [9.52 p.m.

  Acland-Troyte, Lieut. -Colonel

  Culverwell, C. T. (Bristol, West)

  Hutchison, Maj.-Gen. Sir R.

  Ainsworth, Lieut.-Col. Charles

  Cunliffe-Lister, Rt. Hon. Sir Philip

  Inskip, Sir Thomas

  Altchison, Rt. Hon. Craigle M.

  Dalkeith, Earl of

  Iveagh, Countess of

  Albery, Irving James

  Dairymple-White, Lt.-Col. Sir Godfrey

  Jones, Llewellyn, F.

  Alexander, Sir Wm. (Glasgow, Cent'l)

  Davidson, Rt. Hon. J. (Hertford)

  Jones, Henry Haydn (Merioneth)

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

  Davies, Dr. Vernon

  Jones, Rt. Hon, Leif (Camborne)

  Aske, Sir Robert

  Davies, E. C. (Montgomery)

  Jowitt, Rt. Hon. Sir W. A. (Preston)

  Astor, Maj. Hon. John J.(Kent, Dover)

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

  Kedward, R. M. (Kent, Ashford)

  Atkinson, C.

  Dawson, Sir Philip

  Kindersley, Major G. M.

  Baldwin, Rt. Hon. Stanley (Bewdley)

  Denman, Hon. R. D.

  Lamb, Sir J. Q

  Balfour, Captain H. H. (I. of Thanet)

  Despencer-Robertson, Major J. A. F.

  Lambert, Rt. Hon. George (S. Molton)

  Balniel, Lord

  Dixey, A. C.

  Lane Fox, Col. Rt. Hon. George R.

  Beamish, Rear-Admiral T. P. H.

  Duckworth, G. A. V.

  Law, Sir Alfred (Derby, High Peak)

  Beaumont, M. W.

  Dugdale, Capt. T. L.

  Leighton, Major B. E. P.

  Bellairs, Commander Carlyon

  Eden, Captain Anthony

  Lewis, Oswald (Colchester)

  Bennett, Sir E. N. (Cardiff, Central)

  Edmondson, Major A. J.

  Llewellin, Major J. J.

  Berry, Sir George

  Elliot, Major Walter E.

  Locker-Lampson, Rt. Hon. Godfrey

  Betterton, Sir Henry B.

  Elmley, Viscount

  Locker-Lampion, Com. O.(Handsw'th)

  Bevan, S. J. (Holborn)

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

  Lockwood, Captain J, H.

  Birchall, Major Sir John Dearman

  Evans, Capt. Ernest (Welsh Univer.)

  Long, Major Hon. Eric

  Birkett, W. Norman

  Everard, W. Lindsay

  Lovat-Fraser, J. A.

  Blindell, James

  Falle, Sir Bertram G.

  Lymington, Viscount

  Boothby, R. J. G.

  Ferguson, Sir John

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

  Bowater, Col. Sir T. Vansittart

  Fison, F. G. Clavering

  MacDonald, Malcolm (Bassetlaw)

  Bowyer, Captain Sir George E. W.

  Foot, Isaac

  Macdonald, Capt. P. D. (I. of W.)

  Boyce, Leslie

  Ford, Sir P. J.

  Maclean, Sir Donald (Cornwall, N.)

  Bracken, B.

  Forestier-Walker, Sir L.

  Macpherson, Rt. Hon. James I.

  Braithwaite, Major A. N.

  Fremantle, Lieut.-Colonel Francis E.

  Macquisten, F. A.

  Briscoe, Richard George

  Galbraith, J. F. W.

  Maitland, A. (Kent, Faversham)

  Broadbent, Colonel J.

  Ganzoni, Sir John

  Makins, Brigadier-General E.

  Brown, Ernest (Leith)

  Gault, Lieut.-Col. A. Hamilton

  Mander, Geoffrey le M.

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

  George, Major G. Lloyd (Pembroke)

  Margesson, Captain H. D.

  Buchan, John

  George, Megan Lloyd (Anglesea)

  Marjoribanks, Edward

  Buchan-Hepburn, P. G. T.

  Gillett, George M.

  Markham, S. F.

  Bullock, Captain Malcolm

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

  Mason, Colonel Glyn K.

  Burgin, Dr. E. L.

  Glassey, A. E.

  Meller, R. J.

  Burton, Colonel H. W.

  Glyn, Major R. G. C.

  Merriman, Sir F. Boyd

  Butler, R. A.

  Gower, Sir Robert

  Millar, J. D.

  Cadogan, Major Hon. Edward

  Graham, Fergus (Cumberland, N.)

  Monsell, Eyres, Com. Rt. Hon. Sir B.

  Campbell, E. T.

  Granville, E.

  Morris, Rhys Hopkins

  Carver, Major W. H.

  Gray, Milner

  Morrison, W. S. (Glos., Cirencester)

  Castle Stewart, Earl of

  Greaves-Lord, Sir Walter

  Muirhead, A. J.

  Cautley, Sir Henry S.

  Greene, W. P. Crawford

  Nail-Cain, A. R. N.

  Cayzer, Sir C. (Chester, City)

  Grenfell, Edward C. (City of London)

  Nathan, Major H. L.

  Cayzer, Maj. Sir Herbt. R. (Prtsmth.S.)

  Gretton, Colonel Rt. Hon. John

  Newman, Sir R. H. S. D. L. (Exeter)

  Cazalet, Captain Victor A.

  Griffith, F. Kingsley (Middlesbro' W.)

  Nicholson, O. (Westminster)

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

  Gritten, W. G. Howard

  O'Connor, T. J,

  Chadwick, Capt. Sir Robert Burton

  Gunston, Captain D. W.

  Oliver, P. M. (Man., Blackley)

  Chamberlain, Rt. Hn. Sir J.A.(Birm., W.)

  Hacking, Rt. Hon. Douglas H.

  Oman, Sir Charles William C.

  Chamberlain, Rt. Hon. N. (Edgbaston)

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

  Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. William

  Chapman, Sir S.

  Hamilton, Sir George (Ilford)

  Owen, Major G. (Carnarvon)

  Christie, J. A.

  Hamilton, Sir R. (Orkney & Zetland)

  Peake, Capt. Osbert

  Church, Major A. G.

  Hanbury, C.

  Penny, Sir George

  Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston Spencer

  Hannon, Patrick Joseph Henry

  Percy, Lord Eustace (Hastings)

  Clydesdale, Marquess of

  Harbord, A.

  Perkins, W. R. D.

  Cobb, Sir Cyril

  Hartington, Marquess of

  Peters, Dr. Sidney John

  Cockerill, Brig-General Sir George

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

  Peto, Sir Basil E. (Devon, Barnstaple)

  Colfox, Major William Philip

  Haslam, Henry C.

  Power, Sir John Cecil

  Colman, N. C. D,

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

  Pownail, Sir Assheton

  Colville, Major D. J,

  Heneage, Lieut.-Colonel Arthur P.

  Purbrick, R.

  Conway, Sir W. Martin

  Hennessy, Major Sir G. R. J.

  Pybus, Percy John

  Cooper, A. Duff

  Hills, Major Rt. Hon. John Waller

  Ramsay, T. B. Wilton

  Courtauld, Major J. S.

  Hope, Sir Harry (Forfar)

  Ramsbotham, H.

  Cowan, D. M.

  Hore-Belisha, Leslie

  Rathbone, Eleanor

  Cranborne, Viscount

  Home, Rt. Hon. Sir Robert S.

  Rawson, Sir Cooper

  Crichton-Stuart, Lord C.

  Howard-Bury, Colonel C. K.

  Reid, David D. (County Down)

  Croft, Brigadier-General Sir H.

  Hunter-Weston, Lt.-Gen. Sir Aylmer

  Remer, John R.

  Crookshank, Capt. H. C.

  Hurd, Percy A.

  Rentoul, Sir Gervals S.

  Rhys, Hon. C. A. U.

  Smith, Louis W. (Sheffield, Hallam)

  Turton, Robert Hugh

  Richardson, Sir P. W. (Sur'y, Ch'te'y)

  Smith, R. W.(Aberd'n & Klnc'dlne, C.)

  Vaughan-Morgan, Sir Kenyon

  Roberts, Sir Samuel (Ecclesall)

  Smith-Carington, Neville W.

  Walters, Rt. Hon. Sir J. Tudor

  Rodd, Rt. Hon. Sir James Rennell

  Smithers, Waldron

  Ward, Lieut.-Col. Sir A. Lambert

  Rosbotham, D. S. T.

  Snowden, Rt. Hon. Philip

  Warrender, Sir Victor

  Ross, Ronald D.

  Somerville, A. A. (Windsor)

  Waterhouse, Captain Charles

  Russell, Alexander West (Tynemouth)

  Southby, Commander A. R. J.

  Wayland, Sir William A.

  Russell, Richard John (Eddlsbury)

  Spender-Clay, Colonel H.

  Wells, Sydney R.

  Salmon, Major I.

  Stanley, Lord (Fylde)

  White, H. G.

  Samuel, A. M. (Surrey, Farnham)

  Stanley, Hon. O. (Westmorland)

  Williams, Charles (Devon, Torquay)

  Samuel, Rt. Hon. Sir H. (Darwen)

  Steel-Maitland, Rt. Hon. Sir Arthur

  Wilson, G. H. A. (Cambridge U.)

  Samuel, Samuel (W'dsworth, Putney)

  Stewart, W. J. (Balfast South)

  Windsor-Clive, Lieut.-Colonel George

  Sandeman, Sir N. Stewart

  Stuart, Hon. J. (Moray and Nairn)

  Withers, Sir John James

  Sassoon, Rt. Hon. Sir Philip A. G. D.

  Sueter, Rear-Admiral M. F.

  Wolmer, Rt. Hon. Viscount

  Savery, S. S.

  Taylor, Vice-Admiral E. A.

  Womersley, W. J.

  Scott, James

  Thomas, Rt. Hon. J. H. (Derby)

  Wood, Rt. Hon. Sir Kingsley

  Shakespeare, Geoffrey H.

  Thomson, Sir F.

  Wood, Major McKenzie (Banff)

  Shepperson, Sir Ernest Whittome

  Titchfield, Major the Marquess of

  Young, Rt. Hon. Sir Hilton

  Simon, Rt. Hon. Sir John

  Todd, Capt. A. J.

  Sinclair, Rt. Hon. Sir A. (Caithness)

  Train, J.

  TELLERS FOR THE AYES.—

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

  Tryon, Rt. Hon. George Clement

  Captain Wallace and Captain Hudson.

  NOES.

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

  Hall, G. H. (Merthyr Tydvil)

  Muggeridge, H. T.

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

  Hall, J. H. (Whitechapel)

  Murnin, Hugh

  Addison, Rt. Hon. Dr. Christopher

  Hall, Capt. W. G. (Portsmouth, C.)

  Naylor, T. E.

  Alexander, Rt. Hon. A. V. (Hillsbro')

  Hamilton, Mary Agnes (Blackburn)

  Noel Baker, P. J.

  Amman, Charles George

  Hardle, David (Rutherglen)

  Noel-Buxton, Baroness (Norfolk, N.)

  Arnott, John

  Hardie, G. D. (Springburn)

  Oliver, George Harold (Ilkeston)

  Attlee, Clement Richard

  Hastings, Dr. Somerville

  Palin, John Henry

  Ayles, Walter

  Haycock, A. W.

  Paling, Wilfrid

  Baker, John (Wolverhampton, Bilston)

  Hayes, John Henry

  Parkinson, John Allen (Wigan)

  Barnes, Alfred John

  Henderson, Joseph (Ardwick)

  Perry, S. F.

