THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES TUESDAY, APRIL 4, 1933. UNEMPLOYMENT IN BRITAIN.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21920, 4 April 1933, Page 6

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES TUESDAY, APRIL 4, 1933. UNEMPLOYMENT IN BRITAIN.

Mr Neville Chamberlain's reply in defence of the British Government against the recent Socialist Opposition motion of censure upon it for failure to relieve unemployment is of interest from the viewpoint of other parts of the Empire in which the same problem is in evidence. The Chancellor of the Exchequer made it very clear that the Government intended to stand by its conviction that continued expenditure of money on relief works is a hopeless proposition. The only suggestions offered by the Opposition, he pointed out, were that either the Government should again begin to splash money about in the hope of finding in that way a means to absorb the unemployed or that there should be a substitution of Socialism for Capitalism. Mr Chamberlain’s calculation has been that the sum spent on State-assisted works from April, 1024, to September. 1931, amounted to £.700,000,000, of which £450,000,000 was expended on housing, £120,000,000 on unemployment grants, and £90,000,000 on roads. He was astonished, he observed, to find that the average number of men actually employed was only 90,000, the actual peak being reached during the

period of office of the Socialist Government when the number rose to 114,000. “ I cannot think,” the Chancellor of the Exchequer went on to say, “how any thoughtful, intelligent person, considering these figures, can come to any other conclusion than this, that the expenditure of that money, some of it remunerative in the health and well-being of the people and some of it unremunerative, which did not touch the fringe of the unemployment problem, is a criminal folly. It is a criminal folly to pursue it.” It is the deliberate opinion of the British Government to-day that a policy which over a period of years has not even sufficed to keep the volume of unemployment stationary has failed, and it must have done with it. In 1932 the figures for unemployment in Great Britain averaged 2,813,000, an increase of three per cent, over 1931. In January, 1929, the number of the unemployed showed an increase of 154.000. In 1930 the increase was 188.000, in 1931 it was 309,000, and in 1932 it was 221,000. The latest figures, those for January last, have represented an increase of 180,000. What the British Government has found reason to set its face against is the idea of relief works started for the purpose of employing labour, a conception, as Mr Ramsay MacDonald has expressed it, of “ Three million people put to work that is nonproductive, unnecessary in itself, which has no market —three million people living upon the incomes created by the mass of their fellow-workers.” The Government has not refused to admit that there may be cases where it may properly and usefully spend money, or discouraged local bodies from making applications for loans for works such as they can put in hand, and it has not shut the door in the matter of assistance by it for the completion of the giant Cunard liner. But its contention is that the country’s long experience of the efforts of its predecessors over a series of years has enabled it to distinguish true policy from false. Mr Chamberlain’s words seem well worth quoting: —

We have been advocating and operating relief works for the last twelve years. So long as we could cling to the idea that unemployment was only a passing phase, and that all we had to do was to provide some temporary employment until normal times returned, so long it seemed a reasonable proposition _to consider the advisability of anticipating needs which normally would not arise until a few years hence. But I do not think that any thoughtful member of this House would believe that the maladjustments which have brought about this world-wide unemployment are likely to be corrected so rapidly or so completely that we can look forward with any confidence to the reduction of unemployment to comparatively small figures within the next ten years. We have already exhausted practically all we can do in anticipation of needs, and that remedy is no longer open to us. The prospect held out in such a pronouncement is not very encouraging. The criticism of the Observer has been that when members of the National Government speak of spending capital uneconomically they seem to be unconscious that nothing could be less economic than the dole, and that they take little heed of the possibilities of using the dole money to make derelict parts of industry financially solvent and ready to absorb idle hands. In regard to shipbuilding the same journal urges that Britain could take the lead in the provision of new tonnage if the price were right, and towards making the price right the annual millions paid to the unemployed in that industry would be a very handsome contribution, while, if it did not go all the way, the balance would be but a small addition to the £130,000,000 which is being paid out for nothing. So the argument is not all one-sided. The Government’s contention is that the first essential towards the recovery of trade and the increase of employment is the restoration of confidence, and its claim is that it is doing its utmost in that direction, and that what it has to do is to keep pegging away and trust to persistent and consistent effort. A hopeful indication is afforded in trade figures submitted a few weeks ago by Mr Hore-Belisha, financial secretary to the Treasury, from which he drew the deduction'“ Great Britain is not only recovering: she is shaping herself anew. We took office at the most humiliating moment in British history; now at the end of one year we can see a reduction of £145,000,000 in imports without the loss of one ounce of our domestic export trade. In fact we have increased it. Every bad tendency has been corrected in the one year. We can claim to have strengthened the atrophying limbs of Great Britain.”