Manawatu Evening Standard. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1931 DOLE SYSTEM IN BRITAIN.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LI, Issue 69, 20 February 1931, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1931 DOLE SYSTEM IN BRITAIN.

The debate in the House of Commons on unemployment relief centres attention on the staggering cost in Great Britain of providing for workless people. In asking* that the Unemployment Insurance Fund be granted power to borrow £20,009,000, the Minister of Labour, Miss Margaret Bondfield, stated that the Fund was in debt to the nation to the extent of £67,000,000. The proposed new loan, she added, would be exhausted in July unless unemployment was substantially decreased, but previously Miss Bondfield had admitted that there was no assurance that the peak of unemployment had yet been reached. The position seemingly has become so serious as to be beyond the power of the Government to control, and, as Major. Elliot, the Conservative member for Kelvingrove (Glasgow), stated in discussing the Opposition amendment to reduce the vote, the time for holding an inquest had come. The Government,' however, succeeded in getting the resolution through the House of Commons, and the indebtedness of the Fund in consequence will be increased to £87,000,000. As it was only in December last that the Government obtained power to .'raise the limit of Treasury advances to the Fund to £70,000,000, Major Elliot had every justification for his charge that the Government was refusing to face the facts. When reviewing the incidence of unemployment in moving the resolution, Miss Bondfield told the House that the Government would not hesitate to deal with any abuses which the Royal Commission investigating the solvency of the Fund held to be proved. Statements made by responsible .persons suggest that the Labour Government, if still in power, will need a lot of courage to correct the abuses which are said to have crept in, for some at least are due to their action.

Speaking at the Junior Constitutional Club in London on “Doles and Insurance” Sir Henry Betterton, M.P., said he was a believer in unemployment insurance as it was originally intended, and as it should be if earned out, but the position today was that it was being degraded and debauched, and it would be destroyed unless the present abuses were corrected. By abolishing the obligation of tlie applicant to look for work, the Government had led to the present position in which borrowing* to meet expenses was really raiding the sinking fund. The present position in which the Fund was overdrawn _ and the State was providing £22,000,000 a year for trans-

itional persons was not insurance, for a great deal of it was indistinguishable from out of wdrk donations. Dealing with the abuses which*had grown up, Sir Henry Betterton said that 60,000 married women were drawing the benefit though they had no intention of returning to work.. Then there was a much more serious abuse, the combination of employers and employees to use insurance benefit to supplement wages. Whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to supplement wages, it was grossly unfair to men in other industries to supplement the wages of certain men at the expense of the insurance fund, added Sir Henry Betterton. Yery serious warnings have been delivered in Britain within a week of the danger involved in the financial drift. The debate in the House of Commons last week on the Conservatve motion of censure on the Government for lavish public expenditure led to Mr Philip Snowden stressing in grave terms the sacrifice that must be demanded of every section of the nation if the industrial crisis were to be overcome and the Budget balanced. The result of the debate was the carrying of a Liberal amendment to set up a committee to recommend immediate economies. In moving it, Sir Donald Mac Lean pointed a way fo> the Government to follow when he said ways must be found for distributing the national cost of relief in the shape of wages. In writing of Europe’s dole fed millions recently, Mr C. De Lisle Burns, Lecturer in Citizenship at the University of Cambridge, remarked that it is generally recognised that what was accepted as inevitable in the first ten years after the armistice of 1918 is tending to become a permanent burden in many European countries. The demand for maintenance during a prolonged period of unemployment is now granted, but this policy will have to change into something more constructive, at least in Great Britain and Germany, in the next decade.