  Barr, James

  Henderson, W. W. (Middx., Enfield)

  Pethick-Lawrence, F. W.

  Batey, Joseph

  Herriotts, J.

  Phillips, Dr. Marion

  Bennett, William (Battersea, South)

  Hicks, Ernest George

  Potts, John S.

  Benson, G.

  Hirst, G. H. (York W. R. Wentworth)

  Price, M. P.

  Bowen, J. W.

  Hirst, W. (Bradford, South)

  Quibell, D. J. K.

  Bowerman, Rt. Hon. Charles W.

  Hoffman, P. C.

  Raynes, W. R.

  Broad, Francis Alfred

  Horrabin, J. F.

  Richardson, R. (Houghton-le-Spring)

  Bromley, J.

  Hudson, James H. (Huddersfield)

  Riley, Ben (Dewsbury)

  Brothers, M.

  Isaacs, George

  Ritson, J.

  Brown, Rt. Hon. J. (South Ayrshire)

  Jenkins, Sir William

  Romeril, H. G.

  Buchanan, G.

  John, William (Rhondda, West)

  Salter, Dr. Alfred

  Burgess, F. G.

  Jones, J. J. (West Ham, Silvertown)

  Samuel, H. Walter (Swansea, West)

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

  Jones, Morgan (Caerphilly)

  Sanders, W. S.

  Cameron, A. G

  Kelly, W. T.

  Sandham, E.

  Cape, Thomas

  Kennedy, Rt. Hon. Thomas

  Scrymgeour, E.

  Carter, W. (St. Pancras, S.W.)

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

  Sexton, Sir James

  Charleton, H. C.

  Kinley, J.

  Shepherd, Arthur Lewis

  Chater, Daniel

  Lansbury, Rt. Hon. George

  Sherwood, G. H.

  Cluse, W. S.

  Lathan, G. (Sheffield, Park)

  Shiels, Dr. Drummond

  Cocks, Frederick Seymour

  Law, A. (Rossendale)

  Shillaker, J. F.

  Compton, Joseph

  Lawson, John James

  Shinwell, E.

  Cove, William G.

  Lawther, W. (Barnard Castle)

  Short, Alfred (Wednesbury)

  Cripps, Sir Stafford

  Leach, W.

  Simmons, C. J.

  Daggar, George

  Lee, Frank (Derby, N.E.)

  Sinkinson, George

  Dalton, Hugh

  Lee, Jennie (Lanark, Northern

  Sitch, Charles H.

  Davies, D. L. (Pontypridd)

  Leonard, W.

  Smith, Ben (Bermondsey, Rotherhithe)

  Davies, Rhys John (Westhoughton)

  Lewis, T. (Southampton)

  Smith, Frank (Nuneaton)

  Day, Harry

  Lloyd, C. Ellis

  Smith, Tom (Pontefract)

  Devlin, Joseph

  Logan, David Gilbert

  Smith, W. R. (Norwich)

  Dukes, C.

  Longbottom, A. W.

  Sorensen, R.

  Duncan, Charles

  Lunn, William

  Stephen, Campbell

  Dunnico, H.

  Macdonald, Gordon (Ince)

  Strauss, G. R.

  Ede, James Chuter

  McElwee, A.

  Sullivan, J.

  Edmunds, J. E.

  McEntee, V. L.

  Taylor, R. A. (Lincoln)

  Edwards, C. (Monmouth, Bedwellty)

  McKinlay, A.

  Tilled, Ben

  Edwards, E. (Morpeth)

  MacLaren, Andrew

  Tout, W. J.

  Egan, W. H.

  Maclean, Neil (Glasgow, Govan)

  Turner, Sir Ben

  Evans, Major Herbert (Gateshead)

  McShane, John James

  Vaughan, David

  Gardner, B. W. (West Ham, Upton)

  Malone, C. L'Estrange (N'thampton)

  Viant, S. P.

  Gardner, J. P. (Hammersmith, N.)

  Manning, E. L.

  Walkden, A. G.

  Gibson, H. M. (Lanes, Mossley)

  Marley, J.

  Walker, J.

  Gill, T. H.

  Marshall, Fred

  Wallace, H. W.

  Gossling, A. G.

  Mathers, George

  Watkins, F. C.

  Gould, F.

  Maxton, James

  Watson, W. M. (Dunfermline)

  Graham, D. M. (Lanark, Hamilton)

  Messer, Fred

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

  Graham, Rt. Hon. Wm. (Edln., Cent.)

  Mills, J. E.

  Wallock, Wilfred

  Grenfell, D. R. (Glamorgan)

  Milner, Major J.

  Welsh, James (Paisley)

  Griffiths, T. (Monmouth, Pontypool)

  Montague, Frederick

  Whiteley, Wilfrid (Blrm., Ladywood)

  Grundy, Thomas W.

  Morley, Ralph

  Whiteley, William (Blaydon)

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

  Morrison, Rt. Hon. H. (Hackney, S.)

  Wilkinson, Ellen C.

  1144

  1145

  Williams, David (Swansea, East)

  Wilson, C. H. (Sheffield, Attercliffe)

  Young, R. S. (Islington, North)

  Williams, E. J. (Ogmore)

  Wilson, J. (Oldham)

  Young, Sir R. (Lancaster, Newton)

  Williams, Dr. J. H. (Llanelly)

  Wilson, R. J. (Jarrow)

  Williams, T. (York, Don Valley)

  Wise, E. F.

  TELLERS FOR THE NOES.—

  Mr. T. Henderson and Mr. Thurtle.

  Resolution agreed to.

  Mr. JAMES HUDSON: I beg to move, in line 3, to leave out from "1927," to the word "shall," in line 5.
  I am moving to exclude the phrase from the Resolution,
  "and the reliefs in relation to life assurance and other matters provided by Section thirty-two of the Income Tax Act, 1918, as amended by any subsequent enactment."
  I do not think that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if he had been present, would have complained that we should seek to get some more definite information on the variations he proposes to make in the reliefs from tax in respect of premiums for life assurance. Although the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his Budget statement gave a general indication as to what all the other reliefs would be, curiously enough in this matter, although it has created, in the past, very considerable trouble for him, no detailed information whatever has been vouchsafed to us. The Chancellor of the Exchequer would recall, if he were present, that in the 1930 Budget and in the discussions in connection with it when he increased the reliefs to the small Income Tax payers in order to secure, as he said, equality of sacrifice, he found it necessary—and there is no complaint about this on any side, I expect—to vary the tax upon the premiums of the same class in order to preserve a general uniformity in his scheme.
  In his efforts to secure this uniformity, when he came to the question of exemptions in the matter of life assurance, he met with an astonishing opposition from the Tory party and from the Liberal party. As he is now working in conjunction with the people who inflicted that opposition upon him and caused a very considerable modification of the plans that he had made, there is very special reason why, in view of the association he now has with them, we should learn from him as early as possible exactly what is proposed in this matter. The opposition ran to such an extent that there are 30 columns of it in the OFFICIAL REPORT of the Committee stage of the Finance Bill of 5th June, 1930. Hon. Members opposite held up
  1146
  the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the proposals he made for exemptions. The Conservatives moved an Amendment, which was supported by leading Front Bench men on the Conservative side and by leading Liberals, such as the right hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. Runciman) and the hon. Member for Leith (Mr. E. Brown). Their Amendment dealt with life insurance abatements in regard to one particular class of Income Tax payers, to meet the grievances of that class.
  The grievance was shown to be during the Debate, and as the Chancellor of the Exchequer showed it to be, in reference to premiums of £475 a year and more. Those premiums referred to exemptions that were proposed in the Amendment referring to incomes of £2,850 and more. It was only in regard to such incomes that any possible grievances could exist, according to the Amendment. The right hon. Member for St. Ives reminded the Chancellor of the Exchequer that even Mr. McKenna's dictum ought to have little regard paid to it, because he had held that in regard to life insurance and its relation to Income Tax no sort of contract was made with the State. Mr. McKenna had pointed out that the State never granted to individual taxpayers exemptions in regard to life insurance. The exemption went on from year to year, and the State was quite free, said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as Mr. McKenna had said, to vary whatever arrangements had been made. The right hon. Member for St. Ives and hon. and right hon. Members on the Conservative benches objected to that point of view. As a result of the pressure, and I marvelled at the time how little notice was taken of it in the general Press, and even among my own friends, the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Report Stage, brought in another Amendment which cost him £400,000 in exemptions, and probably £500,000 if the full claims were made. Those exemptions went mainly to people whose incomes were reckoned in thousands rather than in hundreds.
  I made no complaint at the time that the Chancellor of the Exchequer found it necessary to yield under Parliamentary

