CENSURE MOTION

Southland Times, Issue 21848, 27 October 1932, Page 5

CENSURE MOTION

LABOUR PARTY A HEAVY DEFEAT MEANS TEST DISMISSED (British Official Wireless.) Rugby, October 25. When the Labour Party motion of censure on the Government was moved in the House of Commons, the Hon. G. Lansbury criticized 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 had expired. The Prime Minister in replying stated that the increase in unemployed had greatly decelerated and recalled the Means Test instituted when the Labour Government, including members of the Opposition, were in power. The Government had no intention of making a clean sweep of the Means Test. The administration test had to be imposed, but there might be 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 business and finance and of devising ways of providing work. To do 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 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 they definitely were of the opinion that the Means Tests could not and ought not to be abolished. The censure motion was defeated by 462 votes to 55. The Samuelites supported the Government but the Lloyd Georgeites voted with Labour. In the censure debate, Mr Lloyd George said that the Governor of the Bank of England had recently made an ominous speech. He declared that he was lost and did not know what to do. Thus the man who above all others had been a guide to Ministers for a decade had admitted 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 deteriorating in idleness. Millions of idle money could be employed providing better houses, roads, public works and land settlement.