I have to acquaint the House that this House has this day attended His Majesty in the House of Peers, and His Majesty was pleased to make a Most Gracious Speech to both Houses of Parliament, of which for greater accuracy, I have obtained a copy, which is as followeth:

My Lords and Members of the House of Commons,

My relations with foreign Powers continue to be friendly .

The campaign of hostility to British rights and interests in Egypt and the Sudan, inspired rather than discouraged by the Government of Zaghlul Pasha, culminated in the murder of Sir Lee Stack in the streets of Cairo and, obliged. My Government to demand redress .

Their demands, which the present Egyptian Government have accepted, are designed to secure respect for those interests which are of vital concern to My Empire and which My Government specifically reserved to their absolute discretion when My Protectorate over Egypt was withdrawn .

I follow with deep interest the important deliberations of the League of Nations. My Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs has proceeded to Rome to act as British representative at the meeting of its Council. He is taking the opportunity of this Journey to meet the Prime Ministers of France and Italy .

My Government have not yet had time to study, in consultation with the Governments of the Dominions, the Protocol for the pacific settlement of disputes drawn up at the last Assembly of the League of Nations with the attention which its character demands. They have already begun to examine this weighty question .

My Government are unable to recommend to your consideration the Treaties with the Government of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, signed on the 8th August. It is My desire that normal intercourse between the two countries shall not be interrupted. I trust that the attainment of this object will be made possible by the strict fulfilment of those conditions of friendly international intercourse which have been repeatedly placed before the Soviet Government, and accepted by them, particularly at the moment of the establishment of diplomatic relations. The Trade Agreement of the 16th March, 1921, does all that is at present possible to foster mutual trade .

I have concluded a Treaty of Commerce and Navigation with the President of the German Reich in order to put the commercial relations of the two countries on a stable footing. You will be invited to give legislative effect to its provisions .

A Bill will be laid before you for giving approval to the Treaty with Italy signed in July for the cession of a portion of the, province of Jubaland, in the Kenya Colony and Protectorate .

The visit of My eldest son, the Prince of Wales, to South Africa, which was unavoidably postponed this year, has now been arranged to take place in the spring of next year. In the course of his journey he will also visit My Possessions in West Africa and St. Helena. I have no doubt that the happy results which attended his previous visits to other parts of My Dominions will be repeated on this occasion .

I have received an invitation from the President and Government of the Argentine Republic for the Prince of Wales to visit the Argentine next year. I have gladly accepted this invitation on behalf of My son .

It is the firm, conviction of My Government that in the closest co-operation with the Governments of My Dominions and of India in all matters of mutual concern lies the key both to industrial progress and to the increasing unity and strength of the Empire, and this will be a guiding principle of their administration .

The policy of encouraging Empire settlement and mutual trade between the various parts of My Empire is one which My advisers deem to be of the greatest importance, and to which they will steadfastly adhere. Proposals based upon the recommendations of the Imperial Economic Conference of last year will be submitted for granting further preferences on goods imported into this country from the. Empire .

My Government propose, in accordance with the resolution, of the last Imperial Conference, to proceed with plans already made for enlarging the Naval Base at Singapore .

Members of the House of Commons,

Estimates for the public services will be laid before you in due course. Every effort will be made to reduce public expenditure to the lowest possible limit consistent with the security and efficiency of the State. The present heavy burdens of the taxpayer are a hindrance to the revival of enterprise and employment. Economy in every sphere is imperative if we are to regain our industrial and commercial prosperity .

My Lords and Members of the House of of Commons,

While I am glad to note the signs of improvement in the state of trade and industry, the present extent of unemployment continues to cause Me grave concern and will receive the constant attention of My Ministers. More stable economic and political conditions throughout the world, and the greater development of facilities for inter-Imperial commerce, will, I hope, promote the growth both of our internal and our overseas trade. A Bill is under consideration, and will be submitted to you at an early date , for safeguarding employment in efficient industries where, after inquiry, the need for such exceptional action is established .

The various schemes which have already been initiated for the relief of unemployment, including those relating to juvenile unemployment, will be examined with great care, and you will be asked to make provision for the continuance and extension of all such measures as are likely to alleviate the present distresses .

But no less important for the prosperity of My country than the action of Parliament is that there shall be among all parties concerned in the industrial life of the nation increased goodwill, frankness and mutual confidence, without which full advantage cannot be taken of any improvement in other conditions .

My Ministers are deeply impressed by the continued shortage of housing accommodation. They are convinced that the encouragement of the private builder and the occupying owner is an essential element in the successful treatment of the problem, and substantial progress has been made in this direction. My Ministers will devote their attention to overcoming the rising cost of houses and the shortage in the available supplies of skilled labour. With this object they will endeavour to supplement the building resources of the country by encouraging new methods of construction calculated to promote the rapid production of houses of approved design and moderate cost, and, at the same time, to assist in the reduction of unemployment .

The housing problem is not merely one of overcrowding, but also of the existence of large numbers of houses which fall below modern standards of propriety and sanitation. Something is already being done under existing legislation to clear the worst areas and to remedy sanitary and structural defects in those which remain. As new building increases it will be possible largely to develop this process, and My Government will take every opportunity of pressing it forward with vigour .

My Ministers are engaged upon inquiries into the possibility of combining with existing systems of insurance, provisions for improved old age pensions and pensions for widowed mothers .

They will also endeavour, in co-operation with the Local Education Authorities, to promote the steady and continuous development of the public system of education .

A Conference of representatives of landowners, farmers and workers has already been invited to consider whether an agreement can be arrived at by these different interests which might provide the stable basis of a national agricultural policy. Meanwhile, measures will be laid before you to, give effect to the proposals of the late Government for the encouragement of the sugar beet industry; to provide where practicable for the marking of imported foodstuffs and for dealing with the readjustment and redemption of Tithe Rent-charge .

Steps will be taken to carry out the principal recommendations of the Committee on the use of preservatives and colouring matter in food and for the ascertainment of costs and profits in the distribution of milk .

In view of the prevalence of high food prices and their adverse effect upon the cost of living, I have appointed a Commission to investigate the extent and causes of the differences between the prices received by producers of foodstuffs and those paid by consumers .

Measures will be presented for the consolidation of the Law of Property and of the enactments relating to the procedure of the Supreme Court, for the reform of the system of rating and valuation in England and Wales and of rating in Scotland, for the prolongation of the Rent Restrictions Act and of the Agricultural Rates Act, 1923. You will be asked to facilitate the completion of Land Purchase in Northern Ireland and to guarantee the principal and interest of bonds issued by the Government of the Irish Free State under the Land Act recently passed, in that Dominion .

Bills will be introduced dealing with legitimation by subsequent marriage, separation and maintenance orders, guardianship of children and the improvement of the probationary system .

Preparations are being made for legislation dealing with the Property and Endowments of the Church of Scotland and with the foundation of a National. Library for Scotland .

Bills will also be laid before you to give effect to three International Conventions dealing with wages in the case of shipwreck and with medical examination and stoke-hold employment of young seamen, to validate certain charges imposed during the War, and to amend and consolidate the Factory and Workshop Acts and the law with regard to the use of road vehicles .

My Government are hopeful that, with the support of the community at large, they may be able, on the lines here indicated and to be developed as time proceeds, to expedite the solution, in a spirit of unity, of many of the problems that are weighing heavily on the national life, and in this way to remove some of the obstacles that have not ceased, since the termination of the War, to retard the industrial and economic recovery of My people .

Your labours upon these and all other matters I humbly commend to the blessing of Almighty God .

