Labour policy—false and true

by Lynden Livingston Macassey

Training schools were to be provided for women attracted into industry during the war but who, after the war, found themselves unable to secure permanent peace employment. The local educational authorities, assisted by grants from the Exchequer, were to provide courses of training for unemployed male workers. To relieve adult unemployment the Board of Education should be authorized at any time to raise the school-leaving age, and should be restrained from discouraging local educational authorities from making by-laws raising the age of full-time attendance. Local education authorities should be urged to submit fresh schemes for schools, etc., under the Education Act of 1918. Any exemption from school attendance below the age of fourteen to be made illegal; local education authorities to proceed with schemes of “continuation education”; the Government to increase the number of free places in secondary schools and provide maintenance allowances to all free-place pupils in need of them. The number of free-places in all centres of higher education to be increased, maintenance allowances to be given under grant from the Board of Education to persons holding such places; training centres for young persons unemployed to be opened by local educational authorities under grants from the Board of Education.

“Socially necessary” work was to be provided for all. This was to be facilitated by the withdrawal of juvenile labour, and the general introduction of a 44-hour week without reduction of wages, coupled with a drastic regulation of overtime. The work so provided should not be “relief works,” but of a “socially productive character” carried out under regular wage-earning employment by workpeople in the appropriate trades. Work merely providing employment for the unemployed without social results was characterized as wasteful for the community and demoralizing to the workers.

The Labour Party tries of set policy to make the Government the scapegoat; so the Report delivered itself as follows:

“We recognize that the insensate policy of the Government during the last two years both in home and foreign affairs has brought the nation to the point at which wholesale relief is the only alternative to wholesale starvation, and that those who suffer by it must be provided for directly out of the pockets of those more fortunately situated.”

In order to increase the volume of employment the Government was enjoined to put in hand, at once, as much as possible of its works programme for the next decade, and cause commodities ultimately needed by the State to be manufactured forthwith; and local authorities and public bodies were similarly called upon to anticipate their requirements. Road improvements were demanded on a much larger scale, and afforestation and foreshore reclamation. Then came the recommendation that the Government should compose its differences with the Building Trade Unions by giving them a guarantee of an adequate minimum housing programme for the next five years, so as to meet “their reasonable claim for safeguards against unemployment”—this to induce the Building Trade Unions, who had more housing work than they could do, to allow unemployed unskilled men, mainly ex-service men, to enter temporarily the building trade! The report alleged that many raw materials and other necessary supplies were being held up by capitalists, for instance, cement, bricks, light castings; to remedy this supposititious state of affairs the Government was urged to take drastic steps to compel the production of these materials in the required quantities. An enormous amount of work in respect of the construction, improvement and repair of railways, roads, waterways and harbours, it was said, ought no longer to be postponed. Schools and other public buildings should be built. The embargoes laid upon borrowing by local authorities should be removed and loans provided for them through the Public Works Commissioners or otherwise by the State to enable them to carry out local public works. The Government was required to resume through county agricultural committees its war-time powers to enforce the proper cultivation of land.

Then follows a series of measures for the restoration of overseas commerce. The root of the problem of unemployment lay, it was said, in the revival of industry and of commerce abroad. “The Government had shirked that duty,” and these were Labour’s demands:

(a) An end to be put to wars, and all expenditure on armaments and semi-warlike expeditions in this and other countries.

(b) The immediate inception of trade with Russia, and normal political relations with the Soviet Republic. The Russian Government was known to be ready to supply to this country large quantities of timber, hide, flax, platinum and gold in payment of extensive supplies which it needed of railway equipment, means of transport, agricultural machinery, implements of all kinds, clothing, boots, and a thousand and one other commodities. This necessitated and justified the immediate conclusion of an effective trade agreement with Russia.

(c) The restoration of production in, and trade with, other continental countries, but not under the export credits scheme of the British Government—which is “merely an attempt to enable British manufacturers to palm off their surplus goods upon foreign countries instead of supplying the goods to those countries which they really need.” The ordinary normal course of international trade is then described, with this naïve observation. “At present, however, conditions in Central Europe are such that, without further assistance, it is very doubtful if this normal trade transaction would be carried out.” The report is most admirable in its modesty as to what “further assistance” it recommends. We may assume that if a recommendation had been available, that would stand criticism, it would have been proffered.

The only proposals which the Report advocated were as follows: