CHRISTMAS RECESS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 December 1938, Page 6

CHRISTMAS RECESS

.ADJOURNMENT OF BRITISH PARLIAMENT SOME PROBLEMS DISCUSSED. UNEMPLOYMENT RELIEF. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 11.25 a.m.) RUGBY, December 22. Parliament rose today for the Christmas recess and will not reassemble until January 31. The international drug traffic, air raid precautions and unemployment were discussed on the adjournment of the House. Mr R. A. Butler (Parliamentary Un-der-Secretary for Foreign Affairs) during the adjournment debate, said the Government viewed with grave concern the situation in connection with the drug traffic, as described by the League’s Advisory Committee on the Drug Traffic. The Government was in communication with other governments regarding a communication addressed by the committee to governments of the growth of the traffic in the Far East. It was decided, with one or two exceptions, to retain in a reconstructed form the trenches dug in the Royal Parks in London as an air raid precaution during the emergency of last September. Mr J. J. Lawspn (Labour) raised the question of unemployment, and stressed the sapping of moral fibre and destruction of self-respect resulting from long periods of involuntary idleness suffered in areas where unemployment was most severe. Replying for the Government, Mr Ernest Brown (Minister of Labour) denied any lack of sensitiveness on the part of Ministers to the tragedy of unemployment, or any wish to deny the deterioration in the employment figures, which he thought was inevitable, consequent on the fall in the price level of primary commodities. At the same time, it was right to recognise that there had been a great increase in relieving the people as a whole over the past four years as a result of the fall in the cost of living, and that relief of the misfortunes of unemployment through the insurance scheme, public assistance and general social services, was on a scale not matched in any other country in the world.