( in the uniform of a Deputy-Lieutenant: ) I beg to move:

Much has been given to this Government by its majority, and much will be demanded of it by the people of this country. It will never be said, I think, when the history of this period comes to be written, that the majority which has been returned to support this Government, any more than the electors who voted for them, is, in the main, partisan. One feels in every way, speaking from one's own experience, and having discussed the experiences of one's friends with them, that the like of the voting has never yet been experienced. The reason was that the people thought there should be some stability in the country. The Government is fortunate in its large majority, because it will be able to get the whole plan of its programme into proper perspective, and will not be checked, as unfortunately the last Government was, by the feeling that tactics were necessary to secure them in the place which for the moment they filled. The present position gives the Government an opportunity of treating the House perhaps in a way that the last Government was unable to do. I hope the House will have the opportunity of a fuller and freer discussion of the subjects that come before it than it has had in the last two or three Parliaments, and that in the Committee Rooms upstairs, as well as in this Chamber, when subjects come forward, subjects which one ought to deal with free from all party preconceptions, that the House, and the Committees, will be allowed to consider such in the sense that they ought to be considered, and without feeling that they have any check upon them from one party side or the other. May I, as a comparatively young Member of this House, say I hope, and I am sure many hon. Members on this side of the House, too, will hope—that in that Committee work and the work attendant upon it, they will find some mitigation of the weary period of waiting which is inevitable in this House, inevitable, too, with a great majority like that which now supports the Government in power.

I would ask the indulgence of the House while I just touch on one or two questions which are mentioned in the Gracious Speech from the Throne which has been read to the House. No one can say that the speech is either short or wanting in substance. If anything the cup is full and brimming over. Perhaps we ought to take it more as a general indication of what we are expected to do over the next two or three years rather than a setting up Bills to be torn to pieces by my hon. Friends opposite. Unemployment takes first place. Perhaps at last we are agreed that there is only one remedy for unemployment and that the miracle all hoped for and expected has passed by even hon. Members who sit on the other side of the House—that the one single remedy for unemployment is the restoration of our trade, one hopes, to that position it was in before the War. But do not let us be misled. I speak as one who is keenly interested in trade and industry. Do not let us be misled into thinking that Acts of Parliament can create trade or that the faking of the exchanges or lectures by economic professors can alter fundamentally the facts of life. We in this country have to depend on the profit this nation can make from its foreign trade. The profit on that foreign trade is derived solely from the production of our skilled workers. By so much as that production is increased, by just so much can we get back old markets and open up new ones and will there be any chance of getting that standard of life which everyone in this country wishes to see, and which yet is confined, I am afraid, to the necessities of life rather than the standard which we all have in view. I do suggest, as one interested in industry, that we ought to have perhaps a little better perspective as to the wages that we pay to producers compared with those who are non-producers, because, after all, if the producers fail, or the markets fail, then those of the sheltered trades and those dependent upon them are in a worse plight than if their wages had never been raised at all. I think some of the producing trades to-day have just cause for complaint in the state of their wages and the relations between the skilled workers wage and the unskilled and semi-skilled workers' wage throughout the Kingdom.

I am delighted to see in the Gracious Speech references to better facilities for inter-Imperial commerce. Our markets are fast being closed around us. Our difficulties are increasing, and that for many reasons which one need not go into to-day. But here lie markets within our own limits, peopled by our own race, eager to deal with us, and capable of indefinite expansion. We should be foolish, indeed, if we did not take with both hands the offer held out to us by our Dominions. With all that done, we get back to the state of unrest which undoubtedly exists in the trade and industry of this country. It is an unrest based upon a feeling which it is difficult to define, but I think it may be said that it springs from two sources. One is the determination, whatever the verdict of the country may have been at the General Election, to prosecute political aims through industrial channels and organisations, and the other a perfectly just and reasonable demand for a fair share of the profits of industry throughout the country. If we are to achieve any success in industry there must be a sharp division between these two cases. It must be thoroughly understood that when an election has taken place, and on the political side there is a definite decision that the industrial side is the only one that matters, if we are to protect our profit-getting and our existence and if we are to keep our place as a nation. I do hope, therefore, that if we have trouble in the future, and people seek political aims by industrial means, if it be necessary, that the Government will ask the support of this House to insist on claims being based on an industrial and not a political basis.

Then there is the housing question, which I am afraid so far has been too much the sport of politics. Here, again, I think the right hon. Gentlemen opposite were unlucky in the last Parliament. Rightly or wrongly—rightly perhaps from their point of view—they have taken the attitude that any houses owned by other than the public authorities are not desirable in view of their policy. We are more fortunate in this Government in that we are able to indicate a strong and steady programme in the building of houses in which owners can be interested and in houses which can be built by other than public authorities. The slow progress of building has been subjected to two schools of criticism. One has spoken about profiteering in materials, oblivious of the fact that even into materials a large amount of labour goes, and this has caused expenses to rise to a considerable height. On the other hand there has been grumbling, oblivious of technicalities, about "ca'canny" and restriction of output which has had the same effect. There is no need to apportion the blame, but of this I am quite sure: if any private interests, springing either from owners or producers of materials, or from trade unions, are determined to hold up things for their own ends, as it is suggested they have been doing, then the House will demand from the Government, and the Government will be obliged to grant, some form of legislation putting an end to any exploitation of the public.

Last of all, may I mention the subject of insurance. Insurance has been used, especially in the last election, largely as an emotional appeal, I am afraid very often to catch votes. We on this side of the House have been charged with want of sympathy with the poorer people of this country. The finest idealist in the world, at least in this political world, is the idealist who keeps his feet in the realities of life, and it is a poor kind of offer to fill an empty belly with sentimentalities. I hope that, as time goes on, both in this House, and in the Committees of the House, this insurance question will be examined with a single eye to getting the best results out of all the schemes that have been brought forward, that any scheme which is known will be considered on its merits, and, above all that the great friendly societies will be considered in a way, perhaps, they have never been considered before, and will be allowed to give their opinion and the benefit of their experience in the many ways in which it can be so valuable.

It has been said by some of the opponents of this side of the House—it was given me by a Member a little time ago—that "strong as your majority may be, keen as your young men undoubtedly are, there still exists in your party a torpid and constricted element whose negative crust will inevitably smother every effort you may make." They are wrong. If that element ever existed, natural evolution has transmuted it to sounder views or happier lands. Experience must ever steer the ship of State, and, more than any, a ship of State like ours, but it is the younger element, especially in this House, which will provide the motive power for that ship—youth that has been through the fire and has grown up almost in a day.

My time is almost up and I must doff an unaccustomed uniform and return to the obscurity from which an all-too-kind Prime Minister has temporarily taken me. But before I do so, may I venture on a description—perhaps some people will call it a definition—of what I believe to be the feeling which animates this side of the House and will continue, I hope, to animate it for some time to come. It is natural caution, begotten of the hard facts of our daily life, but open to conviction and always responsive to the spirit of the age.

( in Court Dress ): I beg leave to second the Motion so ably proposed by my hon. Friend. He has dealt principally with domestic matters, and I would like to refer briefly to foreign affairs. Their importance is still immense, as we see from the fact that one half, or nearly one half, of the Gracious Speech is devoted to the subject. There are, of course, many outstanding questions awaiting settlement, but adjustments are gradually being accomplished and to-day, for instance, we are able to welcome the announcement that a commercial Treaty has been concluded, or is being concluded, with Germany, and that a portion of the Province of Jubaland is to be conceded to Italy—a concession which means more, perhaps, to Italy and to Italian opinion than is always realised in this country. Progress is no doubt slow, too slow perhaps for those who would advocate an immediate return to normal conditions, but we are driven to recognise the fact that without a common principle the world is unlikely to achieve universally accepted and recognised results, and a measure of patience may not be amiss. I believe that though the common panacea has as yet not been devised, steps have been taken in the right direction and that those steps may come to fruition, sooner than we, oppressed as we still are by recent events, realise. In a hundred years' time, I believe, few people will be surprised when they read in an accredited history of our time, supposing such a thing were to exist, that for a considerable period after the Great War conditions in this country remained unsettled, that labour was distressed, that prices were high and internal politics confused. The influence of our Government must be directed towards harmonising existing differences. We all hope most sincerely that we may remain conciliatory both as a nation and also, no less important, as a member of the League of Nations, but we must also recognise the fact that these efforts will never be fully effectual unless we show that when occasion demands we can act with promptness, firmness and decision. All these matters then, occupy our closest attention.