  1147
  pressure. It was pressure used by the Liberals and the Conservatives. They constantly used that pressure where large monetary interests were concerned, in order to make the Chancellor of the Exchequer do things that were opposed to the general line of policy for which he stood. Can it now be complained that I should ask, now that we find the Chancellor of the Exchequer bound and tied in his relationship with those gentlemen, exactly what it is that will be proposed when we come to the question of the exemptions from Income Tax in respect of life assurance. I am not complaining about general exemptions on life assurance. The principle goes back to the days of William Pitt, although it is true that for a good many years, in the last half of the 19th century, the method fell into disuse. It was revived again by Mr. Gladstone in 1853, in mitigation of the taxation of savings and in order to give benefits to those who derived their incomes from their own exertions.
  The result of exempting incomes from tax in respect of life insurance has led to a tremendous development of life insurance as a general national process. Higher taxation in recent years has given an incentive to persons to avoid part of their Income Tax payments by taking out life insurance policies, in order to reap the advantage of the exemptions. Insurance companies have not been slow to develop this advantage and have advertised in their prospectuses that much can be gained by utilising this particular process. They have done that to such an extent that there has grown in recent years a certain amount of suspicion that in the matter of large incomes it is not the view of Mr. Gladstone that has prevailed, but rather the aim of the tax dodger that has been successfully carried out. Nevertheless it still remains important that for the small incomes proper exemptions should be allowed on life insurance policies. The Royal Commission on Income Tax in 1918 suggested that there was no other way except life insurance by which the small class of Income Tax payers could secure their dependants in case of their own death. We have seen the development of widows' pensions and orphans' pensions, and the man of small income feels it more than ever necessary to make some effective
  1148
  provision for his widow and orphans in case of his death.
  I do not know whether the Financial Secretary to the Treasury will be able to make an announcement, but I should like to know that any exemptions that are allowed shall be such that in this matter of insurance against death no further burden whatever ought to be placed upon small Income Tax payers, not only for their own sake but for the sake of the nation, especially in view of the present financial situation in which we find ourselves. The Colwyn Committee suggested in its report that life assurance was a kind of thrift specially practised by the possessors of small and moderate incomes, that it was a sort of thrift which came first to the possessors of small incomes because they felt the need for it in the case of widows and orphans of their own class, and they said that:
  "A contraction of this type of exemption would leave a less balance of savings free for general industrial investment."
  If the Financial Secretary should announce now—I do not know what he is going to say—that there is to be any stiffening of the charge that will fall upon the small Income Tax payer in regard to this matter, all that he will be doing will be to make a reduction in the general amount of wealth that is more and more needed, in view of the financial crisis, for the purposes of general industrial development.
  Major ELLIOT: I do not wish to interrupt the hon. Member, but this is relatively quite a small point, and I am willing to explain it now if the hon. Member so desires. It involves a concession to the taxpayer, and I am perfectly willing to explain it here and now.
  Mr. J. HUDSON: Perhaps I had better accept the suggestion of the Financial Secretary and then finish my remarks afterwards if necessary.
  Mr. SPEAKER: Is the Amendment seconded?
  Mr. HUDSON: Before you ask for a seconder for the Amendment may I ask whether the fact that I am giving way to the Financial Secretary will deprive me of any right to speak again? I was hoping that it was more of an interjection on his part, which would leave me quite free to continue my speech.
  Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member would have no right to speak again.
  Major ELLIOT: May I suggest that the hon. Member, if he so desires, would be able to speak on the Resolution if he is not satisfied with the explanation I propose to give on this Amendment. He will lose his right to speak again on the Amendment, but he would still have his right to speak on the main Resolution.
  Mr. HUDSON: Perhaps I had better finish my speech, although the fact that the Financial Secretary is willing to rise so rapidly will have the effect of curtailing it. The point is that exemptions regarding the small Income Tax payer have a close relationship to investments of wealth for industrial purposes, but it is not the same thing when you come to the large Income Tax payer. If you give to the large Income Tax payer a special advantage in the matter of life assurance what he will do, especially in a time of financial crisis, will be to take advantage to an even greater extent of this process of investing wealth in order that he might reap advantages in the exemption of tax, and in the long run the wealth of that class of Income Tax payer available for general industrial investment will be decreased rather than increased. I hope on this occasion that the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Treasury, in working out their schemes, have been far more successful than in the case of the last question we discussed on the Amendment moved by the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benson).
  I hope that whatever scheme is going to he suggested it will be perfectly clear that the small man will have, at any rate in this matter, no further burden added to those that he already bears, and that if there is to be any alteration in the general scale it will be made only in the matter of the large Income Tax payers. I am certain that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, knowing the sort of struggle that he went through in 1930, will have done his best in this matter. I know his difficulties will have been increased, even on those that existed in 1930. I am sure that the Financial Secretary will forgive me for feeling that upon this issue we want a very clear statement indeed before we can be thoroughly satisfied that a fair deal is
  1150
  being given to the various classes in the community.
  Mr. MONTAGUE: I beg to second the Amendment.
  I am in the same difficulty as my hon. Frnend who has just spoken. I do not wish to take up unnecessary time if the Financial Secretary proposes to make an explicit statement upon this Resolution. But we do require a definite statement as to whether that part of the Resolution which it is proposed to delete means that it is a definite proposition on the part of the Government that there shall be either variation or a deletion of the reliefs allowed on account of life assurance. When the hon. and gallant Gentleman is making his statement, which I understand will be to the effect that there is to be a definite relief and advantage to the smaller Income Tax payer, I would ask him to bear in mind two points that are of great importance. First of all I suggest that there is an illustration of the unfairness of variations in these reliefs which come home very closely to Members of this House. Members of Parliament are to have their allowance for expenses—it is not a salary—reduced by £40 a year. The majority of Members realise that the reduction is very serious indeed for some Members, because there are those who depend entirely upon that allowance in order to maintain themselves. If the variation is to be made with regard to relief for life assurance it will be a case of an additional burden which will press very severely indeed on hon. Members.
  I use that as an illustration, and do not want to say more upon a delicate subject. The points in reference to it were dealt with by the hon. Member for St. Helens (Sir J. Sexton) a, day or two ago. But there is an illustration showing how these burdens are cumulative upon various sections of the community. With regard to most of the proposals to which we are objecting, the same argument is applicable with equal force. If each stood alone, and if this were an ordinary humdrum Budget there might not be the same objection. We would object, no doubt, to burdens upon the community, but in this case it is not a question of one isolated burden imposed either as a tax or as a variation in relief from taxation. It is a cumulative burden because of the other burdens which are

  1151
  imposed, and that is the gist of the opposition which we are putting up to many of the proposals in the Budget.
  May I point out another case in which this burden will fall very harshly? In many cases life assurance policies Are taken out by small business men and people of small financial means for the purpose of getting backing either for bankers' overdrafts for business purposes or for the purchase of house property. If relief of taxation on account of life assurance is to be varied seriously, it will have a definitely harmful effect upon a large class of people of small means. Finally, I would point out that the other matters referred to in Section 40 of the Finance Act of 1927 include deferred annuities to widows, and also the special provision that may be made by means of life assurances for children—that is to say, assurances which provide specifically for the education of children should the death take place of the assured person. These are matters of considerable importance, and I suggest that the Government would do well to bear in mind, when reconsidering this matter, that a variation of this kind is not isolated in its effect, but is a very burdensome cumulative tax upon people of limited means who will feel it very seriously indeed.
  Major ELLIOT: I hope to be able to reassure the House on the matter which has been raised by the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. J. Hudson) and the hon. Member for West Islington (Mr. Montague). As the hon. Member for Huddersfield truly said, there was a great deal of controversy on the previous Finance Bill about the question of insurance premiums, and the House, quite rightly, is most jealous of any alteration in the law with respect to these things, because they represent the gilt-edged investments of many people of small incomes. As the Resolution is drawn in these general terms the House naturally and rightly demands from the responsible Minister an explanation of what is intended. As I say, I hope to be able to assure the House on the point. It is really a very minor matter. It is of the order of a concession to the taxpayer.
  The hon. Member for Huddersfield, who was deeply concerned in the previous
  1152
  Finance Bill, will appreciate the point that it is intended to provide for the alteration in the relief in respect of life assurance premiums, which has to be consequential on the proposed alteration in the amount of relief given in respect of the first slice of taxable income. He will remember that it was so arranged in the last Finance Bill that you were not to get relief at a higher rate than you paid Income Tax. As now the rate of Income Tax has been changed, that restriction is no longer necessary, and consequently it is repealed. It is merely a technical point, and it is not proposed in any way to invade the rights or privileges of insured persons in respect of insurance policies or premiums or anything of the sort, but is merely a technical sweeping away of a restriction which is no longer necessary. Of course, the matter will be set out in greater detail in the Clauses of the Bill, but I assure the hon. Members that that is all that is proposed. As will be remembered, a person paying tax at 2s. in the £ was not to receive life insurance relief at 2s. 6d. Well, as the tax on the first slice of the taxpayer's income is now charged at one-half of the standard rate, 2s. 6d., it is not necessary to say that he is not to receive any other relief.
  Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
  REPORT [15TH SEPTEMBER].
  STANDARD RATE OF TAX FOR 1931–32 AND CONSEQUENTIAL AMENDMENTS OF LAW.
  Resolution reported,
  "That—

  (a) the standard rate of Income Tax for the year 1931–32 shall be increased to five shillings in the pound; and

  (b) in connection with the said increase amendments shall be made in Section two hundred and eleven of the Income Tax Act, 1918, as amended by Section twelve of the Finance Act, 1930, and special provision made in relation to income chargeable under Schedule C, under Rule 6 or Rule 7 of the Miscellaneous Rule applicable to Schedule D, or under Rule 21 of the General Rules; and

  (c) such other amendments shall be made in the Income Tax Acts as are consequential on the said increase."

  NATIONAL DEBT.
  Resolution reported,
  "That it is expedient to amend the Law relating to the National Debt as follows:

  (a) by making provision that in the event of the five per cent. War Loan, 1929 to 1947, becoming repayable, holdings in that loan may, unless application is made for repayment in cash, be continued subject to a reduction in the rate of interest and modifications in the name and terms of repayment, and in the other conditions and incidents, of the said loan, and in that connection making provision—

  (i) for the issue of bonus stock and bonus bonds to form part of the said loan and the payment of cash bonuses;

  (ii) for enabling any expenses incurred in connection with the continuance or redemption of holdings in the said loan (including sums paid on account of any such cash bonus as aforesaid or on account of any interest which, by reason of the continuance or redemption of the said loan, becomes payable in any financial year instead of in the next following financial year) to be defrayed, if the Treasury so direct, out of the Consolidated Fund instead of out of the permanent annual charge for the National Debt;

  (iii) for enabling the Treasury to borrow, as if under Section one of the War Loan Act, 1919, to meet any such expenses as aforesaid;

  (iv) for other matters in connection with the continuance or redemption of holdings in the said loan;

  (b) by reducing to three hundred and twenty-two million pounds the permanent annual charge for the National Debt for each of the financial years ending respectively on the thirty-first day of March, nineteen hundred and thirty-two, and the thirty-first day of March, nineteen hundred and thirty-three, and providing for the defraying of the whole or any part of the sums required in the said years for the purposes specified in sub-paragraphs (iv) and (v) of paragraph (b) of Subsection (4) of Section twenty-three of the Finance Act, 1928, out of money to be borrowed for the purpose as if under Section one of the War Loan Act, 1919, instead of out of the said permanent annual charge;

  (c) by making further provision for the issue by the Treasury of securities—

  (i) subject to the condition that Income Tax will not be deducted from the interest thereof;

  (ii) subject to the condition that in certain cases the capital and in certain cases the interest will be free from taxation:

  and with respect to other matters in connection with any securities so issued;

  (d) by providing for the repayment through the post to holders outside the
  1154
  British Isles of principal moneys due to them on the redemption of Government stock."

  ROAD FUND [ADVANCES].
  Resolution reported,
  "That it is expedient to provide that advances to the Road Fund made under Section thirty-six of the Finance Act, 1931, shall be made out of moneys provided by Parliament instead of out of the Consolidated Fund."
  Bill ordered to be brought in upon the said Resolutions, and upon the Resolutions reported from the Committee of Ways and Means upon the 16th day of September and agreed to by the House on that day, by the Chairman of Ways and Means, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Major Elliot.
  FINANCE (No. 2) BILL.
  "to increase the Customs and Excise Duties on beer and tobacco, the Customs Duty on hydrocarbon oils, and the Entertainments Duty; to increase the standard rate of Income Tax for the year 1931–32, and the higher rates of Income Tax for the year 1930–31; to amend the Income Tax Acts in so far as they relate to certain reliefs and the tax payable by persons carrying on a trade consisting wholly or partly in dealing in securities; to amend Section thirty-six of the Finance Act, 1931, and the Law relating to the National Debt; and to make provision for certain matters connected with the matters aforesaid," presented accordingly, and read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Monday next, and to be printed. [Bill 226.]
  The remaining Government Order was road, and postponed.

