CENSURE MOTION FAILS

Taranaki Daily News, 27 October 1932, Page 5

CENSURE MOTION FAILS

BRITAIN’S UNEMPLOYMENT POLICY OF THE GOVERNMENT MR. LLOYD GEORGE UNEASY VOTE ,CAST WITH LABOUR By Telegraph—Press Assn. —Copyright. Rec. 5.5 p.m. London, Oct. 26. A motion of censure on the Government for its unemployment policy was defeated in the House of Commons today by 462 votes to 55. Liberal followers of Sir Herbert Samuel supported the Government, but Mr. Lloyd George s supporters voted with Labour.

When the Labour Party motion was moved Mr. George Lansbury criticised the economies effected in social services and the imposition of a means test on a section of unemployed whose right to benefit under the Insurance Act had expired. /

Mr. Lloyd George said 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 the man who above all others had been a guide to the Ministers for a decade admitted he could not foresee what was going to happen. Mr. Lloyd George said he felt uneasy as the oldest member of the House of Commons. He asked whether the Government had any plan to deal with the 3,000,000 of unemployed except to wait and see what 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 pounds of idle money could bo employed in providing better houses, roads, public works and land settlement.

The Prime Minister, replying, stated the increase in unemployed had greatly decelerated/ He recalled the means test instituted when the Labour Government, including members of the Opposition, was in power. The Government had no Intention Of making a clean-sweep means test. An administration test had to be imposed, but there might be disability questions to be considered and the question as to how far thrift arid savings had to be taken into account.

The unemployment problem was one not merely of sympathy, but also of business, finance and 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 to reach 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 were definitely of the opinion that the means tests could not be and ought not to be abolished.