We in this country are concerned, in particular, owing to our special economic condition, the exceptional variety of our obligations abroad and our duty towards our Colonies and our Dominions, to draw closely the bonds of commercial unity within our Empire—I think all will be glad that an attempt is projected. These will farm the basis of much that is neces- sary to us and is essential to our Empire. I would wish, however, that the methods we advocate to bring about this desired effect were more remote than perhaps they are from the sphere of party controversy at home. We believe we have had an invitation, discreet perhaps but nonetheless emphatic, from millions of our fellow countrymen overseas, and that to refuse that invitation would be to refuse to do what is our bounden duty. Nor do I think that the question of Imperial Preference should excite quite so much disputation at home. We constantly read and hear of the most pure-blooded Free Traders giving preference to British firms for rails, for electrical equipment and for other things instead of buying those same goods, of equally fine material and at a great deal lower cost, from foreign sources; and, by analogy, I do not think an extension of this principle to preference for Dominion goods need excite quite so much animosity as it does to-day.

The settlement of those vast regions seems to be almost an elementary national duty, even though it entail some trifling sacrifices on our part. In other just causes we are willing to and repeatedly do make immense sacrifices, for instance, in maintaining our reputation for paying our debts. In this case, why should we not make this comparatively small sacrifice with the object of bringing about what everybody in this country realises is the growing need of the country, a better, a greater and more profitable trade? The future of our Empire rests, of course, on these great communities, and, no less, their future rests on equally close relations with ourselves. Measured in terms of population they may not sound important. New Zealand, we are told, has a smaller population than that of an English county, and yet what a vast, what an assured future is being unveiled before our eyes in that country, and none the less in Australia and South Africa. When, in 1811, the Commissioners of New York laid out the plans for their great city, they budgeted, I believe, for a future population of 300,000. To-day the population of greater New York stands at something like 9,000,000. Does not Canada promise a future, a rise, if not quite so rapid at that, at any rate little short of sensational? These great communities cannot, everybody recognises, live in commercial isolation, and it should be the duty of this country to see that their future alliances are made with this country and with no one else.

If I may turn for a few moments to home affairs, I would like to mention the Royal Commission which has been set up by the Government to inquire into the cost of living and into the distribution of foodstuffs. It has been criticised as being too slow and too cumbersome a method of dealing with the question. We all, I think, have had experience of inquiries that have been not too slow but a great deal too quick. There is a temptation that these critics put before every Government to "do something," whether it is right or wrong, and above all to "do something quickly"; it does not always matter very much what the something is, so long as it keeps a large number of people very busy indeed. I would remind those critics of a very simple story that Cardinal Newman used to tell against himself. He was in Dublin one day, and found that he was very late for an appointment. He got into the nearest cab standing by, told the driver he was in a great hurry, and jumped in. The driver whipped up his horse, and before the Cardinal knew where he was he found himself half way down the street, but going in the wrong direction. He pulled up the driver, explained the situation, and the driver replied, "Well, at any rate, your Eminence, we were going quickly." The Government must take care that this Royal Commission, before it whips up its horses, is going in the right direction. It will have difficulties and dangers, to face, and it will have to remember that deep-seated symptoms are not removed by superficial remedies. It must also realise that there is danger, when dealing with distribution and with the curtailment of prices, of endangering supplies, and when dealing with distribution the Commission must pay equal attention to production. The public will also realise that many of these matters are not within our control. We cannot, for instance, alter to suit our own convenience the commercial organisation of the United States of America or of Canada.

We also welcome the proposals of the Government for dealing with the agricultural problem, and are glad that they are examining, without prejudice, and in a comprehensive way, one of the most complicated and complex problems of the day. It seems that there has been a certain amount of preliminary correspondence. There have been delays. Up to now the terms of the Inquiry and the personnel have not been adjusted. I do not regret this delay, because it shows what a very great importance the agricultural world attaches to the proposed inquiry. Agriculture remains, of course, the biggest and one of the most important industries in this country. It has suffered in the past from the uncertainties of policy. I take it that the object of this inquiry is to seek some policy that will help to stabilise the position, and which will receive the support of all Parties in the State.

A policy of that kind would undoubtedly give to the agricultural world an element of permanency and a feeling of continuity and of confidence. I believe that on the lines indicated in the Gracious Speech we shall be able to achieve much with patience and a little good will, and it is in this hope and with this strong belief, together with a sense of deep gratitude to the House for having extended to a maiden speech, with its inevitable shortcomings, such courtesy and such patience, that I second the Address.

I begin, as I ought to begin, and as my heart desires, by offering my most sincere congratulations to the Mover and the Seconder of the Address. I am not at all sure that the Mover did not come very near to a precedent set some years ago, when I was still a very young Member of the House of Commons, and when he who held the position which I now hold had something to say about the party character of what is generally a nonparty Address. The difficulties of the Mover and the Seconder are always very great because they have to make the best of two worlds. They have to justify the choice of their Prime Minister and show themselves to be good loyal party men. While doing that they have to keep a watchful, and, if I may say so, possibly, a humorous eye, upon the faces and the feelings of the Opposition. I sympathise with them very much indeed and congratulate them really upon their performance. The Seconder, if he will allow me to say so, deserves a special word for himself for a most admirable maiden speech. We cannot regard him as a mere individual Member of this House, because those of us who were colleagues of his father before he came here will offer him a specially hearty welcome and congratulate the House and ourselves upon the hon. Member's first appearance.

Now that I am in a congratulatory frame of mind, I must congratulate the Prime Minister on his luck. He has performed an achievement which is somewhat miraculous. We take with a certain amount of salt the great flight of satisfaction which the Mover of the Address indulged in when he talked about the magnificent support the Government got in the country. Upon such occasions it is always well to avoid figures. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and his party poll 7,500,000 votes and get 400 Members: we poll 5,500,000 votes and get only 150 Members. So that whatever happens in the course of these Debates, and whatever happens in the Division Lobbies during the life of this Parliament, hon. Members opposite must always remember that one Labour Member, in relation to electoral values, is equal to two Conservatives. [An HON. MEMBER: "How about the Liberals?"] My hon. Friends in the higher seats below the Gangway were so hostile to me during the E lection that I would not venture, even in such a moment of abandoned enthusiasm, to speak for them.

I am sorry at such an early moment in the life of this Parliament to even attempt to chasten the enthusiasm of hon. Members opposite. I am not sure, however, that I ought not to mingle commiseration with congratulation. If the Prime Minister will allow me to say so, I see him sitting there somewhat in the position of the old woman who lived in a shoe. His progeny is far too prolific for his comfort. Some of them, I have no doubt at all, will be most obedient, but others have already shown a restive, changeable, and somewhat conspiring disposition. [HON. MEMBERS: "Who?"] I will leave it to hon. Members to put the cap on if it fits. I assure the right hon. Gentleman that we shall watch with reposeful sympathy the evolution of his fate. The Mover of the Address quite properly said that much would be demanded of this Government, and he quite accurately reflected that the first product of the Government is an extraordinarily lengthy King's Speech—lengthy but of very little substance. The last King's Speech came at the end of a Session, and not at the beginning, and it was full of achievements.

Let us take the two big questions of domestic concern at the present moment. The first is the soaring of food prices. What is the policy of the Government? An inquiry? They do not know. They have had Committee after Committee sitting, and instead of saying quite plainly and with a little more brevity in this paragraph than they have done, "We propose a Bill to do this or that," they say, "No, we propose an inquiry. We are not quite sure where we stand until the inquiry finishes, and we are not in a position to state our minds on the subject." Take the other question, that is the position of agriculture. The Government have no policy and no ideas, and they have shown even an incapacity to answer a few straight questions put to them by the farmers' representatives as to what they intend to do.

4.0 P.M.

I admit the lengthy character of the King's Speech, and I hope the Mover of the Address will admit my indictment that it is both long and empty. It begins, as these Speeches always do, by a reference to foreign affairs. The Foreign Secretary has gone to Rome to take part in a meeting of the Council of the League of Nations, and an arrangement has been come to by which foreign affairs will be discussed in detail and at close quarters next week. I should like to congratulate the Foreign Secretary on the decision that he has taken. It is of the greatest importance that the British Government in every way possible should show that it is not only interested in the League of Nations, but that it is important to be represented on the League of Nations and on its Assembly by the most powerful and representative and authoritative men it has got, because, if the League of Nations is going to fulfil the promise that I believe the whole of us on both sides of the House attach to it, then Foreign Secretaries and Prime Ministers must represent Great Britain in those large and important Assemblies.

I hope, when the Foreign Secretary comes back, however, that he will not only report to us what has taken place at the Council meeting of the League at Rome, but that he will also tell us what he did in Paris with M. Herriot and what he has done in Rome with Signor Mussolini. I read Press accounts that I know must be inaccurate. The Press, when these conversations take place, is nearly always inaccurate, but it is very essential that the public should not be misled by statements that are not true as to what agreements Foreign Secretaries have come to. In that way, States get into more difficulties than tongue can tell, and I hope, when the right hon. Gentleman returns, that he will report to us what agreements have been come to, if any; what the conclusions have been, and what the results have been of those two, I cannot exactly say subsidiary conversations, because they are certainly not subsidiary, but of those two conversations which he had at Rome and at Paris.

I should like him to tell us when he comes back what is the position of the Government regarding the Geneva Protocol. We were told that the Government had completely thrown it over. The King's Speech indicates that they have done nothing of the kind, but that the Government are still considering it. It says the Government are calling the Dominions together in order to consult them. Well, that is what we were going to do. There is no pledge, there is position taken which means that the Government of this country were to accept and sign that Protocol apart from consultation with the Dominions and subsequent agreement by the Dominions. But I should like to know how they are going to put the case before the Dominions. Is there going to be a special Dominions Conference in the matter? When that Conference is held, is the case for the Protocol to be put as well as the case against the Protocol? Moreover, are we going to assume that this consultation with the Dominions will be so long delayed that the Conference on armaments, provisionally fixed for June, will have to be postponed? I think it is of the greatest importance to remember that that Conference was decided upon after the most careful consideration, and after taking into account the possibility of consulting the Dominions, it was fixed for June, every Government concurring that the preparations could be made before then. Is that now going to be postponed? If there is any idea of scrapping the Protocol, what is the policy that is going to take its place? Perfectly obviously, it cannot be left a blank. Are we going to go back to individual agreements between State and State or agree- ments between a selected group of States against other groups of States? I hope not. If that is going to be the change that the Government make in their foreign policy, then it is right away back to what happened before the War—a policy which gives no security for peace and no opportunity for the complete co-operation of nations in the world's affairs.

Then regarding Egypt. That, again, will remain till next week, so far as details are concerned. The murder of Sir Lee Stack—a public servant not only distinguished on account of the office he held, but distinguished on account of the great services he has rendered to his country and, in some respects, the even greater services he has rendered to the Sudan—not only horrified us all, but made everybody aware that no time ought to be lost in coming to an agreement with Egypt as to what our future relations with that country should be. But there are two ways of approaching that problem. There is the way of an ultimatum and the way of an agreement. An old priest, once asked what was the great rule of life, replied: "The rule of always remembering the end." That is a very sound rule in diplomacy as well as in life. The end that we have to remember and keep before us is this. If our relations with Egypt are to remain peaceful and harmonious, then, by hook or by crook, one way or another, the arrangement, whatever it is, must receive the assent of the Egyptian Parliament. You cannot get away from that fact. We may put Governments in and we may turn Governments out. The Governments that we put in may put their names to documents and may band them over to us, but, unless they have got the backing of an Egyptian Parliament, then the value of the agreement is so low that no Government will ever pride itself on having made it.

That is the first general point. The second is this. The newspapers tell us—I do not know whether it is true and I do not associate myself with it at all, but I think it is my duty to ask that information should be given to the House—that one of the ways in which we are pursuing our policy is to come to an agreement or to agreements with this country, and with that and the other country, say about the distribution of territory in Northern Africa. I hope that is not true. If we begin to bargain off Egypt or Timbuctoo, or Persia, or anything else, I do not care what; if we begin to bargain off our position and our authority in any part of the world by saying to people who might be troublesome, "You hold your tongue, and we will let you do this, that, and the other," I say that is not a settlement; it is only handing over very great difficulties, and increasing difficulties with the world in its present frame of mind, to those who come after the Government which enters on these negotiations and makes these arrangements. May I further ask: Are we going to have papers about Egypt before the debate next week? I am not very sure what is the position of the correspondence now, but I think it has reached a point when it would be useful to the House of Commons to have papers. I am not pressing for them; I am only asking whether it would be possible to do it.

Egypt is followed by Russia, and I confess that I read with a great deal of surprise the mild and friendly paragraph about Russia. I read it with pleasure as well as surprise, but I thought right hon. Gentlemen opposite belonged to a more spirited breed. I thought, after those glorious speeches that they delivered on the platform, after those red hands that were displayed, after those wild attacks upon me and my colleagues—upon myself for wearing a red tie which was not dyed in British dyes but in Russian blood—we were going to have a good old-fashioned, spirited Tory policy with a certain number of expletives which are not in order, even in quotation, in this House of Commons. I saw pictures about the beards, the great beards, the ruffianly beards and that one right hon. Gentleman had spent £100,000,000 of money of the British taxpayers in trying to get them barbered decently; I saw pictures of the murdered Christian men and women, murdered by brutalised scoundrels who are supposed more or less to represent me. Since the Election I have been wandering up and down the face of the earth, and I have been seeing the remnants, the weather-stained remnants, of the extraordinary appeals that were made so successfully, particularly in the South West of England; and then I come here, and what do I find? The mildest mannered paragraph in a King's Speech that could be penned, even if Russia were a Christian nation and we had taken it completely to our bosom!

No pictures of Russian credit.

That is the point. All this culminated with a certain letter, known as the Zinovieff letter, but before all these messages were preached on the platform, hon. Members had already done to death the credit scheme. Here it was a guarantee. [ Laughter .] I see hon. Members appreciate a joke. Here, when we were facing them, it was a guarantee; there, when they got to the electors, it was a loan.

No loan, no guarantee.

That may be. The curious thing is this. All those wonderful variations and shades of meanings, conveying one thing here and another thing outside, were used with the most wonderful skill and effectiveness so far as getting the votes of electors was concerned. What is the result? There is a country that is barbarous, there is a country that can be represented to the British electors only by hands dripping with blood. All that was worked up for weeks and weeks, and then the Zinovieff letter. What is the result? The King's Speech says, "It is my desire that normal intercourse between the bloody-handed country and myself shall not be interrupted." [An HON. MEMBER: "The country, not the Government."] I would like to ask if hon. Members made that distinction when they were angling for votes? [HON. MEMBERS: "Yes!" and "No!"] I did not have the pleasure of listening to their fine verbal distinctions in those days, but here it is too late. Hon. Members have got the reward, and now they can make such distinctions as this. After all that attack, after the use of these weapons and these methods, they come and say, "So little do we believe it all that we are not going to follow it up." The mountain has been in labour with indignation, and has produced a mouse of miserable concession.

