UNEMPLOYMENT IN BRITAIN

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 85, 4 January 1930, Page 9

UNEMPLOYMENT IN BRITAIN

PRINCIPAL CAUSES Sir Arthur Salter, director of the economic and finance section of the League of Nations, made a special journey to Oxford to address a conference on the relation between British unemployment and world economics. He said there were four principal causes why, in a world which was definitely better off as a whole than in 1913, in spite of the war, Great Britain still suffered from serious unemployment and was less prosperous in relation to most other countries than before. The first of these causes was that trade was not a luxury but a vital necessity to Britain, which, therefore, suffered more than any other from the increased impediments to foreign trade that had arisen since the war. That was an evil which could only be dealt with internationally. The second reason was that, during a period of abnormally rapid transition, the country had an exceptionally unelastic system. The character of the fixed plant, and the organisation on both the workers’ and the employers’ side, made readjustments to changing world conditions and world prices more difficult and more slow than in other countries. This was a matter of national and not of international action. The third cause was that the burden of taxation was the highest in the world, and, last, there were a number of special causes, some of which were due to the war. Such causes included the industrialisation of the East, the development of oil, and the expansion of shipbuilding plant. It was essential to hold on to economic principles, but it was equally important to apply those principles to concrete facts and translate them into human terms. What was, for example, lightly called by an economist ‘a period of economic adjustment,” might well be a period of demoralising unemployment and distress for hundreds of thousands of human beings.