BRITAIN’S UNEMPLOYED

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 28, 27 October 1932, Page 9

BRITAIN’S UNEMPLOYED

Complexity of Problem GOVERNMENT’S TASK Censure Vote in Commons ATTACK ON MEANS TEST By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright. (Rec. Oct. 20, 7.30 p.m.) London, Oct, 25. A motion of censure on the Government, submitted by the Labour Party, was defeated in the House of Commons to-night by 4G2 votes to 55. The Samuelite Liberals supported the Government, but the Lloyd George section voted with Labour. The Opposition Leader, Mr. George Lansbury; criticised the economies effected in social services and the imposition of the means test on a section of the unemployed whose right to benefit under the Insurance Act had expired. The Prime Minister, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, in replying, stated that the increase in the number of unemployed had been greatly accelerated, and he recalled that the means test had been instituted when a Labour Government, Including the members of the Opposition, was in power. He said that the Government had no intention of making a clean sweep of the means test administration. A test had to be imposed, but there might be disability questions to be considered, also the question as to how far thrift and savings had to be taken into account. The unemployment problem was >ne not merely of sympathy, but of business and finance, and of devising ways of providing work. To do that they had to straighten out such problems as those left by the financial clauses of the Versailles Treaty, to go on applying the Lausanne Agreement and to get international agreement at the World Economic Conference to go in effect to the root of the unemployment problem. Sir Herbert Samuel, speaking for the free-trade Liberals, said that they were definitely of opinion that the means test could not and ought not to be abolished. Mr. Lloyd George said that the governor of the Bank of England had recently made an ominous speech. He had declared that he was lost, and did not know what to do. Thus the man who, above all others, had been a guide to Ministers for a decade, admitted that he could not foresee what was going to happen. “I feel uneasy,” Mr. Lloyd George said. As the oldest member of the House of Commons, he asked whether the Government had any plan to deal with the 3,000,000 unemployed except wait and see what tariffs would do by the end of the present year. It would cost at least £350 million to keep the unemployed deteriorating in idleness. Millions of idle money could be employed in providing better houses, roads, public works, and land settlement