G.B.S. AND NATIONAL INSURANCE.

Evening Star, Issue 14635, 3 August 1911, Page 8

G.B.S. AND NATIONAL INSURANCE.

Writing to ‘The Times.’ Mr G. Bernard Shaw says; “ Just, consider the situation. Hero we nr© on tho eve of the parliamentary committee stage of a National Insurance Bi.ll. It is in some respects so monstrous a Bill that its passage into law h.j it stands is unthinkable. It is a Bill to enforce saving on people who already cannot afford to feed themselves properly—that, is, a Bill to make suicide and childmurder compulsory—and to enforce it. moreover, by an official machinery which would make even the millennium a nuisance. But it contains certain provisions which have won approval from all parties. It proposes to pay a handsome subsidy to those bodies which, like tit© friendly societies, have by voluntary effort organised thrift and orderly business habits among the working classes, justly recognising that they render social sendees and effect social economies for which they can make no charge and which can therefor© figure directly in no ownmercial balancesheet. Now "the Birkbeck lias done for the less fortunate section of the middle class exactly what the friendly societies and trade unions (which can be brought within the scope of the Bill by a simple amendment) are doing for the working class. Excepting only the hopeless residuum which represents the wreckage of our industrial system, there is no class in which the struggle for existence is so wearing and incessant as in the class that banked at the Birkbeck. Are they, because they are totally unrepresented in Parliament, to be abandoned to a calamity which will do several millions’ worth of mischief when the yield of about half a farthing on the Income Tax would avert it?”