  LEAGUE OF NATIONS (BRITISH DELEGATION).
  Whereupon Mr. SPEAKER, pursuant to the Order of the House of the 9th September, proposed the Question, "That this House do now adjourn."
  Mr. MANDER: I desire to call attention to the action of the Government in

  1155
  failing to appoint one of their Members as a delegate to the Assembly of the League of Nations at Geneva. I am doing this as one who supports the Government and desires to do everything to assist them in their difficult task, which ought to be shared by others who are sitting on the other side of the House. I quite understand that their attention has been concentrated very closely on affairs at home, but I submit that perhaps for that reason they are making a great mistake in not sending out one of their own Members as, for instance, the Foreign Secretary, to represent them at the League of Nations. In all our Debates in the House, and in the discussions that have taken place in Committee rooms upstairs, it has been emphasised over and over again that what we are trying to do here is only a temporary palliative at best, that it may not even be that, and that for a final solution of the problems of this country we have to look to international action and cooperation between the different nations of the world in one way and another. I have only to refer to the suggestion of the right hon. Member for Epping (Mr. Churchill) a day or two ago for a conference of the countries on the gold basis.
  There is a report of the Gold Delegation of the League of Nations to be discussed at Geneva. There is the work of the European Committee now being considered there, and the report of the Financial Committee is also being considered. Then there are the proposals of the Macmillan Committee which all point in the same direction. In view of these considerations, it will be very much in the interest of this country if we have the Minister directly responsible taking part in these deliberations at Geneva. It can surely be no disadvantage to the Foreign Minister to be in a place where upwards of 20 other foreign Ministers are gathered. That is the place to carry on the foreign affairs of this country at the present moment. If it is suggested that the Foreign Minister is engaged on work which prevents him carrying out these duties, one would be inclined to think that some other person might have these duties delegated to him. This is the first meeting of the Assembly of the League when this country has not been
  1156
  represented by a member of the Government. It is a new precedent, and I hope it is one which the Government will not make, and that they will send a Minister out before the deliberations come to an end.
  If the Foreign Secretary is very fully occupied, I suggest that there are other Ministers who might be sent out. What about the two other Liberal Marquesses in the Government? Lord Crewe has had an extensive diplomatic experience and would most worthily represent the Government at Geneva. There are other members of the Cabinet very well qualified to undertake that work, and apart from that we have in the Government, in the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Sir H. Young) and in the hon. Member for St. George's (Mr. Duff Cooper) two gentlemen who, during the last few years, have represented the Government of this country with great ability at Geneva, as I have seen with my own eyes. I suggest that one of them might have been sent out. Possibly the Under-Secretary of State himself, if he could be spared from his new duties, might have gone there. I am sure he would have upheld most worthily the reputation of this country.
  I do appeal to the Government to-night not to miss the opportunity that still lies before them. After all the Assembly has gone into Committee only this week. Most of the important work is done in Committee. I urge that the Foreign Secretary might consider whether he could not go out, if even for only a few days, because the psychological effect would be enormous. It would show that this Government was, as I believe to be the case, genuinely and seriously interested in the League. I know it may he said that we are well represented there by Lord Cecil, and I agree that there is no man in this country, or possibly in the world, whose reputation and prestige stand higher at Geneva than his. But he is not a member of the Government—I wish he were—and I know that on several occasions when he has had to speak in the Assembly he has had to say, "I am not speaking for the British Government. I am only expressing my own opinins." The fact that he has to make remarks of that kind when dealing with important international problems shows

  1157
  how important it is that there should be a Minister there who is able to say that he does speak for the British Government, and that the British Government are keenly and earnestly desirous of cooperating in every way with the League and using the structure and framework of the League for solving the international problems that lie so heavily on all the nations of the world. I earnestly appeal to the Under-Secretary, if he cannot give a definite assurance to-night, to make representations to his Noble Friend with a view to some action being taken during the next few days or before the Assembly comes to an end.
  The UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE for FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Captain Eden): I must confess to a certain measure of surprise that the hon. Member has thought it necessary to raise this subject in this form to-night. I cannot help thinking that if he had read with care the very full reply I returned to the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Dalton) on Monday last he might perhaps have spared himself this amount of trouble. I only hope that his action tonight will not create misunderstanding where at present no misunderstanding exists. I can add nothing to what I have already told the House. Nobody is more anxious that the Foreign Secretary should be represented at Geneva than my Noble Friend himself. He has been most anxious to go himself, and he is so now. He has not by any means given up the idea—he is still seeking an opportunity—but the House will be well aware, as is public opinion here and opinion at Geneva, of the very exceptional circumstances of the present time.
  It is not necessary for me to weary the House with details of dates, but I may remind the House that- this Government was formed a few clays before the Council met. The first meeting of the Assembly Was on the day before the meeting of Parliament. In those quite exceptional circumstances I do not think there can he any reasoned criticism of the fact that no actual Member of the Government was present at Geneva on those occasions. My hon. Friend is wrong in pleading any urgency in this matter, for there is great probability that it will be another 10 days at least before the Assembly completes its work. During that time my
  1158
  Noble Friend will make every effort in his power to be present if only for a very short visit. The hon. Member has suggested very kindly that I myself might go to Geneva. If I did so I do not know who would reply to the questions with which he not infrequently honours the Foreign Office. But in any event I would impress upon the House that the position is quite clearly understood at Geneva. When the Government found it impossible to have one of their own Ministers present, they did the best thing they could in the circumstances. The head of the present delegation is Viscount Cecil, and he is not only very fully acquainted with all those with whom he works at Geneva, but he is also equally familiar with all the problems before the Assembly. The Noble Lord is in constant and daily touch with His Majesty's Government at home.
  I think that there is nothing further that I can add except that it is only in these most exceptional circumstances that the Government have departed so far from the traditional practice which my Noble Friend is himself so eager and anxious to fulfil. In any event, I ask the hon. Member who has raised this question to believe that the position is well understood at Geneva, and I hope, after my explanation, that it will he equally well understood here. I will add this further word. I am sure the hon. Member for East Wolverhampton (Mr. Mander) did not wish to suggest by raising this question that there is any lack of interest on the part of the Government—which I understand he supports—for the work of the League, because nothing could be further from the truth. The present Government are as anxious and determined as any of their predecessors to give active support to the work of the League of Nations. That fact also is well understood in Geneva, and I hope that after this explanation, it will be well understood here.
  Mr. SANDERS: I would like to reinforce what has been said by the hon. Member for East Wolverhampton (Mr. Mander). I have no mandate to speak for my party, but I think I shall be expressing the views of most hon. Members on this side of the House when I say that we, as a party, consider the appearance at Geneva of the most representative Member of the Government that may be

  1159
  in office as one of the most important duties in connection with that Government. I have been fortunate in having seen practically the birth and the continued growth of the League of Nations for at least nine years—
  Notice taken that 40 Members were not in office as one of the most important present; House counted; and 40 Members duties in connection with that Govern not being present—
  The House was adjourned at Ten Minutes before Eleven of of the Clock till To-morrow.

NATIONAL FINANCE.
  TERRITORIAL ARMY.
  TERRITORIAL ARMY.
  ARMY RATES OF PAY.
  ARMY RATES OF PAY.
  PRISONERS (COST).
  PRISONERS (COST).
  HOUSE OF COMMONS (FREE TELEPHONE CALLS).
  HOUSE OF COMMONS (FREE TELEPHONE CALLS).
  SAVINGS BANK (DEPOSITS).
  SAVINGS BANK (DEPOSITS).
  5 PER CENT. WAR STOCK.
  5 PER CENT. WAR STOCK.
  NATIONAL SAVINGS CERTIFICATES.
  NATIONAL SAVINGS CERTIFICATES.
  INTER-ALLIED DEBTS.
  INTER-ALLIED DEBTS.
  SUEZ CANAL COMPANY (DIRECTORS' FEES).
  SUEZ CANAL COMPANY (DIRECTORS' FEES).
  INCOME TAXPAYERS.
  INCOME TAXPAYERS.
  BRITISIT TREASURY CREDITS.
  BRITISIT TREASURY CREDITS.
  OFFICIAL RETORT.
  OFFICIAL RETORT.
  LAND VALUATION.
  LAND VALUATION.
  GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS (TEMPORARY CLERKS AND TYPISTS).
  GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS (TEMPORARY CLERKS AND TYPISTS).
  FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS (FIVE-DAY WEEK).
  FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS (FIVE-DAY WEEK).
  DISTURBANCE, MANCHESTER.
  DISTURBANCE, MANCHESTER.
  SUNDAY PERFORMANCES (REGULATION) BILL.
  SUNDAY PERFORMANCES (REGULATION) BILL.
  BOILERS (INSPECTION).
  BOILERS (INSPECTION).
  NASEBY CHURCH OF ENGLAND SCHOOL.
  NASEBY CHURCH OF ENGLAND SCHOOL.
COAL INDUSTRY.
  HARTON COMPANY (WAGE-EARNERS).
  HARTON COMPANY (WAGE-EARNERS).
  HYDROGENATION.
  HYDROGENATION.
  LITIGATION (COST).
  LITIGATION (COST).
  IMPORTS (CABINET COMMITTEE).
  IMPORTS (CABINET COMMITTEE).
  BANKRUPTCIES, LANCASHIRE.
  BANKRUPTCIES, LANCASHIRE.
CHINA.
  MR. JOHN THORBURN (DISAPPEARANCE).
  MR. JOHN THORBURN (DISAPPEARANCE).
  INCIDENT, HANKOW.
  INCIDENT, HANKOW.
  BRITISH BONDHOLDERS, UNITED STATES.
  BRITISH BONDHOLDERS, UNITED STATES.
UNEMPLOYMENT.
  RURAL WORKERS.
  RURAL WORKERS.
  MINE SURFACE WORK, WEST LOTHIAN.
  MINE SURFACE WORK, WEST LOTHIAN.
HOUSING.
  SLUM CLEARANCE.
  SLUM CLEARANCE.
  RURAL AREAS, NORFOLK.
  RURAL AREAS, NORFOLK.
  RENT RESTRICTIONS ACTS.
  RENT RESTRICTIONS ACTS.
  IMPORTED FOOD REGULATIONS.
  IMPORTED FOOD REGULATIONS.
  NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE.
  NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE.
TRANSPORT.
  ROAD ACCIDENTS.
  ROAD ACCIDENTS.
  ST. JAMES'S STREET (REPAIR).
  ST. JAMES'S STREET (REPAIR).
  MOTOR VEHICLES (SPEED LIMIT).
  MOTOR VEHICLES (SPEED LIMIT).
  ILLEGAL FISHING, NORTHERN IRELAND.
  ILLEGAL FISHING, NORTHERN IRELAND.
  ARABLE FARMING.
  ARABLE FARMING.
  AFFORESTATION.
  AFFORESTATION.
Preamble
The House met at a quarter past four of the clock, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.

MESSAGE FROM THE KING.
THE EARL OF CROMER: My Lords, I have a message from the King. His Majesty's Message is as follows:
"I have received with great satisfaction the loyal and dutiful expression of your thanks for the Message which I addressed to your House."

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE.
LORD PARMOOR: My Lords, I should like to ask the noble Earl who is leading the House whether he can give us any further information as to the course of public business.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (EARL PEEL): My Lords, I understand that it is not quite certain at what time the Economy Bill will come up to us, and I think in those circumstances it might be better for the House to adjourn after to-day's proceedings until this day week. We shall then know better—in fact we shall probably know exactly—at what date the House should assemble to receive the Economy Bill.
LORD PARMOOR: I am much obliged to the noble Earl. I quite concur in the suggestion he makes.

PUBLIC WORKS LOANS BILL.
Brought from the Commons; read 1a; and to be printed.

