UNEMPLOYED SCHEME.

Evening Star, Issue 20421, 28 February 1930, Page 2

UNEMPLOYED SCHEME.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —I am set wondering what tho rank and file of the unions will think of tho scheme now that Mr Ralph Harrison has given his approval. I having had time to read tho schemebeing one of tho unemployed —have no hesitation in roundly condemning both it and Mr Harrison’s approval ,of it. Ho evidently is of tho opinion that the workers should be further penalised in tho shape of a tax, and this in order to make them think about their unemployed brother, _ It must bo evident that Mr Harrison in bis economics has gone up a lane and got lost. Ho believes in taxing the already overtaxed, the workers. And as a working class propagandist and educationist ho proves himself hopelessly out of date by an advocacy of coercion in order to produce thought in the working class. 1 think ho is wrong in assuming, as bo does, that tho working class “ will quickly settle down ” to the imposition of the tax. He recognises, of course, that at first it will bo somewhat of a hardship for the small wage-earners, but holds out to them tbo hope of the tax being revised some time in the future. In tho meantime they will not have to go near the pictures nor the dirt-track racing. If Mr Harrison had boon a small, wage-earner instead of a salaried person I think ho would have replied quite differently to tho interviewer. Ido not think that tho Labour Party, of which he and I are members, will approve of any further reduction of tbo workers’ annual income, for that is what the scheme amounts to. Wo are surely living in a topsy-turvy time when a labour union secretary advocates such a course.— I am, etc., I l '.A. February t’7.