THE UNEMPLOYED

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 268, 27 October 1932, Page 8

THE UNEMPLOYED

PROBLEM IN BRITAIN GOVERNMENT’S TASK. ATTACK ON MEANS TEST. British Official Wireless Service. Rugby, Oct. 25. When the Labour Party motion of censure on the Government was moved m the House of Commons, Mr Lansoury 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 has expired. The Prime Minister, replying, stated that the increase in unemployed had been greatly decelerated, and he recalled that the means test was instituted when the Labour Government including members of the Opposition, was in power. The Government had no Intention of making a clean sweep by the means test. An administration test had to be imposed, but there might be the disability questions to be considered and the question as to how far thrift and savings had to be taken into account.

The unemployment problem was one not merely of sympathy but of business and finance and of devising ways for providing work. To d > 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 an 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 the 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 recently made an ominous speech. He declared that he was lost and did not know what to do. Thus a 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. Mr Lloyd George said he felt uneasy, and 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 to wait and see what the tariffs would do. By the end of the present year it would cost at least £350,000,000 to keep the unemployed from deteriorating in idleness. Millions of idle money could be employed for providing better houses, roads, public works and land settlement.