TRADE INQUIRY.
LORD MELCHETT LORD MELCHETT rose to move to resolve, That this House approves the action of the Government in setting up a Committee of the Cabinet to enquire into methods of balancing the trade exchange. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I have put down the Motion which stands on the Order Paper in my name to-day because I understand it is the earliest

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and possibly the only opportunity that, we may have of discussing this question. We have just heard from the noble Earl that after the proceedings to-day the House will be adjourned for a further week. Until I heard that statement I had only known that the probability was that we should adjourn until the 28th of this month. In the interval a great many things are occurring, and a very critical situation is developing in the country. I feel that there is a great deal that could be usefully said and discussed by your Lordships'. The country is waiting to hear the views of many members of this House who speak with authority upon topics which are agitating the country to-day. In the Lower Chamber there is very much doubt and difficulty, and the discussion of questions in this House might be of considerable interest and use to another place. For my part, in fact, I should like to see a series of logical and consequential Resolutions on the state of the nation tabled in this House, and discussed thoroughly and fully, so that we might have every opportunity of clarifying to the country the importance of the issues before us and allowing the country to understand them in the most complete and thorough form, and might understand one another before we have to deal with the Bills that will be sent to us from another place, when we shall have at once to engage in more practical issues.
The Prime Minister on Tuesday last set up a Committee to enquire into the question of restoring the balance of trade. I should like to ask the Government what this implies. Do the Government mean to stay on in office and to put the findings of this Committee into operation? Do they mean to try to restore the balance of trade itself? I should like noble Lords to realise that at the present moment we are buying every day about £2,000,000 worth of goods, and selling only £1,000,000 worth, and that the balance of trade is so much against us that no steps that can be taken by mere financial means will stabilise the position of this country for the time being. If the Government are not going to carry out the findings of their own Committee, or to attempt to carry them out, what will be the position in which we shall be placed? I think it would be a great mistake for us to be lulled into a false
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sense of security. An Election may have to take place in this country. I think we ought fully to realise that if an Election takes place at the present time, it will be utterly disastrous to this country and, very likely, to a large section of Europe. I believe that, when Parliament is dissolved, it will be impossible for any force to maintain the pound sterling at the present rate, and we shall be rapidly involved in a currency collapse.
After all, we have to look to the position of foreigners in this matter, and to what they will think and say. No one can guarantee that there will be any majority as the result of an Election in this country under our present electoral system. We may be faced with exactly the same situation as we are faced with to-day. Foreigners will sell British Government securities, and our currency will fall, on every bourse, on every exchange, on every pavement from Shanghai to Paris, right across the world, and nobody will be able to stem the great tide, if once any doubt comes into the minds of those abroad as to the security of this country. During the course of the Election, our exchanges will fluctuate according to the speeches of the Party Leaders. If a Leader of the Opposition makes a great hit the pound will go down, and when a Government Leader scores you will see a rise in sterling.
I do not believe that this is a situation upon which this country ought to embark without the most grave necessity and without being fully aware of what is likely to happen if we are driven to this course. This Government was formed, and took office, in order to avoid an Election and to escape those very disasters that I have just described. For myself, I fail to see how the position is now better than it was when this Government was formed. There are many disturbances, and a great-deal of trouble, evident now that were not apparent then. The nation is disturbed and divided. The Government have imposed, as they were bound to impose, crushing taxation. Unemployment has increased. It is true that they have balanced the Budget, but the Budget is balanced on paper only. All Budgets are balanced only on paper until the final accounts are drawn at the end of the year. You cannot with any certainty balance

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Budgets at the beginning of the year. The situation has only been improved on paper. In reality it has not improved.
There is, however, this advantage to the country in this difficult position: that we have a certain measure of national agreement to enable us to achieve some national unity. In the first place all Parties are agreed upon the essential importance of trying to balance the Budget on paper. The Leaders of all Parties have agreed to that course and there is a large amount of agreement upon another matter, the question of the institution of tariffs in order to redress the balance of trade. The Opposition have admitted that they preferred tariffs to cuts in certain of the services or the unemployment benefit or "dole." There were therefore three alternatives before us. Either cubs or tariffs or some other scheme hinted at vaguely but never presented in a practical or concrete form to the country. If they were prepared in certain conditions to accept tariffs they must have worked out in their own minds what they thought those tariffs were going to do. There are not many things which tariffs can do. It would have been very easy to set down very shortly the effect of the tariff which they were prepared to accept. First of all it would produce some revenue; secondly, it would effect some improvement in industry; and thirdly, some restriction in imports.
There is a fourth point, that it might in some cases raise prices, and it was upon this ground that the Opposition were opposed to the idea of tariffs. It is not necessary in all cases that tariffs should raise prices. There are some cases where they would result in a reduction; but the point that we can look to is, I think, this: If the only point between the Opposition and the Government is the £12,500,000 which we are going to take from the people on the "dole," is it worth while dividing the nation and running the risk of an Election? For my part, I would gladly see that £12,500,000 given up. £12,500,000 out of £170,000,000 is not so vital to the nation, and I only grieve very much that it ever came to be brought forward. I think it is a great mistake to rouse partisan feeling to such an extent upon a question which cannot be considered vital from a financial point of view for
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one moment, though on which there may be a great deal to be said from the point of view of justice. Other things have come down, and it may be said that this should come down too. All I can say is that a great deal of the feeling against the unemployed in this country is entirely unjustified. The unemployed are a very fine body of men; they are citizens who fought in the War and who, after a short time, have been without employment since. It is not a question of dealing with a few hundred thousand men who cannot and will not work. There are 3,000,000 of our people who are in this condition, and sympathy, not opprobrium, is their due. If this is all that stands between us and national unity, whatever the justice of the case may be I think it is a great mistake and a great lack of statesmanship to allow this £12,500,000 to stand between us and a united policy, which alone can save the country from disaster.
Then I make an appeal for the middle classes. They have been called upon to make an undue proportion of sacrifice. They have an essential standard of life to keep up and theirs is a perpetual struggle to save their children from being forced back into the labouring classes from which they have raised themselves. They have added burdens which make all the difference between being able to save themselves and being forced back into a condition of life for which they are entirely unsuited and quite untrained, and into a class which is already considerably overcrowded. They have no pensions and no "dole," and three quarters of their taxes are to be paid on January 1. They are the most loyal and long-suffering class in the nation. Thousands have been dismissed from their employment, and have no hope of re-engagement under present conditions. These are the people upon whom we rely. They were the heroes of Kitchener's Army, and are the keystone of the arch of national security.
This is the situation in which we are now placed. It is the Government's business to restore industry, to get factories restarted, and to get the men back into their jobs. People may think that the Government Committee which has just been set up is going to find some completely new and successful solution of this problem. Perhaps it will. For my

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part, knowing the Government and knowing the problem, I think that is highly improbable. There is only one solution and that is the tariff solution, however unpalatable to a great many people. I think we might regard for one moment the very large number of people, leaders in this country, who have completely changed their views on the subject in the last few years—people who speak with authority. In this House we have Lord Illingworth, Lord Inchcape and Lord Joicey, and in the other House Sir John Simon, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Runciman, Sir Robert Hutchison, Sir Murdoch Macdonald, Mr. E. D. Simon and Mr. George Lambert, and chambers of commerce throughout the country, including those of Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, Huddersfield, Wolverhampton, Sheffield, Leicester, Coventry, Derby, Dunfermline, Teeside, Halifax, Dewsbury and Exeter, have passed resolutions which in. fact proclaim that in their view tariffs are the only solution for the problems of this country.
There is one other remarkable conversion to which I would like to refer if your Lordships will grant me leave for one moment, and that is the conversion of my predecessor in this House who at one time was a very powerful Free Trader. In this time of national crisis I have felt that it was worth while looking up some of the things he said in order that they might be of some use to the people of this country in this hour of grave danger. I have taken two quotations which I think show sufficiently what I mean, and wish your Lordships' permission, I will read them to the House. The first is not a quotation from Lord Melchett but from Mr. Stanley Baldwin, who, in November, 1923, referred to my predecessor, then Sir Alfred Mond, as. "the ablest controversialist on the Free Trade side in England to-day." It certainly shows that he was one of the most prominent advocates of that system.
Curiously enough, my predecessor in this House, speaking in Manchester almost exactly five years later, December, 1928, said:
"I think it is perfectly futile to bandy words about an old and effete controversy. I think it is perfectly useless and a mere mockery to endeavour to deal with a situation of such seriousness by extracts from economists… Can you go on maintaining one part of an economic theory—a theory of
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free imports at all costs, regardless of its effect on British industry, regardless of unemployment, regardless of its effect on the standard of wages and living, when you have changed all the other factors that necessarily enter into costs of production?"
A change so violent in the point of view may seem hard to understand, but I saw that change take place, from the time when my predecessor left the Government in 1922 and, after a short period of politics in 1923, went back into industry and day by day found himself face to face with the problems which had to be faced. A complete change in his whole fiscal ideas came about from Free Trade to strong advocacy of Protection.
Nowhere is it more remarkably shown than in two further quotations. Speaking at Swansea in 1923 on the steel industry he said:
"It is a remarkable fact that our country has not been flooded with cheap goods. This country has been built up on a proved fiscal system. I see no reason—far from it—to depart from the policy which I have always advocated."
In November, 1929, speaking in London, he said of the same industry, the steel industry:
"To-day you are paying £9,600,000 a year to 120,000 men to do nothing at all. By importing 3,000,000 tons of steel at £1 per ton less than the home produce you are saving £3,000,000. That is book-keeping which I do not understand. People do not realise these figures, and that is why they allow it to go on although, were those 3,000,000 tons produced in this country, it would employ 120,000 men. If there were no unemployed you might make some point about buying cheap steel. The industry needs safeguarding. I have been astonished to hear it has not been done. People are frightened at the repercussions it is to have on various industries. Let us try it and deal with them when they occur. They are sure to be of a different nature from what people imagine. They always are. I know one thing that would happen: your furnaces would go, your mines would go, your shipping would improve. All your industries would spring to life, and it is worth running some risks to achieve that."
Dealing with the question of repercussions, one of the most usual arguments that are raised is that of the shipbuilding industry. Well, to-day, the shipbuilding industry is in a very depressed condition. It hardly seems worth while keeping a very large number of men out of employment who might otherwise be working in our steel industry for that reason alone. But in any case there is nothing new in this problem of the shipbuilding in-

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dustry with a tariff. The Germans had to face it. They faced it in a very simple, practical, and obvious way. They merely excluded steel for shipbuilding from the terms of the tariff, and had a rebate on steel for shipbuilding. There is nothing in the world to prevent us from doing exactly the same thing. The other day, in discussing this question with a man very well informed in the steel industry, he raised the point that the most profitable section of the steel industry to-day was the tube manufacturing industry, and that there was no adequate plant in this country to supply their raw material. Very well, to my mind that shows an excellent opportunity for us. We can give an exemption for the time being, we can bring in a tariff, slowly and by degrees giving the steel industry the opportunity to create this plant, to bring some new business to this country and to give further employment to people and additional profits to industry.
It is a great mistake to believe that the price level is the determining factor in this question. It is quite true that in some cases the imposition of a tariff will lead to a rise in prices, but it is not necessarily true. Is it always so desirable to have low prices? What is the use of low prices to a man who is on the "dole" and who cannot, of course, buy anything in any case? What is the use of telling a man, "This is the cheapest Christmas on record" if he has no money with which to buy? The real fact of the matter is that in a great many cases there is no necessity for any rise in the price level at all. In modern industry, with its marginal costs, the home producer will very often produce at a very much lower figure if he has a protected home market, and the price of the home consumer will not be increased if he is protected. There are a great many cases where that has taken place.
In mass production in modern industry, if you are producing at the rate of 85 per cent., instead of 55 per cent., the costs are enormously reduced. Many overheads are unavoidable. Your accountants, your salesmen, your technical officers, your technical controllers, your research staff—those you have to pay for in any case, however much business you are doing. Over and above the amount of business you can do under our present system any further business can be
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charged at merely the cost of conversion, and that will in many cases be 33 or 45 per cent. lower than the total cost that is charged to-day. That gives a great opportunity for expansion of business, and also for exportation. This country is being flooded with goods exported from other countries upon marginal costs. Manufacturers abroad are adding to their plants because a small addition will bring their total costs down and they can dump their goods in the free market that we are providing for them. Everybody who has a factory is tempted to increase it with that in view. After all, he says, there is always the English market in which he can dump and possibly got rid of a sufficient quantity of goods at a very low cost to enable him to carry his overhead charges in his domestic market. We can do exactly the same as he can.
I think that is the fallacy of the remarks made by Mr. Graham in another place, when he said:
"Side by side proposals were put up by the people who recommended the revenue tariff that it should be accompanied by a bounty on exports, because here they realised the idea would fail unless there were some method of supporting the export trades. But, of course, it will be plain to every hon. Member that no sooner do we apply this bounty to exports in this country than we bring into operation against our trade the anti-dumping legislation of other lands. Any export bounty of that kind is regarded as an artificial device, as a form of dumping which they consider they are entitled to treat under that legislation."
On those grounds I would point out that this country is being continually flooded with dumped goods which are subsidised by Governments. They may not be direct subsidies, but they are subsidies on transport, subsidies on one charge or another. And we might as well be charged at this moment with subsidising industry by means of relief of rates. There are many ways of subsidising exports besides a direct subsidy. If we had a direct subsidy in a great many cases we should be doing neither more nor less than other countries are doing against us at the present moment, and the burden of which the British manufacturer has to bear in any case.
There is one thing which no one can calculate, and that is the ancillary prosperity which results from the starting of any factory, the putting into employment

