IN BRITAIN TO-DAY

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22909, 4 January 1940, Page 6

IN BRITAIN TO-DAY

Unemployment Still Above Normal

ANCIENT LAW FORBIDS CAROL SINGING

[By ROY SHERWOOD] LONDON, December 12. It is only a few weeks since a lot of muddleheaded people told us in letters in practically all the big London newspapers that every, war must have a name; that it was vital for the successful prosecution of this one that it should have the right name from the very start; and that no name could be more right for it other than Hitler's war. What do they think of it now? It has become Stalin's war for 3,500,000 Finns and the whole of Scandinavia; and "the peculiar" war for most people in other parts of the world. It is remarkable, too, though not peculiar, that the sympathy felt spontaneously for the Finns, to whom no one was bound by any guarantee, far transcends the sympathy felt for Poland, which 'was the object of the Anglo-French guarantee. It is also a safe prophecy that, before we are many weeks older, the "peculiar" war will have become even more peculiar, though even now, goodness knows, it is peculiar enough. Did we not have Herbert Morrison, the Labour leader, thinking it worth his while only two days ago to assure us that we should certainly not join an anti-Bolshevik group by the side of Germany to fight Russia? Would he have troubled about such an assurance—and would our most famous caricaturist have driven home the same point in the best cartoon of the week—if there had been no widespread whisperings that such a thing might happen? And. is the world not full to-day of speculation about the Balkans and Turkey, and of* guesses about the meaning of the anti-Bolshevik demonstrations in Rome? There never was a time when there was any excuse for thinking of this war as about •Poland. There were a few weeks when it was permissible to think of it as mainly a trial whether or Germany would lead the world. All that is past. The war's true nature as beginning to show through. It is revealing itself as the long foretold ideological struggle about which dozens of books have set us wondering. Only the grouping of opponents may not be what most of us anticipated with more assurance than perspicacity. Unemployment The last unemployment figures published show a decrease. It is not a large one, but Mr Ernest Brown, the Minister for Labour, says that we have turned the corner. The actual decrease for the period October 16 to November 13 is 28,050, and it was announced on the same day as 250,000. more men were called up for the armed forces. That leaves us with 1,213,345 wholly unemployed, 135,233 temporarily stopped, and 54,010 normally in casual employment at present out of work. But as that is still 172,000 more than the number of unemployed at the outbreak of war, there are some people who think that Mr Brown is crowing a little too loudly. For those who are at work wages are going up in more and more trades. Three hundred thousand men in the civil engineering, contracting industry and an unspecified number of surgical instrument makers have had wage increases this week. For the civil engineering workers the new agreement already holds the provision that the. situation is to be reviewed again in January and thereafter every four months. As far as my own admittedly incomplete records go, that makes a total of more than 3,000,000 men whose rates of pay have gone up since the war. There is more genuine pleasure in hearing that the unemployed, too, are to have a little more money at once, Is a week for adults and 6d for each child. The blemish on that bright picture of rising wages is the steady increase in the cost of living. But the political leaders of our working men and women do hot seem to see that the interests of the people they represent would be better served if they fought to keep down the rising cost of necessities than by assuring them these hollow wage improvements. ' No Carols There will be no young carol singers this Christmas. Under one of those old laws which we forget about in normal times, parents are liable to a fine of £25 or three months' imprisonment if they allow children under 16 to sing carols in the street and to knock at doors for money. Now the police have unearthed that old law and sent out their warning that it is to be enforced. It may seem unkind, but it is wise. The black-out is no time for' wandering children. Thajiks to the latest light regulations the shops are looking just a little less dismal. They may how illuminate their windows by means of a sort of light box enclosing one 25-watt lamp which shines through a tissue paper covered slit four inches long and a quarter of an inch wide. That sheds a soft glow over the contents of the window without throwing an outward or an upward beam. It is a poor "Ersatz" for the usual Christmas displays which are so often at their best at night, but we are growing thankful for small mercies. One of the wonders of the post-war days to come will be to hear how the big London stores managed to carry on at all through these days. ■ Perhaps the most cheerful bit of news of the day comes in the report of the Ministry of Health for the year 1938 which has just been published. There were 10,647 more births and 30,745 fewer deaths than in. 1937. The birth--rate was 15.1 per 1008, highest since 1932. The death-rate was 11.6, which is 0.8 per 1000 less than the previous year, itself a record. Only 32,724 children under one year died which means that this particular mortality rate has been reduced by almost half in the last 20 years. And, though that is. still a deplorably high figure, there is comfort in the fact that we have now brought down the deaths of women in child-birth to 3.08 per 1000 live births Only cancer: deaths are still going up. With 68,605 of them in 1938 there was an increase of 1614 over the previous year. As cancer finds most of its victims among the elderly, and the low birth-rate of recent years is shifting the balance of the population's age to these, we can expect no great improvement in the near future of cancer death figures.