LANCASHIRE’S PLIGHT

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 169, 12 April 1930, Page 26

LANCASHIRE’S PLIGHT

UNEMPLOYMENT RIFE ONE COTTON WORKER IN FIVE IDLE Unemployment is rite in Lancashire, and is daily getting worse. There are more people on the live registers of the employment exchanges to-day than has been the case in any February since 1922 (wrote the Manchester correspondent of the "Morning Post” on February 12).

The number of unemployed adults in the north-western division, which includes Lancashire and Cheshire, is now 3-18,309, which is not far short of 100,000 more than was the case a year ago. The cotton industry is the main direct contributor to these figures, while indirectly that industry may be held almost wholly responsible, for it is a commonplace in Lancashire that if cotton is doing well the other industries in the county are also busy. One cotton worker in every five is idle. These are the basic facts of the situation. They are no doubt well known to Mr. J. It. Clynes, the Home Secretary, who sits for one of the divisions of this city. It has been announced that Mr. Clynes will be the chairman for the remainder of the inquiry that is being conducted into the Economic Advisory Council. Mr. Clynes made a speech at the opening of the Lancashire Cotton Fair, in which he said the outstanding problem in the cotton trade was to recapture the overseas markets. Well, of course, it is, though there is also something to be said in view of all that is happening for the preservation of the home market. Tariffs in India. If the inquiry can show how the export trade is to be recaptured and bow the home market is to be retained, all Lancashire will be glad. The great bulk of the trade is export, and must always be an export trade if Lancashire is to nourish as it did before the war. Lancashire could supply almost the whole world with cotton goods, and it used to do so, but of late years the increasing competition from •Japan, which is close to our Far Eastern markets, and the setting up of tariffs in India, have eaten into Lancashire’s overwhelming supremacy and obviously are making a difference in the outlook on our fiscal system from the old Free Trade fortress here. During December last the exports of cotton piece goods were 27,559.000 square yards, as compared with 290,499.400 square yards in the previous December. It is this continuing loss in the export trade which accounts for much of the unemployment. Admittedly there is now in the trade a considerable body of opinion in favour of a resort to protective duties. According to Mr. H. W. Lee, president of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, those who now advocate protective duties do so “partly to protect the home market and partly with the idea in the generally used phrase of ‘having something to bargain with.’ ” There are ottiers, according to the same authority, who favour Free Trade within the Empire because they believe that would improve Lancashire’s trade not so much with the Dominions as with India.