UNEMPLOYMENT IN ENGLAND

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 133, 1 March 1929, Page 13

UNEMPLOYMENT IN ENGLAND

Sir, —There were two ominous items of news in the Press telegrams from the Old Land in your issue of yesterday. The one is Mr. J. L. Garvin’s gibe that the Baldwin Government and its party had resolved themselves into a “noble order of ostriches”; and the other item was that a large band of idle miners, “bedraggled and disconsolate,” are marching to London to see Mr. Baldwin to plead with him to help them in their desperate plight. . . . It is a difficult thing for a brilliant journalist like Mr. Garvin to say smart and clever things and yet keep within the solid region of fact. Mr. Baldwin and his Cabinet are not blind and stupid men, but they are men weighted with social and economic problems such as no British Cabinet has had to carry for many a long day. The war debt problem is enough in itself to tax the strength of any Cabinet. Taxation has increased fourfold since the days before the Great War, and there is an army of unemployed numbering a million and a half receiving doles that barely keep body and soul together—and yet those doles almost make bankrupt the Treasury of the Baldwin Cabinet.

The dire extremity of the Government is the opportunity of the smart journalist and the party politician. Mr. Garvin, who of yore was Joseph Chamberlain’s trusted lieutenant in the ill-timed tariff reform crusade, holds the present Cabinet up to ridicule. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, in a speech at Edinburgh, deplores the “colossal failure” of Mr. Baldwin, and commends his socialistic nostrum as the cure-all for all the ills of -the Old Land. Liberal leaders fell into line with Messrs. Garvin and MacDonald. Sir Herbert Samuel, an ardent follower of Lloyd George, has found that the Baldwin Cabinet is like Mr. Pecksniff’s horse, “full of promise, but of no performances,” and he entertains his audiences with amusing chunks from Dickens. Nero fiddled when Rome was burning, and party politicians are following in his steps. Party bickering is rampant, and endless thousands of men, women, and children, starved in body and in mind, are looking to a future with no hope. The criminals in English gaols are in a way better off than they. The war ended for a time party political bickering, and surely a truce might be made in the presence of this awful calamity and all parties unite to solve the problem. Party political bickering leads nowhere, and in Italy, Jugo-Slavia, and Spain, where democracy ran to tongue the dictator stepped in, and took the reins of government. Is this to be the remedy in the Old Land? The late Mr. Stead wrote a booklet on the “Haunting Horrors of Armenia,” and he asked, “Who will be damned for all this?” Lord Rosebery said at the time that he was “haunted by the horrors of Armenia.” A fairly large volume might be filled with the story of the “haunting horrors” of England’s mining districts, with 200,000 idle men and boys, and a total population of 750,000 depending on State and private charity—and that charity quite inadequate. There is no paper more guarded in its statements than the London “Times," and its reports describe an incredible amount of physical, mental, and moral misery. They endorse as true the picture of the Prince of Wales in his Christmas appeal, and printed in the “Times”: —

“Picture for a moment an unemployed man in, say, the Rhondda Valley, or in Durham. He has been without work for months, perhaps for a year, or more. His small son is packing off to school with only a thin jersey between his back and the bleak winter air. Shirt and vest he has none. His little sister’s shoes and stockings don’t bear thinking about, and her dress is a cloak of her mother’s, who herself doesn’t go out of doors until her daughter comes home, for the simple reason “hat this dress is joint property. And day after day the father tramps the one narrow, winding street of the valley town—the same little post office, the same half-empty shops, the same chapel, and ever the grim, overhanging hills, sombre and treeless, shutting out all but one slit of the grey sky above. “Now this sort of thing, m different forms, is going on in the mining villages throughout the country. A cruel torture to suffer, a terrible torture for keen, intelligent men who have been used to better things, not down-and-outs whose senses have, perhaps, been blunted to hardship. And think most* of all of the children, whose minds and bodies must be going awry amid this long-drawn weariness of misfortune, which they cannot even understand or explain.”

Emigration of course should be a way out of this distress. But the door is shut in New Zealand and Australia, sad to say. There is an open door in Canada, but the people have lost to some extent initiative and self-reliance, and they cling to their wretched regions. A Canadian immigration agent went through a workless njjning region twO months qgo inviting lads from 14 to 18 to go to farms in Canada to learn farming, and he got no response. They were offered a free passage, a wage of at least 10s.' a week, of which they could spend one-third, but must bank two-thirds, and nt 21, when they had saved £lOO, they would get a loan of £5OO to settle on the land. The years of physical destitution have caused moral deterioration' and self-reliance is dying. . . Those blighted mining regions are a menace to the Homeland and to the Empire. It is true that regions peopled by men and women physically and morally run down become the breeding places of deadly diseases. These regions are a menace to the whole world. These mining re-, gions unless swept away will become a contagion of badness. The solidarity of the human race is a blessed fact and yet it may prove a curse. The healthy and the cultured belong to the same family as the diseased and the vicious. The words of another may well be applied to those mining regions, with their “haunting horrors”: “If we teach them not in the brotherhood of light and love, to raise them up to newness of life, then they will visit us by a fixed law of social unity and pour the virus of their degradation upon us.” Has New Zealand no pity and no help?—l am, etc., ROBERT WOOD. Karori, February 26.