WAR SETTLEMENT

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 37, 13 February 1931, Page 7

WAR SETTLEMENT

CRIPPLING BRITAIN

Improvements Needed to Meet

World Competition.

WORK FOR IDLE HANDS

(British Official Wireless.)

(Received 12 noori.)

RUGBY, February 12,

In the House of Commons, Sir Herbert Samuel, for the Liberals, introduced a motion calling on the Government to formulate an extensive policy for utilising the labour of the Avorkless in schemes of national development such as advocated by the Liberal party for several years.

He emphasised that they were not asking for mere relief works but for useful and essential works needed for the improvement of national equipment.

Continuing', Sir Herbert stated that during the past ten years the Government expenditure on unemployment im surance had totalled £545,000,000, with nothing to show for it. It would have paid for 1,000,000 houses or alternatively the whole of the national road and electricity programmes several times over.

The Liberals suggested that such developments should be met from loans, the interest on which could be paid from' the revenues from telephones, and the electricity and road fund.

The Prime Minister accepted the motion for the Government. He said that there was nothing the country could do with greater wisdom at this mbment than develop, its resources, because the economic conditions Were changing and Britain had to meet in the markets of the world extraordinary increased competition.

The special advantages which thife country enjoyed in the past had been lost as a refeult of the war, and the political and economic settlement Of the War, arid it was impossible for it to be indifferent any longer to the lowef standard of life among the workers of most of the foreign countries. , *

Protection of thfe British workers came iriork and riiOre into international negotiation. Gefieva 'was becoming, increasingly, the 'place where the nations had to negotiate to enable them to maintain their standards of life.

Mr. MacDohald reviewed the development schemes already inaugurated, by the Government, and he concluded with an .appeal for an effort to increase the programme of development and for a spirit of hope and power so that the unemployment problem should be solved.