PROBLEM FOR BRITAIN

Hawera Star, Volume L, 20 June 1930, Page 5

PROBLEM FOR BRITAIN

THE UNEMPLOYMENT QUESTION NEW COMMITTEE SET UP REDUCED VOTE NOT AGREED TO « (British Official Wireless.) 'RUGBY, .Tune 18. liaising tho question of unemployment ini the House! of Commons this afternoon, 'Sir Austen Chamberlain ('Conservative) said he thought it was desirablei that! the Prime Minister snould define exactly the nature of the co-operation he asked for and the scope of the activities in which he asked the other parties to take part. Sir Austen .pointed out that tho cultivation of trade with the Dominions would give Britain an opening to markets of the greatest promise and greatest possible development. The Prime Minister said a body had been chosen to consider the unemployment problem. It consisted of men of varied experience and he believed they would work in full harmonious eo-oper-atiom together. The custody of the work would be very safe in their charge:' The work done 'by the Minister in charge of unemployment was an attempt to re-adapt industrial conditions to enable Britain to compete in the world’s markets in future. That would be continued and no change that had taken place in the machinery must be taken as a change in the purposes of the Government.

On the question of the economic relations between the Dominions and Britain, Mr MacDonald said it. would be very difficult to find a time when goodwill was better and the desire to cooperate was stronger than it was now. The Prime Minister mentioned that the Government had taken a body of civil servants temporarily from their own departments, arid they were devoting the whole of their attention, with their departmental experience, to this problem. The chief of them was Sir John Anderson, permanent secretary of the Home Office. Very important representatives of the Treasury, Board of Trade, Ministry of Labour and the chief adviser of the Economic Advisory Council had also been brought together for the purposes of dealing with unemployment in its neiw phase and of enabling more use to be made of the co-ordinated experiences of departments that had been dealing with the subject in a more piecemeal way. Mr Lloyd George said tho Prime Minister had! indicated that he was prepared to put' into operation the invitation he had extended to both parties some weeks ago to co-operate with the Government in the solution of what was after all a national problem. “I have accepted the invitation,” Mr Lloyd George continued, “and tho whole of the conditions laid down by the Prime Minister.”

•Mr Lloyd George said unemployment had been aggravated by conditions which he hoped were temporary, but Britain would always have 1,000,000 unemployed. That was the problem tho Government 'ought to consider from a national viewpoint. Britain had still the largest export trade in Europe, and, as far as manufactured goods were concerned, had certainly the largest export trade in the world. He agreed that the mere expenditure of money upon things which were not in themselves productive -would not only leave, the problem unsolved, but would aggravate it. The money ought to be spent with a view to the reconditioning and equipping the nation. The Minister of Labour (Miss Margaret Bondfield) gave an assurance that of the. total grants of £36,000,000 for unemployment schemes no more than £2,280,000 had been paid for material which was not British, and this amount had been paid only because the material was unprocurable in Britain. A mo'tion to reduce the vote for unemployment was defeated bv 259 votes to 230.