The last phase of that matter we shall certainly raise next week—the Zinovieff letter. Meanwhile I would like to put a question or two about it. I saw by the newspapers that since we left office the Government have received some further evidence regarding that letter, and, so far as I can make out, that evidence is not of a nature that belongs strictly to the secret service sphere. Could they tell us what that evidence is that they have received since we came out? I think that, in spite of the harvest they have reaped, they will agree with us that the present situation is a very unsatisfactory one, and here and now I ask them, are they prepared to have an inquiry into it? [ Interruption. ] I can perfectly understand the objection of right hon. Members to an inquiry.

What was the result of your own inquiry?

It could not be finished in our time. We are informed now that it has been finished. We are now informed that new information has come. Well, seeing the importance placed upon this by hon. Members opposite and by the Government, and seeing the use that was made of it, are you afraid to have an inquiry? [HON. MEMBERS: "NO!"] Then why not have it? There is one point upon which I should like further light. It is a very curious thing that this letter—which never purported to be more than a copy of a letter—went into the hands, not only of the Foreign Office, but of a newspaper, in precisely the same form in which it got into the hands of the Foreign Office, and I am not at all sure but that it got there a few days before the Foreign Office had it. Now as a State document I have always taken the view that, whether it was authentic or not, the ground covered by the Zinovieff letter had been covered by other letters before.

And speeches.

Certainly, speeches and manifestoes. I agree—nothing new. But that letter was not used as a State document in the election. That is my grievance. That is my complaint. That letter at the election was lined simply as an electioneering stunt.

You gave it out.

The point that requires inquiring into is this: This newspaper gets for political purposes precisely the same copy of a letter that found its way into the hands of the Foreign Office, not for political purposes but for purposes of high State. It is kept for days and days, perhaps weeks, by that paper. [An [HON. MEMBER: "How about you? How long did you keep it?"] It is kept for days, if not weeks, by that paper—[An HON. MEMBER: "And by you!"] Not by me, certainly not.

You gave it out.

During the whole time that paper had that letter it never approached the Foreign Office to find out what was being done with it. It never asked—[An HON. MEMBER: "Why should it?"] Of course it should not, because it was keeping it up its sleeve. [ Interruption. ] I assumed that the whole question at issue—probably I did that in my innocence—[ Interruption .] I am only yielding to what seems to be necessary to hon. Members opposite. I say that, perhaps in my innocence, I assumed that the concern was for the State. Was I wrong? I assumed that the great concern on that Saturday morning, and for the rest of the election, was not merely that that letter existed, but that it had to be handled. That is what I assumed. Now, hon. Members laugh when I suggest that that letter, held by a paper and used for political purposes, was never made the subject of any inquiry as to what was being done with it, but was used simply to create a certain panic in the minds of old ladies.

Oh!

I was not using that expression in reference to sex. Surely, if hon. Members opposite are proud of their campaign they will not object to explain how it was conducted. If this letter was there, the most suspicious part of it all is that precisely the same copy—not an original—should get to newspapers before it got to the Foreign Office. It is kept up, it is handed out at the psychological moment, and from that you get a great panic and a big majority. If hon. Members do not like an inquiry, we shall ask for it. Let them refuse it, and the country can decide.

Then I should like to know what is the meaning of this expression "normal intercourse." What is normal intercourse? Surely, one of the first essentials of normal intercourse with a country is that you know what treaties you have with that country that that country is observing. But in the Treaty that I am told is going to be scrapped—I understand that both Treaties are to be scrapped, not the loan only, or the guarantee only, but the whole of the Treaties—there is a Section which decides by agreement what body of old Treaty obligations Russia and ourselves accept. That is part of normal relations, but that is torn up; that is gone. Another part of the Treaty refers to fishery rights—a settlement of the old trouble of the three-mile limit. [ Interruption. ] Fishermen know best. In the White Sea, certainly. That is gone. There was, moreover, a scheme, a machinery, by which creditors were to be paid. That is gone, and the Government, in order to show, at any rate on one point, that they do detest the red hand, say to people who loaned money to Russia before, "You are not going to get paid until we have seen our way to reconsider the whole matter. [ Interruption. ] We shall see about that, but I hope next week, when an inquiry is asked for, it will be given.

Now we come to Imperial matters. I see from the King's Speech that we are once more going to have Imperial Preference. I should like to clear up an ambiguity there. What is meant by Imperial Preference? The question of Imperial Preference was put as a straight issue to the country in 1923. [HON. MEMBERS: "No!"] It was not put as an issue last month. [HON. MEMBERS: "Yes!"] Put as a straight issue in 1923—[HON. MEMBERS: "No, it was not!"]—it was rejected. [HON. MEMBERS: "No!"] Under the cloak of the red peril, a majority comes here, and then the private mind and the private will of Members becomes public policy. The Prime Minister told us that there were to be no taxes on food. Is he going to run Imperial Preference without taxes on food? [HON. MEMBERS: "Yes!"] Well, that is another miracle that we wait to see. Are we going to have tinned salmon as a great bond of Empire? There is the situation. When these issues were considered by the country, when there was no ambiguity as to what was to be done—not a mere side reference in an election address, but the issue fought on every platform, discussed on every platform—then the country said, "We are against Imperial Preference." [HON. MEMBERS: "No!"] Exactly the same with a tariff Even greater reprobation should be visited upon that very vague but none the less ominous paragraph which adumbrates Protection in this way: this box by right hon. Gentlemen opposite. Are they going back to those fantastic figures rather than to ledgers? Mr. Morris's 4,000,000 unemployed were solemnly thrown at us. It turned out to be all humbug. As soon as the McKenna Duties were taken off the industry had a healthy and a natural bound forward. I suppose this is one of the first efficient industries that require Protection to-day in order to put the 4,000,000 unemployed people back into work. It is about time hon. Members opposite stopped dealing with mythical figures and facts.

From this it is a very simple gradation to housing. May I, not as a party politician and not as the Leader of an Opposition or anything of that sort, put in the plea that if you are going to embark on new forms of construction you will not cover the countryside with unseemly dwellings, which are an insult to the eye of the passer by as well as an inconvenience to those who dwell in them. I have not had the pleasure of seeing Lord Weir's work. I tried very hard to see it, but I did not have the opportunity. In my wanderings the other day I came across something that was pointed out to me as one of those new cheap houses— a dirty grey blotch on a beautiful face. We have been having far too many engineers and far too few architects in the building of our houses. I hope, however severe the necessity may be, the right hon. Gentleman will not forget that, just as man does not live by bread alone, neither is he sheltered by walls alone and that he will do his best to give us something that we can look upon with pleasure as well as dwell in with comfort. We propose to raise this as a separate issue, but I should like to ask a question on this matter. The Government have committed themselves to this proposition, that they are going to solve the housing problem by private enterprise in building, and by individual ownership in housing. Can you imagine a canvasser going up and down the block building stairs or along miles and miles of mean dull streets where you have the woman's complaint of her limited space and the overcrowded condition of the house. The bright-witted and sharp-minded Tory canvasser says: "My dear lady, I have a cure. You vote for my candidate and the Government that will be returned in consequence will solve your problem by the individual ownership of houses." The whole thing is absurd. The great mass of people who are pressing most hardly now upon your housing conditions are the people whose income in amount is not enough and in security is not sufficient either to borrow, to beg or to mortgage in order absolutely to tie themselves to one particular corner in a town or in the country by acquiring possession of a house. The problem of housing will never be solved in that way. You must provide houses to be let at a reasonable weekly rent; and unless you face that you cannot claim that you are facing the most pressing part of the question.