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of any number of men as compared with keeping them on the "dole." They have their wages to spend. The company is spending money and making profits, they buy boots, they buy clothes, they buy furniture for their houses. It starts in a dozen different ways the multifarious currents of trade, which no one can define, and which no one can calculate. And, as a matter of fact, when you come down to the principal question, the processes of exchange are not so very difficult and complicated as people sometimes make out. All that we really do is to exchange food and raw materials for the manufactured products. And if your tariff includes, as it is bound to include, agriculture in this country you will exchange far more of your manufactured goods for the agricultural products of England. Your little towns throughout the land, to-day impoverished, just living upon a bare margin, will all have a wave of prosperity such as they have not seen for seventy or eighty years in this country, and no one can calculate what the effect of that will be. My own belief is that the effect would be dramatic so far as the industries of this country are concerned. Of course, that applies even more to the Empire, but there is no time this afternoon to go into that question.
I am not one of those who believe, that tariffs are the be-all and end-all of national and international organisation. I believe that a far more serious and more permanent reorganisation has got to be attempted than that. We have to reorganise the whole basis of our national and industrial life in order to meet the demands that science is making upon mankind to-day. The real trouble we are all confronted with is the failure of the philosophic sciences to keep pace with the natural sciences. That is our real problem, which it will take many, many years to solve. Probably my generation and the generation after me will not see its solution. We certainly cannot solve it here this afternoon. But we can solve one thing. We can press this Government not to run away from the task they have undertaken. We can press this Government to go for the only solution that can really restore the balance of trade in this country, and get these unfortunate men back to their work, and get some prosperity to our industry and to our agriculture. I
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would appeal to your Lordships, from no partisan point of view—there is no room at a moment of national crisis such as this for partisan interests—to approve of the Motion that I have put before you this afternoon in order to strengthen the hands of the Government, in order to give them an even greater sense of security in making plans for the future, in order to give confidence to the country and to the world at large that when it comes to the real problem England will face the world with a united front and deal with its difficulties successfully.
Moved to resolve, That this House approves the action of the Government in setting up a Committee of the Cabinet to enquire into methods of balancing the trade exchange.—(Lord Melchett.)
LORD GAINFORD: My Lords, first of all I would congratulate your Lordships' House on the presence of the noble Earl (Lord Peel) and the noble Marquess (Lord Crewe) whom we see sitting together on the Government Bench for the first time since the formation of the present Government. It is with great satisfaction that the House has realised that the principal Leaders of all Parties have come together, as they did after the episode of August 23, with a view to saving the pound from inflation and from the flight connected with it. I do not feel I can allude to the action of the late Government in any terms except those of great regret, with the exception of that of the three Leaders who have taken Office. I think it was a deplorable lack of political statesmanship, and I agree with the noble Lord who has just spoken that a question of £12,500,000 is not a sufficient justification for inducing a large section of the people of this country to abstain from supporting a Government in this time of difficulty. I know it is suggested by them that they are justified in their action in, as I would call it, running away from their responsibilities, because they were anxious to prevent the deprivation of a deserving set of men, the great number of the unemployed. After all, the cause of humanity is equally dear to us all and none of us is going to allow acute privation to exist among the unemployed or any other class of the community if it can possibly be avoided.

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But the crisis which has been met is not the crisis upon which I desire to speak to-night. My subject is the objects which the Committee of the Cabinet will have to consider. What we require at the present moment is to find a method of reducing taxation. All taxation, even that which has been recently imposed or is about to be imposed upon us, is a burden upon the industries of this country, and we have to get rid of a great deal of that taxation in order to help our industries to become profitable, to enable us to meet the competition of other countries and to balance our Budget year by year. The taxation per head in this country is £15 14 s., in France it is £10, in Germany it is £8, in the United States of America it is £6, and in Italy it is only £5. We are called upon to carry an unbearable burden of taxation which Government to try to diminish.
The unbalanced trade position owing to the fall in exports means that we are heading for national bankruptcy. In 1928 our exports amounted to £844,000,000; in 1930 they amounted to £657,000,000, a fall of £187,000,000. If you take the first eight months of this year, there has been a further terrific fall. Taking the eight months of the two preceding years and the eight months of this year, the fall has been from £488,000,000 to £398,000,000 last year and to £263,000,000 this year. The adverse balance to-day is worse than it has ever been in the history of our nation. We are living on borrowed money. Nothing could have illustrated that more than the necessity of the banks recently to take advantage of the generosity of France and the United States in issuing emergency credits to enable us to maintain the sovereign at its proper level. But economies are absolutely essential if we are to meet our obligations.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: Hear, hear.
LORD GAINFORD: And much more requires to be done than, I think, has hitherto been indicated. The causes of the present situation are generally admitted. There has been a series of extravagant proposals carried out not only by the last Government but by its predecessors in office. The social expenditure has been beyond what the nation could afford, although we are very reluctant to
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curb social expenditure. But it has run wild. There has been an increase in pensions of more than we can afford. There has been an increase in the contribution to the "dole" of more than we could afford. It is very difficult for those in another place to advocate openly the reduction of money spent either on social services or on "doles" when they are seeking the support at the next General Election of 28,000,000 voters. If the wealth which has been so largely exhausted in this country is to be restored it is high time for the Government to set themselves the task of investigation and inquiry into the remedies. The investigation which I want to see the Government enter into is not that which was dwelt upon by the previous speaker, but the undue interference with industry by the State. There has been a limitation it is the duty of any of hours by statutory enactment, also of wages. Every Department has powers which interfere with the direction and administration of labour, and officials, however worthy their motives may be, at least have not the business experience and training of those who carry on industries in difficult times.
Then I want them to enquire into the question of sheltered and unsheltered industries and their pay. Let me give your Lordships a simple illustration. The other day I met a workman whom I know close to any house. He was working alongside the road. He has not very hard work to perform. It is mainly cutting the grass on the edges of a tarmacadam road. He recently applied to the farmers in my district for an agricultural job. They did not think him worth it as he was not skilled enough. The wages that skilled agriculturists in my district are paid are only 30 s. a week, but this man has got a job on the roads and is being paid 54 s. a week. That is the sort of system which exists in this country between sheltered and unsheltered industries, and it seems to me to be grossly unfair. I want an inquiry into that matter, so that remedies can be found and proper economies effected in public administration.
There is another direction in which I think an inquiry ought to be entered into by the Government, and that is to consider what contributions should be paid by the State towards local taxation

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in the districts. I believe that the waste in local expenditure is very large, and is mainly due to large sums spent by the State in helping local authorities to carry on their work. It contributes to waste. I will give you another homely illustration. A bridge within a mile of my house was quite a good bridge, but narrow, and had a little elevation going up and a little gradient going down. It caused traffic along that road to steady from forty or fifty miles an hour to twenty-live while going over the hump. Alongside of it was a road which certainly 360 days in the year is quite possible for all traffic if the drivers like to go through a tiny rivulet only a few inches deep, which is very seldom in flood. It was not necessary to alter that, road. Within the last few months £3,000 has been spent in making an enormous wide bridge covering the passage over the water, and removing the old bridge which was quite adequate for all the traffic. That kind of expenditure by local authorities, while it does employ for the time being a, certain limited number of men, I believe to be a gross waste of public money, and ought not to be allowed to continue.
Again there is the Railway Commission. I am always sorry to allude to wages, but I believe that in these times we cannot afford to pay the wages which the average wage earner is securing upon our railways. In 1913–14, for which we call the average cost of living figure 100, the wages were £47,000,000 on the railways, and now, with the cost of living figure at 152, the wages being received by the railway men amount to £120,000,000 per year as against the £47,000,000. That is a prodigious increase in the pay of the railway men. The result is that traffic is leaving (ho railways, and—if I might put merely an assumption—20 per cent. should be taken off the railway men in the aggregate. That would mean £24,000,000 saved to encourage traffic on the railway system, and would enable dividends to be paid upon trustee and other savings which are invested in the railway companies. I want that kind of subject to be considered by the Cabinet to see whether savings cannot be effected in items of that kind.
I want next to deal for a moment with a subject upon which I have some little knowledge, and that is the subject of the
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coal trade. The export of coal is one of the most important items among the materials which we export in exchange for the necessary food and raw materials that are required in this country by our manufacturing industries. In 1923 we exported 78,000,000 tons of coal. At the rate which we have been exporting during the last eight months, if the same rate is continued for the twelve months, our export in 1931 of coal instead of being 78,000,000 tons will be 39,700,000 tons. It has diminished by half taking the period of eight months. That is an item which I think the country has to realize in order to see what can be done to recover our export markets in the world. It is known that our cost of producing coal in this country is much greater than in other countries—not the cost of the general items in production but the cost in wages.
The average wage which we pay in this country to our miners is 9s. 7¼d. per ton, or, if you like, exactly the same figure per shift. In Germany it is 6s. 5d. per ton and 8s. 6¾d. per shift. But in Polish Silesia, a country with which we are in competition to the greatest extent, the wages per ton are 3s. 10 d., as against our 9s..7d., and their earnings are less than 5s., as against our 9s. 7d. per shift. That makes it very difficult for us to retain, our export trade in competition with them. When I tell you that the railway rates in this country, owing to the high costs of conducting our railways, force the railway companies to charge rates on seven miles between a colliery and its market the same as they are charging in Polish Silesia for 384 miles, you will realise how difficult it is for us to get even the coal to the sea in competition with the coal from other countries. That also is a subject which I should like to have investigated, to see what can be done not only by international agreement but in some other way calculated to meet that difficulty.
The noble Lord thinks that tariffs are going to settle all these difficulties, or settle them to a very large extent. I demur entirely, because I see that if a tariff is placed upon commodities which come to us from abroad, there is a great danger of a tariff being placed upon our coal going into countries abroad which at present are our best markets. Nothing could be more detrimental to one of our

