The Press Wednesday, July 20, 1927. The Proposed Unemployment Loan.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19057, 20 July 1927, Page 10

The Press Wednesday, July 20, 1927. The Proposed Unemployment Loan.

Although everyone hates to think of even one honest and industrious man being out of work—as the subscriptions to the Unemployment Fund attest—and nobody would care to appear to want sympathy with the unemployed, the volume of abnormal unemployment that actually exists is not so great as sonte people would represent. Certainly it is not so great as to justify the proposal of the City Council to raise a loan of £25,000 for ! relief works. The works proposed—the renovation of certain City streetsare useful enough, and in some cases necessary, but they must be—or at any rate they ought to be—part of a general street improvement scheme which it is the duty of the City Council to carry out with the utmost efficiency and economy. Such a scheme ought not, even in part, to be treated as a means of finding work for the unemployed, who, as is well enough known, include many men who are not capable of giving value for the wages paid for this kind of labour. It must also be remembered, as Councillor Andrews pointed out, that the existing arrangements are adequately meeting the existing problem. If the Council feels that some large-scale measures should be adopted, it ought to turn its energies towards getting the unemployed" into the country districts. But the Council is now ruled by the Labour representatives, and Labour in office likes nothing better than spending large sums of money without regard to the interests of the ratepayers or the general public. It is one thing to have necessary public works undertaken in a . businesslike way and carried out on business principles, and another thing to regard themas relief works for the providing of jobs. This is a distinction which the Labour politicians will perhaps neither recognise nor admit, just as they will not recognise nor admit that the raising of large loans for relief works is unsound in principle. .