Then there is the question of food prices. The Government have an extraordinarily leisurely way of approaching this problem—a Royal Commission with evidence. You have had your Committees. What is being done with their Reports? Instead of sharp, quick, decisive Departmental action, you are getting a Royal Commission appointed to take fresh evidence, and goodness knows when it is going to report. Are there to be Interim Reports, and is action going to take place on them; or are the Commissioners going to sit until they have covered the whole field of prices, imports and so on, and then only, when they have finished, are the Government going to consider what action they are going to take? It refers to milk. May I ask when action is going to be taken on that? How long are we going to wait before this legislation—I suppose there is going to be legislation—will be produced dealing with the milk problem? There is a reference in the King's Speech to the marketing of imported foodstuffs. What does that mean? Am I right in assuming that the Government are going to yield to Socialism in this respect, that imported foodstuffs, especially from the Dominions, are going to be imported by the State— [HON. MEMBERS: "Marked!'] If I have made a mistake, I apologise. There is certainly a reference to marking, but I felt sure there was also a reference to marketing. Let me put my point in another way while it is being looked up. I regret to say the late Chancellor of the Exchequer has deserted me and is unable to turn marking into marketing. Whether a mistake has been made or not the point I wanted to make is this. In connection with food prices, will the Com- mission inquire into the proposals which have been made by some of the Dominion Governments to export, as Dominion Governments, to us as a Government; and to make arrangements of a national character and of a public character for the purpose of marketing those products at prices which are just prices in relation to the cost of bringing the goods here?

That covers pretty generally all I need comment upon in the King's Speech with one exception, and that is the position of agriculture. I think the farmers have brought themselves into a very considerable fix, and I have great sympathy with them, because it is practically affirmed by this paragraph that the Government is still experimenting with what pledge it is going to give in order to secure even the agricultural Conference. Let us remember what happened. The Coalition Government gave subsidies for certain things being done. Suddenly, without any warning, they withdrew the subsidies. Mr. Bonar Law declared in favour of either duties or subsidies. The Prime Minister went to the country last year and said, "I am in favour of one pound bounty for every able acre." I know a farmer of Liberal principles who was found coming out of a polling booth in 1923 having voted, it was suspected, for the Conservative candidate. On being asked for an explanation he said, "At this election my principles go to the wall. I am voting for one pound an acre." But he did not get it.

Farmers were assured last year that whatever the Government could do would be done after a conference with all the parties. That, at any rate, gave a certain amount of security for what was to be done. That has all gone. The subsidy has gone. To Protection the Government would not commit themselves. There is no conference between the parties. All we know is that the Government ask the farmers to come together and to say what they think the Government ought to do, but they will not give them a pledge that they will then do it. The farmers remember the Sankey Commission, as we do. The farmers are perfectly entitled to press the question as to what the Government have in mind. Will they treat agriculture as one of those efficient industries described in another part of the King's Speech? Will they give any new pledges to the farmer? I think we might ask them, if they give any pledges to the farmer, are they likely to give such pledges before the farmers will agree to take part in the conference?

I will deal with three points left out of the King's Speech. Have the Government any intention of doing anything with regard to the Washington Convention on labour conditions? This arouses a great deal of international interest, and as a step towards levelling up international labour conditions it is absolutely essential. Have the Government scrapped that?

Do the Government propose to do anything regarding the mining situation? They must be perfectly aware that the condition in the coalfield is going steadily worse and worse. Not only are wages low but unemployment is going up. Unless the Government take time by the forelock there and come to some agreement with both sides, and a rearrangement is made, the Government will find that they have been caught napping, and the country will also find that it is in a very serious crisis.

The third point is this. The Government need to watch very carefully, in the interests of British industry, the operation of the Dawes Report. The Dawes Report—we will not now go over the whole controversy—has been recognised by its very best friends as having a good many doubtful provisions. When I was in office I appointed representatives from three of the industries most directly affected by the Commission's Report to keep in constant consultation with me and to advise me regarding the internal conditions of their industry lest something might happen long before those of us were outside those industries knew.

Which industries were they?

It was a purely personal consultation. It was not a public Committee at all.

Will the right hon. Gentleman repeat his question?

I want to know whether the Government are taking any steps to watch, almost from day to day and certainly from inside the industries concerned—iron and coal in particular, and certain chemical industries as well— how the Dawes Report is operating, either adversely or favourably on British industries. I think it is very essential that that should be done.

We are at the beginning of a Parliament of apparently longer life than its predecessors, but, as we know, long life and virtue do not always go together. There have already been evidences that although there is a good deal of change in the appreciation of political necessity and of opportunity on the other side, the way they are handling affairs justifies a large amount of apprehension. The Whips may succeed in keeping their majorities, but I venture to say that long before we see an end of this Government the country will be thoroughly tired of them. My last appeal is this: do not make things too bad for us when we come in. When we came in last time we had rather a bad inheritance. As an Opposition, we shall be inspired by one great consideration, and it is this, that we, with you, are joint trustees of the national estate, and it will be our duty, and we shall do our best to exercise it, to see that there is some care shown in its conservation, some wisdom in its administration, and some success in making its enjoyment more general amongst the common people than has hitherto been the case.

I should like to contribute my meed of praise of the Mover and Seconder of the Address for the very admirable way in which they have discharged a most difficult and delicate task. There was about the Mover of the Address a refreshing and revealing candour which I liked. There were some passages in his speech which gave me very great satisfaction, especially when he revealed the spirit of the young men with whom he is associated on his own side. I certainly trust in my heart that he is a faithful exponent and interpreter of that view. If he is, we may hope for, at any rate, some measure of improvement in the condition of the people of this country, because, undoubtedly, the Government have the power behind them, if they have what the Prime Minister referred to the other day as the necessary drive amongst their young men. I was, therefore, very delighted to hear the last two sentences of the speech of the Mover of the Address. With regard to the Seconder, may I say as one who has a deep respect for his father, that it was an especial delight to me to be present to witness the success of his son in seconding the Address to-day.

The right hon. Gentleman who has just sat down rather complained that there was a note of controversy in the speech of the Mover, to which we are not accustomed on these occasions. I cannot say much for the speech of the right hon. Gentleman in that respect. I do not think it was quite in keeping with the tone and temper usually expected on the first night of the Session. When I heard him complain of election extravagances, I thought that, on the whole, he might have left that function to be discharged by someone else. [ Interruption. ] I am not complaining. I have never done it, and I do not propose to start. The right hon. Gentleman quoted some figures, and boasted that upon those figures the Labour party were not fairly represented in this House. He had his opportunity in the last Parliament to redress that anomaly. That was a Parliament in which ha specially profited by the very anomaly of which he is complaining to-day. He was not so fully alive in that Parliament to the injustice of having a representation which the number of votes which were cast would not justify. Since he has invited us to go into figures, might I say to him that when you begin quoting figures you might as well quote the whole of them that are relevant. They are very instructive. It is perfectly true that of the contested seats the Conservatives have one Member for every 19,000 votes and that the Labour party has a Member for every 37,000 votes. He did not say that we have only one Member for every 80,000 votes. [HON. MEMBERS: "Why!"]

You gave them away.

The right hon. Gentleman is quite capable of looking after himself, although I understand there are a good many hon. Members here who do not think so. Therefore, let him speak for himself. He claimed that every Labour Member here is twice as good, I think he said, as every Conservative. On the same analogy, every Liberal Member is at least twice as good as every follower of the right hon. Gentleman. There can be no doubt that, in spite of the fact that every Member of our party here represents 80,000 votes, our numbers have considerably diminished. But in life there are compensations for every loss.