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greatest industries than that other countries should place tariffs on the coal which we are so anxious to export. But I will deal with the fiscal question from another point of view in a moment. I cannot suggest what the findings of this Cabinet Committee may be, but I think that the facts are suggestive of what might be done to cure unemployment, bring about a trade balance, stop the drain of gold and do something more than merely meet temporary demands of the Exchequer. What we want is a proper distribution of the gold in the world. That is another subject which I think ought to be investigated by a Cabinet Committee. It is perhaps difficult to see what will be the inducement to either France or the United States to part with their gold reserves and spend their money in this country so that we should have a greater proportion of the gold, but the maldistribution of gold is to me one of the reasons for the extraordinary depression through which this and other countries are passing at the present time.
The real wages in Germany are 75 per cent. of our own, in France 55 per cent. and in Italy 45 per cent. That is a wage question which I think has to be considered in conjunction with all these other matters. We are faced with great competition, and we have to meet that competition. I believe that one of the ways of meeting it must be some sacrifice of wages as a temporary expedient in order to recover our position. The fallacy that high wages help production need not, I think, be dwelt upon much in the debate to-day. If 10 s. has to be found to increase wages it has to come from some source or other, and the person who finds it is denuded of the 10 s. as a rule. It perhaps increases consumption, but it does not necessarily increase the production of wealth. What we have to try to see is that wealth is produced and not merely consumed and wasted.
There is a great deal, I think, to be done to secure economy. One way in which economy can be fostered is by direct taxation imposed on every member of the community. When Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1897 I made some observations on economy. I ventured to suggest to Sir Michael that it was the right
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course to tax every one in the community by means of direct taxation, so that everybody felt the taxation and did not merely pass it on to other people. I believe that principle is, sound, and I believe that if direct taxation could be imposed—in accordance, no doubt, with ability to pay—on everyone, on every wage-earner and on every rich man in the community, it would be a far better way than trying to raise money by indirect taxation, which often is not appreciated by those who have eventually to meet their obligations.
But what we have to avoid is that the pound sterling shall go down in value. Twenty shillings per week for an average working man is worth far more with the pound sterling where it is to-day than 50 s. a week would be if the same collapse occurred here as occurred in France, so that instead of the franc standing at twenty-five to the pound it is now 124. If the ordinary householder pays 10 s. for bread out of that 20 s. he still has 10 s. to spend on other things, but if when the collapse occurred he had 50 s. he would have to spend the whole 50 s. on bread and would have nothing left over for any other commodity. This sort of illustration, I think, is required in order that the public may realise the importance of maintaining the pound at its present level and not allowing it to collapse. The importance of maintaining it was very well illustrated by a speech delivered by Mr. Runciman in the House of Commons a few days ago, in which he pointed out that the savings of the working classes amounted to £2,470,000,000 in various securities. If all the middle classes and the poor who contribute to the Post Office Savings Bank, to the building societies, and to various other thrift institutions were to suffer the outlook would be more deplorable than any words of mine can picture.
It is unpleasant to have to face facts, it is unpleasant to propose a 10 per cent. reduction in wages, but it would produce a profit in nearly all our industries. If that profit was produced it would bring money into industry and in that way it would meet the problem of unemployment. Sir Josiah Stamp and Sir William Beveridge—both men who are not Party politicians but statisticians and men of great thought and reputation—have

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stated that the nation cannot continue to pay 50 per cent. more in wages than is paid by nations in competition with us unless our workpeople work 50 per cent. better than they are at present doing. Unfortunately, in certain industries, notably bricklaying and in other trades, workmen are not all doing their best. It is very hard to deal with questions which are going to hit the poor. It is very hard to do anything which will interfere with leisure, but, if we are to maintain prosperity and the leisure of the whole country and of the working classes in particular, then I believe it is in the direction of reducing costs of production that we must call upon the community to make a sacrifice in order to secure that end. The sacrifice need not be a very long one, but it must be for a time a considerable one. Diminishing the cost of production, I believe, in the long run will lead to the royal road to prosperity and to the position which we all desire to see our country once again become—namely, a prosperous country and leading the nations of the world.
LORD BARNBY: My Lords, the noble Lord who has just spoken emphasised the need for economy. That is the thought uppermost in the minds of your Lordships and throughout the country. It is for that reason that I listened with some alarm to the remarks of the noble Lord who preceded him, though in the main I am in entire agreement with the point he was trying to emphasise. The noble Lord who has just spoken concluded his remarks by saying we must, in order to maintain our trade balance, reduce our costs. I am sure your Lordships are agreed that it is hard to make that end tally with the philosophy that those who are at present being paid for doing nothing—it is no opprobrium to them, it is their misfortune—should be paid on a scale which requires no reduction in the standard of purchasing power. It is unpopular at the moment, but surely no Government has the right to shirk the unpopularity which the essential economics of the case require. That is fundamental, and I do not labour it.
The point I wish to make is that so far we have only attempted to balance the Budget. What is the good of that unless we are also going to adjust the trade balance? I doubt whether there are many in your Lordships' House who
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have been in more Continental countries than I have in the last few weeks for the purpose of business. It is not always comfortable, but it is at times necessary that the heads of large businesses in this country should travel as much as possible. When other countries in Europe find their currencies in jeopardy, and find from the intensity of the adversity which faces them that they must mobilise their resources and get cash for their merchandise, they look round to see where they can send it. Their position is no different from that of anyone else. They aim to direct it where they are likely to get paid for it. If anyone standing on the shores of the Black Sea or the Baltic looked for a target at which to level his goods he would remember that in these islands there are 45,000,000 of people capable of consumption on a scale surpassed nowhere else and—this is the point I wish to make—with a credit and a probity which give more probability of his being paid than in any other country in Europe. That is the point. We have adjusted, as I have said, our Budget; but what about our trade balance? We know that it is necessary to secure credits to maintain the stability of sterling, but are your Lordships satisfied?
In the political situation in which we find ourselves there are two leading questions: (1), Can we maintain the stability of the pound without limiting this avalanche of imports which in the immediate future is going to be directed to this country? (2), If political exigencies or the difficulties of the political position require an Election before action, can we rest assured that the pound sterling can maintain itself under the strain that will be imposed upon it? I venture to repeat that our manufacturers, as the noble Lord who spoke last has said, require cheaper costs of production. Such cheaper costs of production are going to permit us to sell abroad. But, there again, it is a question of credit, not only at home, but of every manufacturer in every country. For that reason, if we decided on a restriction of imports to protect the pound, there would be two results. First, we should emphasise to the world the weight that we can swing. The whole world will be impressed by what is in our power, and I venture to think that if, in those difficult weeks of

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July, the British Ambassador in Paris had been able to feel that he had either weapons in his hand or armour with which to defend this country, we should have had greater influence than, to judge from the French Press, we appear to be believed to have in France.
The second point which I wish to make concerns agriculture. Your Lordships are more familiar than any other section of the community with the difficulties of agriculture to-day. Agriculture must have some consideration, some measure of protection from this avalanche of primary products that is being mobilised throughout Europe and the world to pour into this country. As one who, like many in another place, consistently opposed such a simple measure as the Safeguarding Act, but who uses the retreat of your Lordships' House to make his first recantation of those principles, which are wrong under the changed condition, I feel that you must be impressed with the change of opinion that is taking place generally at the present moment. If it is a question of surrendering life-long principles in this necessity, the greater the honour to those who, recognising that the position is acute and as perilous to-day as it was in 1914, are prepared to sacrifice principles in the national interest. I hope that this readiness which we see in this direction, growing with a cumulative momentum, will permit some national agreement in this perilous situation and that, with the support of the whole nation, it will be possible to take some steps to protect our industry and our agriculture from the avalanche that threatens both, with all the subsidiary dangers. The result will give some hope to our manufacturers that they may be put in a position in which they can successfully compete. We have talked much about making economies, but to make economies we need a better hope for industry
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: My Lords, I think we all ought to be very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Melchett, for raising this question to-day. I feel with him that this House ought to have been given greater opportunity of discussing these very serious matters, in this moment of grave crisis, and I am very glad to hear that this House is not going
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to be adjourned beyond next Thursday. No doubt during the coming week matters will move quickly, and there will be further questions with which this House ought to have an opportunity of dealing. Let me turn to the grave crisis with which we are confronted to-day. A Committee has been set up by His Majesty's Government with, in a sense, one of the most difficult tasks to perform that any committee has ever had placed before it. The Committee has been asked to investigate methods of restoring the trade balance of this country. We have heard to-night from various noble Lords an account of the position, but I should like to add to it by giving one or two more figures.
We have, at the present moment, a trade deficit of about £100,000,000. This is made up by importations of £1,000,000,000, from which we can deduct £600,000,000 of exports and £300,000,000, possibly, of invisible exports. Then, during the past few weeks, we have obtained, through short credits from America and France, the sum of £105,000,000. What have we got with which to face that deficit of £205,000,000? We have to-day—and I am not stating a fact that is not known to every banker and business man in the City—we have in the Bank of England 134,000,000 golden sovereigns with which to meet that deficit. That is the situation which this Cabinet Committee has to deal with, and on which it has to make recommendations. There is a gross deficit of £100,000,000. How are they going to find it? I agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Gainford, when he said that such matters as the maldistribution of gold ought to be investigated by this Committee. But how is it in their power to go into questions like the maldistribution of gold? Supposing they were to make recommendations in that regard, this Government is not a super-Government for the whole world. It cannot settle that question within the next few weeks, though it is a solution, or at any rate a partial solution, which would enable us at least to march again towards some stage of recovery. There is a question, no doubt, like the cancellation of Debts and Reparations, which would help enormously to settle

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the difficulties, but that again is not a matter with which the Cabinet Committee could deal.
There is, however, at least one remedy which is now accepted very largely in this country as a solution for our difficulties, and that is the solution of tariffs. Mr. Runciman, in another place, last week suggested that in order to repair this trade balance we ought to impose prohibition upon imports. I believe that when the Cabinet Committee investigates that solution they will find that it is not practicable—that, to-day, there are so many treaties in force with foreign countries which would have to be denounced and could not be denounced in sufficient time to enable us to deal with the solution with any degree of hope. More than that, I think the prohibition of imports would arouse an enormous amount of heart-burning on the part of those nations upon whom we impose it. I think that the only possible solution is the solution which has been suggested by my noble friends; Lord Melchett and Lord Barnby—namely, that of tariffs, because after all tariffs are a measure understood by all foreign countries, and have been used by them, for the best part of a century. While they will feel to some extent hurt that we, a nation which has employed the different system of Free Trade, or so called Free Trade, during the best part of a century, should suddenly revert to a system upon which I submit we originally built up our trade—although no doubt it will cause a good deal of feeling amongst them, at the same time there will be a feeling that we are doing to them exactly as they are doing to us.
There is a matter which is closely bound up with this question of tariffs, and that is that in the event of this Committee recommending tariffs as the immediate solution, the Government would then have to consider whether it was possible to induce the House of Commons to accept that solution. Like my noble friend Lord Melchett, I am entirely opposed to a General Election to-day if it is possible to avoid it. I think that the situation is so desperate that if it is possible by any means for this Government to take steps to deal with the situation then they ought to do so, but it may be that this House of Commons would not be prepared to accept the measures in the full
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sense that are necessary to remedy the situation to-day. A mere 10 per cent. revenue tariff is of no use whatsoever. What we require, to-day, is a measure of tariffs that will not only produce revenue for the country, but also protect our manufacturers and our agricultural industry from the blast of competition from abroad with which they are faced. Like my noble friend Lord Barnby, I believe that the very earliest measures have got to be taken to prevent this avalanche of imports which is likely to be hurled into this country within the next few weeks or months as a result of tariffs being proposed.
If it is not possible, what are we to do? I believe, that one of the reasons why foreign countries have had their confidence restored in Great Britain is largely the fact that a National Emergency Government has been established in this country. There are some people who say that this is not a National Government—that it is only a Coalition. I do not agree with them, because so long as you have a Government which includes the leading members of the three different Parties in the State then whatever may be said I think that at least it can be said that it is a National Government. If that is the case, it is most important that that National Government be. preserved in one form or another, and I, speaking as a Party man, and as one who has for long taken an active part in connection with the Conservative Party, and who has believed in Party, am prepared to sink my feelings in this national crisis and to support a National Government, and to support the Prime Minister of this Government if he were to go to the country on a national programme of economies and tariffs—indeed, to give him a free hand to impose any measures or do anything necessary to restore the country's credit and to extract it from the slough in which it is wallowing today. I believe that on those conditions, if foreign countries saw that we were going to have an Election upon that basis, they would do everything they could to keep the pound alive while that Election was going on. But it has got to be done at once. Whatever is done, whether the Government are going or are able to introduce these measures during the present Parliament, it must be done at once. They must find out at once whether they

