The Present Machinery of Relief
At present what is the situation? Most unemployed work-people are entitled to receive certain payments from the Employment Exchanges under a so-called Insurance scheme, which is administered on a national basis; some weeks they are entitled to receive those payments, other weeks they are not; but in any case those payments afford relief which is admittedly inadequate, and they are supplemented—and very materially supplemented—by sums varying from one locality to another, but within each locality on a uniform scale, which are paid by the Boards of Guardians in the form of outdoor relief. Now that situation is highly unsatisfactory. The system of outdoor relief and the machinery of the Guardians are not adapted for work of this kind. They are designed to meet the problem of individual cases of distress, not necessarily arising from unemployment, but in any event individual cases to be dealt with, each on its own merits, after detailed inquiry into the special circumstances of the case. That is the function which the Guardians are fitted to perform, and it is a most important function, which will still have to be discharged by the Guardians, or by similar local bodies, whatever the national system of unemployment relief may be. But for dealing with unemployment wholesale, for paying relief in accordance with a fixed scale and without regard to individual circumstances—for that work the Guardians are a most inappropriate body. They possess no qualification for it which the Central Government does not possess, while they have some special and serious disqualifications.
In any case, it is preposterous that you should have two agencies, each relieving the same people in the same wholesale way, the Employment Exchanges with their scale, asking whether a man is unemployed, and how many children he has to support, and paying him so much, and the Guardians with their scale, asking only the same questions and paying him so much more. It would obviously be simpler, more economical, and more satisfactory in every way, if one or other of those agencies paid the man the whole sum. And I have no hesitation in saying that that agency should be the Central Government. Perhaps the strongest argument in favour of that course is that, when relief is given locally, the money must be raised by one of the worst taxes in the whole of our fiscal system, local rates, which are tantamount to a tax, in many districts exceeding 100 per cent., upon erection of houses and buildings generally. It is foolish to imagine that any useful end is served by keeping down taxes at the expense of rates.
Serious as is the problem of national finance, the fiscal resources of the Central Government are still far more elastic and less objectionable than those which the local authorities possess. I suggest, accordingly, as a policy for the immediate future, the raising of the scale of national relief to a more adequate level, coupled with the abolition of what I have termed wholesale outdoor relief in the localities. What it is right to pay on a uniform scale should be paid entirely by the Central Government, and local outdoor relief should be restricted to its proper function of the alleviation of cases of exceptional distress after special inquiries into the individual circumstances of each case.
One final word to prevent misconception. I have said that our present system of relief is unsatisfactory, and I have indicated certain respects in which I think it could be improved. But I am far from complaining that relief is being granted throughout the country as a whole upon too generous a scale. Anomalies there are which, if they continued indefinitely, would prove intolerable. But we have been passing through an unparalleled emergency. Unemployment in the last two years has been far more widespread and intense than it has ever been before in modern times, and never was it less true that the men out of work have mainly themselves to blame. But it has meant far less distress, far less destruction of human vitality, and I will add far less demoralisation of human character than many of the bad years we had before the war. That is due to the system of doles, the national and local doles; and in the circumstances I prefer that system with all its anomalies to the alternative of a substantially lower scale of relief. We are still in the midst of that emergency; and if we are faced, as I think for this decade we must expect to be faced, with that dilemma which I indicated earlier, I should prefer, and I hope that every Liberal will prefer, to err by putting the scale of relief somewhat too high for prudence and equity rather than obviously too low for humanity and decency.
THE PROBLEM OF THE MINES
By Arnold D. McNair
M.A., LL.M., C.B.E.; Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; Secretary of Coal Conservation Committee, 1916-1918; Secretary of Advisory Board of Coal Controller, 1917-1919; Secretary of Coal Industry Commission, 1919 (Sankey Commission).
Mr. McNair said:—Need I labour the point that there is a problem of the Mines? Can any one, looking back on the last ten years, when time after time a crisis in the mining industry has threatened the internal peace and equilibrium of the State, deny that there is something seriously wrong with the present constitution of what our chairman has described as this great pivotal industry? What is it that is wrong? If I may take a historical parallel, will you please contrast the political situation and aspirations of the working-class population at the close of the Napoleonic wars with their industrial situation and aspirations now. Politically they were a hundred years ago unenfranchised; more or less constant political ferment prevailed until the Reform Bill, and later, extensions of the franchise applied the Liberal solution of putting it within the power of the people, if they wished it, to take an effective share in the control of political affairs.