You are the Leader now.

5.0 P.M.

I am not sure that that is very much of a compensation, because there are difficulties in every party. The lot of a leader, like that of a policeman, is not a very happy one. There is this consolation we have in this Parliament, that the votes we record in the Lobby will not have the effect, at any rate we think not, of bringing to an end the life of that Parliament. So we can vote without feeling that we are putting our seats into jeopardy. That is a great comfort. Judging by the appearance of my friends on the Treasury Bench, there is a great deal to be said in the initial stages for responsibility coupled with power. It soon wears off. But there is absolutely nothing to be said from any point of view for responsibility without control. That was our lot in the last Parliament. We have escaped from that at a heavy cost. But really it was worth it.

I should like to ask a few questions also of the Prime Minister. I will take the questions put by the right hon. Gentleman with regard to Russia. He seemed to complain that the Government did not incorporate in the King's Speech the passages from the speeches of their supporters at the polls. Really, if that is going to be the practice, I do not think the Monarchy will survive it. May I say that I personally am very glad that the Government have made it quite clear that, in spite of the rejection of the Treaty, they do not propose to break off relations with Russia. I say so without any hesitation. With regard to the loan or guarantee, the right hon. Gentleman seems to think there is a very great difference. I do not think the taxpayers of this country would have discovered that difference if the Treaty had unfortunately gone through. I am glad that the Treaty has been dropped in so far as that is concerned and in so far as several of its provisions are concerned. But I should like to know from the Prime Minister—and if he prefers that this question should be put to the Foreign Secretary when he returns, I do not press it—I should like to know whether the Government are going to leave our relations with Russia at this point, without clearing up matters which I hope can be cleared up. There is, first of all, the first part of the Treaty with regard to fishing, which is a very important matter and which has no connection whatever with the loan part of the Treaty. There are also other questions which should be cleared up—whether the Government think this is a propitious moment or not is for them to decide—but I do hope they are not going to leave our relations with Russia at the point where they would be left if we simply contented ourselves with throwing over the Treaty and not attempting to negotiate our way through the difficulties.

With regard to Egypt, I understand that this question is to be discussed next week. The Foreign Secretary has left for the League of Nations and he could not be present here. I welcome the fact that he has gone to the League of Nations. I regret, however, that it makes it impossible to discuss two or three very pressing questions. I cannot help saying that it is unfortunate that it should have occurred at this moment. It is not his responsibility, nor the responsibility of the Government. After all, the date was fixed at a time when not even those who fixed it had the slightest idea that a great change would take place before that date arrived. Therefore the Foreign Secretary had no alternative but to take the date as it was fixed, because there were so many nations who would have to be consulted in order to alter that date. But it is unfortunate for this reason. I agree with the right hon. Gentleman who has just sat down that we should know not merely what has passed at the League of Nations. There are much more important matters, I have no doubt at all, being discussed privately with the French Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister, and although I can well understand the Foreign Secretary not committing himself upon any important questions, he is bound to give indications of the general lines upon which he is travelling which will embarrass him if afterwards he has to change his mind. I think it is therefore very much to be regretted that, owing to the fixture of the date, it was impossible to have a discussion in the House of Commons before the Foreign Secretary went on this most momentous journey. I will not, however, press the question. There are two or three things which I shall certainly press when we come to a discussion.

There is no doubt at all the Government ought to take a strong line in Egypt, and I think they will have the country behind them in doing so. But there are one or two things which I wish they had not done. I wish they had not put the question of unlimited water supply into a document Which in its form was punitive, because there is no doubt at all of what the effect of that would be upon the Egyptian peasantry. They have given us no trouble; they have been very quiet. They have taken no part in these conspiracies. But it is life and death to them, and when you say in a document which is a penalising document that you propose to take unlimited water—a most unfortunate phrase—unlimited water for the Sudan, which means unlimited water from them, for that is the way the peasant will look at it when it is such a vital thing to his own necessity, I think it is very much to be regretted.

I also press the point put by the right hon. Gentleman. I do hope that the Government, when they come to reveal their policy on this subject, will show what their conception is of the way in which it is to be brought to an end. You cannot leave it merely to the exercise of force. As far as I can see, there are only two ways to get a satisfactory settlement. One is an agreement with the Egyptian people themselves. That undoubtedly would be the best. The second would be some sort of impartial adjudication, either through the League of Nations or otherwise, which would constitute a basis for a settlement. I am putting that in the second place; undoubtedly the first and the best would be an agreement with the Egyptian people themselves, but unless you have got some way out of it, it will be an entanglement for us. It will be a great burden to us, and ultimately it might cost us very grievous disaster. However, as we are going to have a discussion on the subject next Monday, I do not propose to discuss that any further.

I now come to the question of the Protocol. I may say frankly I am very glad the Government have decided to investigate this question before they come to a decision. It is a very difficult decision to come to. There are just three considerations which I will mention. The first is, to what extent the Protocol is an extension or a deviation from the Covenant of the League of Nations. The second is this; to what extent it will commit us to engage in hostilities in any part of Europe where frontiers were involved. I will put it quite frankly. Supposing there were trouble on the Russian Frontier, would we be committed by that Protocol to wage war in that particular quarter of the world if there were a decision by the body which is to control the proceedings which would condemn either one side or the other. I think that should be considered very carefully. This is a country that is in the habit of honouring its pledged word, and once we give our pledged word in a document of this kind, if there is a decision which involves us in hostilities, we could not escape from it without dishonour, therefore I do hope that before we commit ourselves there will be a very clear understanding of what the effect of it will be in that respect. The third thing is, I should like the Government to consider very carefully what the effect will be upon public opinion in America in reference to the League of Nations. Will it facilitate the entrance of America into the League, or will it be the erection of a new barrier in the path of the League of Nations?

There is one omission from the Gracious Speech from the Throne which I regret, and I do not quite understand it. There is no reference to any effort to be made by the Government to deal with inter-Allied debts. That I consider to be a matter of the greatest moment for the finance and for the trade of this country, and I would ask—if the Prime Minister cannot answer I do hope the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be able to tell us—what the view of his Department of the Government is with regard to this matter. What is the position? We loaned £2,000,000,000 to the Allies. We borrowed £1,000,000,000 for the Allies. Had it not been that we were purchasing supplies and guaranteeing supplies for the Allies, it would not have been necessary for us to borrow one shilling of that money. So that, therefore, we are in the position at the present moment of actually paying interest upon £3,000,000,000 of money for the Allies. It comes to £130,000,000 a year. It will figure in the Budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer this year. That is, we are paying 2s. in the £ in Income Tax in respect of money advanced to the Allies or borrowed for them. Nearly half the Income Tax! But I should like to know from the Government what they propose to do.

It is a very practical question for this reason at this moment. There are negotiations going on at this hour between France and I believe, but I am not sure, Italy, and the United States of America at Washington with regard to the French debt. Where are we? Are we represented there? Are we taking any part in the negotiations? I know it is a very unpleasant business to ask your friends to pay their debts, but the United States of America never hesitated one moment to call upon us to pay. At the moment when the demand was sent to us we had 2,000,000 unemployed in this country, and still we were called upon to pay up. There are a million unemployed in this country now. Our expenditure on the War was heavier than that of any other country that was engaged. More than that, our expenditure in proportion to our national income was heavier. The figures have been published in the United States. I take them from the great bankers' book published in America. These are the figures: Great Britain's expenditure during the War was 36·92 per cent of the national income; France's expenditure was 25·59 per cent.; and the others were nowhere Those are simply the percentages of the national income. We are the most heavily taxed country in the world. We are entitled to know from our Allies whether, with our one million unemployed, with trade moving very slowly, with our very heavy burdens of taxation, we are to go on indefinitely paying over £30,000,000 a year to America on their behalf, paying, in addition, £100,000,000 to our own people on the money they have lent to us, whilst no effort is made by them to meet the case.