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are able to do it, and if they are not able to do it then I regard it as their duty immediately to inform the country of that fact and to go to the country upon the basis I have just described.
There is just one other word. In all this I hope that we shall not forget that we have an Empire. I hope we shall not forget that there are Dominions overseas and Colonies overseas, all watching with the greatest anxiety and the greatest hope that we shall be able to emerge from these difficulties. It is because they are there that I think we still have a future. I do not believe that this country can by itself, without its Empire, without its Colonies and Dominions, extract itself from these difficulties. I believe that in any measures that may be taken, by tariffs or otherwise, we must always bear in mind that the Empire is there, and that if we have tariffs we must grant those Preferences to the Empire which they have granted to us in order that we may promote the consolidation of the Empire and continue as a first-rate Power.
EARL PEEL: My Lords, I do not think anyone who has listened to this debate can maintain that it has been unduly and narrowly restricted to the subject that was put down on the Paper. And, indeed, I regret that in the course of what must be a brief reply I cannot do justice to this vast range of subjects, partly because I have been very busy on other matters to-day, and partly because I could not in the space of any speech of reasonable length deal with all those matters over which the debate has ranged. For instance, there was a very interesting speech from the noble Lord, Lord Gainford. He raised four problems of transcendent importance and vast applicability. He dealt with the whole system of the control of industry by the State—a very large matter, on which I myself at the proper time could say a good deal. I could say a good deal also in regard to the complaints of manufacturers about the extent to which they have, in many ways I think unnecessarily, been hampered by State action. Then he raised also the whole question of the method by which savings could be effected, both in our public economy and in our municipal economy, and in other ways. That, again, is a very fruitful subject of discussion; particularly, I think, municipal economy, to which, per-
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haps, not sufficient attention has been paid in this general call for national economy. Then he ranged over the question of the more even and the better distribution of gold. On that, again, there is much to be said. Of course, that brings in the whole question of the tariff in the United States and the whole question of Reparations. Your Lordships will probably absolve me from dealing at any length with that subject. And, finally, there was the subject of direct taxation, which he opposed to the less marked activities of indirect taxation.
But, turning for a moment to the speech of my noble friend Lord Melchett, may I say that he made what I think all your Lordships will consider a very interesting speech in introducing this question. I listened to another of his speeches which he made last summer when we were discussing the question of tariffs, and I may say, if he will allow me—because he alluded to the subject—that I have listened to many very important and interesting speeches from his father in past years in the House on the same subject. May I, in order to relieve his mind from any anxiety under which he may be labouring, say that I desire to accept the Motion which he has moved? May I thank him for introducing that Resolution, and may I say that, having had substantial experience now of answering for different Governments in this House, I think it is the first time I have ever been fortunate enough to answer to a Resolution which supported the Government: Resolutions almost always have been critical. And therefore I am very much obliged for his support, and, indeed, that softens my heart, so that I will, if possible, try to answer the questions which he has put.
Those questions were searching, and, I think, very difficult to answer, because he said to me: "Is this Committee going to sit, and is it going to report, and will the Government remain in office until it has carried out the steps recommended by that Committee?" But the noble Lord also said that he thought that, in order to get the balance between the application of social and physical laws, it would require at least two generations. I think, therefore, he will see that it is difficult for me to give a very positive answer to his question, and as I cannot answer with great certainty perhaps he

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will permit me to be silent on the subject. Again, I am in the same difficulty about the question he asked about the General Election. I note all that he said about the dangers and difficulties of the pound sterling, and that speeches made on either side might, cause a rise or fall in its price, but at she same time he will be aware that those subjects, when the Election comes, will be very much to the fore, and that may perhaps acquit me of the necessity of answering on that point.
I should like to make one observation on a matter which he mentioned at the commencement of his speech. He was discussing the question of balancing the Budget, and he said that the Budget has been merely balanced on paper, but it has not been balanced in reality. He justly observed, I think, that you can never know when a Budget has been fully balanced until the accounts come at the end of the year. For a formal statement that was strictly accurate, but my noble friend did less than justice, I think, to the activities of the Government in introducing that Budget. That Budget, no doubt, does balance on paper, but the foreigner is not going to be impressed merely by that balance on paper. What I am sure has impressed foreign opinion is this, that so soon after it came in, the Government addressed itself and the nation vigorously to the task of balancing the Budget, and has been prepared to make great sacrifices, and all classes have been prepared to make great sacrifices, in order that the balance of that Budget might be attained. It is the spirit with which that Budget has been introduced and balanced, rather than the mere formal side of it which, as I think the noble Lord will agree with me, will make a great difference with foreign opinion.
The noble Lord further discussed at some length the question of tariffs, and he called our attention to the fact that so many notable persons who have for many years professed Free Trade opinions have been converted, and have altered their minds on the subject of Protection. I do not think he will ask me to express my opinion on that subject, because I have so often expressed it before. He knows very well what that opinion is; and, indeed, with my colleague, the noble Marquess, Lord Crewe, sitting beside me, I have a certain diffidence in expressing
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myself with that full vigour that might otherwise have been possible if I had been in a more unhampered condition. But I do think that the extent to which this move in favour of tariffs has gone is very remarkable. And it is remarkable also that in just the same way as when Free Trade was introduced in this country, it was more by the pressure of necessity than by theoretical arguments, that this change has come about. I have noticed that many of the eminent professors of Free Trade have become supporters of tariffs, without to my mind answering satisfactorily from a theoretical point of view the arguments that they so strongly professed when they were Free Traders.
The first step, as I have said, that the Government is taking, is, of course, to balance the Budget, and I quite agree with what noble Lords have said, that that really is only the first step, though a very necessary step in the whole process. There comes, of course, only second to it the great question, of economy in administration and expenditure about which the noble Lord, Lord Gainford, said so much this evening that is valuable. I only want to say one word upon the question of the trade balance with regard to which this Committee has just been set up. I may say that the Committee has not only been set up, but is working. It is sitting even this afternoon. Had it not been working I have no doubt the noble Marquess, Lord Beading, would have been here to reply upon this Motion. Let me examine for a moment the question of the trade balance. There are one or two figures I should like to give your Lordships on the subject. Taking first the year 1928, the excess of imports of merchandise and bullion over exports was £358,000,000. In that year the invisible exports, and I include among the invisible exports £15,000,000 estimated excess of Government, receipts from overseas, amounted to £495,000,000. There was thus an estimated total credit balance of £137,000,000 on the items named. I include in those items an estimated net income from overseas investments. In the year 1929 that excess of imports was £366,000,000 and the so-called invisible exports amounted to £504,000,000. In that year, therefore, the total estimated credit balance on those items was £138,000,000.

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In 1930 the corresponding figure of excess of imports was £392,000,000, and the figure for invisible exports was £431,000,000, leaving, unfortunately, for that year a trade balance of only £39,000,000. Your Lordships will notice a declension in the year 1929–30, and I regret to say that in the present year the picture is a worse one. Not only will there be no credit balance of this kind but there will be, so I am informed, though I have not of course any actual figure to give your Lordships, a debit balance. It becomes clear, therefore, that not too soon has this Committee been set up in order to investigate this particular question. I note, too, that the adverse balance on visible items for the first eight months of the present year is £246,000,000, and that is very nearly the same figure as applies to the first eight months of the previous year. That, therefore, in itself would not necessarily give cause for any acute anxiety if the receipts and incomes from foreign investments and from shipping had remained constant. That, unfortunately, they have not done. It is because of those receipts that we have been able of recent years to secure the purchase of a large quantity of non-essential goods from abroad while still maintaining a sufficient margin to increase our foreign investments. Those receipts had fallen in 1930 by some £70,000,000 as compared with 1929 and very clearly will be largely reduced this year. It is hoped that that reduction will not be constant or continuous; but those are some of the facts upon which the necessity for examining into this matter became perfectly clear.
Noble Lords have discussed the various methods by which the balance of trade might be assisted by excluding imports. The noble Viscount was perfectly correct, no doubt, in what he said about prohibition; but prohibition is not a practical policy because of the various trade agreements by which we are bound to other countries; although I should say in passing that very high tariffs can be put on. I think you can put 100 per cent. on many of these goods without infringing the arrangement about prohibition.
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: Hear, hear—that is what I meant.
EARL PEEL: I am very glad that I accurately interpret the meaning of the
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noble Viscount, and we are on that point very much in agreement. As regards the reduction of imports, to some extent that may be brought about automatically by the fact that, unfortunately, people have so much less money to spend. But it is nevertheless the duty of every person to reduce to the lowest possible limit, perhaps to cut out altogether, any purchases of non-essential imported goods; I may say also going abroad and spending money there for purposes of pleasure. The point has already been taken in another place that those British citizens who are acquiring foreign currency or sending money abroad to purchase foreign securities are themselves putting a further strain upon the exchange. They should refrain from doing so; and they should refrain too from assisting anybody else to do the same.
There is little I think I can add at the moment without, as I said, going very deeply into questions I should not like to deal with without very full and careful consideration. I can only thank my noble friend for having introduced this matter to the House in a speech full of suggestions and ideas. I can assure all those noble Lords who have spoken that I shall place before the members of this particular Committee all the suggestions they have made, that their suggestions may not be lost. Lastly, may I say that the Government is fully aware that this tremendous crisis requires the help and assistance of every class and every Party in the whole community. May I add also, to calm the feelings of my noble friend, that in no circumstances will the Government run away from its responsibilities.
LORD MELCHETT: My Lords, I must thank the noble Earl for his reply and for accepting my Motion. I shall certainly not press him any further this afternoon to answer the questions which I put to him earlier on. He will have to answer them one day or other. For the rest, I think one thing has emerged from this debate particularly from the remarks of the noble Lord who followed me. That is that we are really very much "up against" the question of lower wages or tariffs. I put the question in that form in another place last year, and every time it comes up for discussion one finds exactly the same situation arising. Apart from that I would say only one thing

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more. My noble friend Lord Barnby said that the economic necessity was such that we must cut the "dole," that it was economic justice to reduce that payment with all other payments. It may be economic justice; but I have come to the conclusion that in this world there are times when you require psychologists more than economists, and when, in order to get a united nation, you make sacrifices on the question of pure economy, it is better for the country as a whole to be kind, perhaps, to the very poorest in order that we may all prosper.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

BRIGHTON CORPORATION BILL. [H.L.]
Returned from the Commons, agreed to, with Amendments: The said Amendments considered, and agreed to.

HAYDOCK AND RIXTON - WITH - GLAZEBROOK ELECTRICITY ORDER, 1931.
Special Order in respect of the urban district of Haydock and the Township of Rixton-with-Glazebrook in the rural district of Warrington in the County Palatine of Lancaster:
Laid before the House (pursuant to Act) and referred to the Special Orders Committee.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE.
EARL PEEL: My Lords, I beg to move that this House do now adjourn till Thursday of next week.
Moved accordingly and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
House adjourned at 6 o'clock.