This is a matter of which the Chancellor of the Exchequer will have charge, and I would like to ask whether the Government propose to take action now to bring this matter to a point. Only the other day my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer said he could see prosperity coming. I have no doubt that it will come. The trade of the world will slowly improve. The question is, what will be our share of it? As long as we have this gigantic burden cast upon us on behalf of the Allies we cannot possibly have a fair opportunity in the stupendous struggle which is coming for our share of the trade of the world. I know that it would be quite inopportune for me to make any criticism of the arrangements made by the Prime Minister with the United States. It was denounced in advance by the late Mr. Bonar Law in unmitigated terms, and I have the quotation here. This is not the opportunity to discuss that question. It is not even the opportunity to discuss the opinion which the present Chancellor of the Exchequer formed of that transaction at the time. But I would like to hear a candid discussion between the two upon the matter. It certainly would be entertaining and instructive. At any rate, we made the most generous offer to the Allies that any country ever made, in the famous Balfour Note, in which we said to them, "If you take over the liability to America, we will forgive you all the debts which you owe to us." We are entitled to know whether the Government are dealing with the matter, and what is the line they propose to take upon it?

One word about Singapore. I am very sorry to see that the Government have rushed to come to a conclusion upon this subject. I wish they had taken a little longer to consider the matter. I certainly would have wished that they had entered into negotiations with the Dominions before they came to a decision. This matter has been treated too much as a purely strategic question for the Pacific. It is a little more than that. It is really a question whether we are going to bear burdene on behalf of the whole of the Empire, to bear the whole of the burden, and not get a fair contribution from those on whose behalf the protection is mainly being devised. I wish it had been possible for the Government to have taken longer to negotiate with the Dominions some sort of arrangement for a contribution before they committed themselves to this gigantic expenditure.

I must say one or two words about home affairs. I am glad that the Government are inquiring into the question of food prices. It is a very complex and difficult problem. It is not a case where you can rush into legislation without having the most careful inquiry into the whole of the conditions. It is very easy to carry a drastic piece1 of legislation which, so far from achieving its purpose, may do a lot of harm and in the end carry you much further from your purpose than you were when you started. I am very delighted that the Government are to investigate the matter. With regard to agriculture, I must express some doubt, and I rather agree with the last speaker with regard to the investigation. I am not at all sure that a Committee representing interests is altogether the best. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had better keep his weather eye open. When you get a Committee of interests coming together to consider a problem, it always ends with a demand on the Exchequer. My right hon. Friend remembers very well that in the old days the Irish Members used to fight each other fiercely across the Floor of the House, but we sometimes found the Ulster Members, the Nationalists and the Sinn Feiners meeting together under the most brotherly conditions in a conference, and the next thing was a deputation to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I am a little afraid that this agricultural inquiry will end in a big demand upon the Exchequer without really tackling the problem. I would ask the Prime Minister this question: Is this Committee to consider the question of the business conditions under which agriculture works out its problems? For instance, is the question of tenure to be referred to? Or are they simply to consider subsidies and tariffs and duties and helps from the State? Is the smallholder to be represented on this body, or is it to represent only the big farmer, the agricultural labourer and the landowner?

I was very delighted with some passages in the speech of the Prime Minister at the Albert Hall, in many ways, if I may respectfully say so, a very remarkable deliverance. In the course of that speech the right hon. Gentleman said that the Government proposed to interpret the mandate they got from the country as a mandate to do their best and to use the whole of their strength to remove the existing evils of society. If the Government carry out that declaration in the spirit and in the letter, such help as we can give to them will be at their disposal. It is very easy for hon. Members to say: "Very well, but what help can you give? Here is a majority of two hundred." No Parliamentarian makes the mistake of imagining that the Lobby is the only place where an Opposition can show its power. As a matter of fact, the supreme desire of every Minister is to get the Opposition into the Lobby as quickly and often as possible. It is outside that the difficulties come. But if the right hon. Gentleman carries out the policy laid down at the Albert Hall—the improvement of housing conditions, the removal of slums, assistance of those who are broken down prematurely in life, for the widows and the orphans—such help as we can give is at the Government's disposal, and gladly so. The Prime Minister said—this also is a very remarkable statement, and, coming from a Conservative Prime Minister, even more remarkable; it showed a realisation of the difficulties which every Government has experienced in dealing with housing and slums—that he meant to cleave his way through interests and to use the whole of the ardour of the young people behind him in order to do so. Unless he does that none of the concrete and iron and steel houses will be of the slightest use. If he uses the great strength that he has behind him, not merely in numbers, but, I think, in ardour, and that was why I was glad of the speech of the Mover of the Address— if he uses that power in order to cleave his way through this tangle of interests that has baffled every Government, Conservative, Liberal, Coalition, yea, Labour as well, then he will find, in so far as the small group that is around me is concerned, that we will do our best to help him, and I am certain that hon. Gentlemen of the Labour Party above the Gangway will do the same.

I genuinely regret that instead of carrying out the spirit of that speech, the right hon. Gentleman has given sinister indications in the King's Speech of an intention to ramble into the sterile desert of Protection. I think it is a pity. I ask him what he means by Imperial Preference. This is a question rather for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I have no doubt that with his well-known Free Trade views we can depend upon him; we know what a doughty fighter he is, especially when he wants to get his own way. Do the Government really mean to impose new duties upon food? because that is all upon which you can get preference, on food and raw materials, as Mr. Joseph Chamberlain said in this House. Do they propose to impose further duties upon food at a time when prices are rising? When there is so much unemployment, when it would be very difficult for multitudes of the people to make both ends meet, are the Government really going to do that? Are they going to extend the protective provisions of an Act which was a temporary Act to meet an emergency which has already passed away by the stabilisation of the exchanges, or substantially passed away? I am not discussing the merits of that proposal, but I would point out this: Here is a Government which has put through an admirable Treaty with Germany, a Treaty to facilitate interchange of business and commercial intercourse between the two countries, a very good piece of work. Are the Government in the course of the same Session to carry another Measure which is going to negative and render futile the Treaty which they carried at the beginning of the Session? I appeal to the right hon. Gentleman to act rather in the spirit of his very fine deliverance at the Albert Hall, when he uttered that great call to the powerful party behind him to rally to his support in order to improve the conditions of the people. If he carries out that idea and that sentiment in that spirit, he will make this Parliament a really memorable Parliament.

I should like, if I may, to deal first with some of the observations which have fallen from the Leader of the Liberal party. I will answer, so far as I can, the questions which he has put. I am grateful both to him and the Leader of the Opposition for recognising that the visit of the Foreign Secretary to Rome at this juncture is a visit of paramount importance; they have been willing, as all Members of the House have been, to submit to what is an inconvenience to the House—the surrender of its privilege, and its opportunity to discuss fully foreign affairs during the first two or three days of its sittings. I hope the Foreign Secretary will return by the end of the week, and there will remain three days next week during which foreign affairs or any other affairs which the Opposition may choose to raise can he discussed. By Monday the Foreign Secretary should be in his place, and I hope he will be able to deal fully with the points which have been raised this afternoon. He will have the advantage of reading the speeches which have been made and of being able to give considered answers.

I am afraid it will not be possible before Monday to produce Papers on the Egyptian situation with regard to correspondence, but I can assure the House that the Foreign Secretary will tell the House everything it is in his power to tell them, and I hope very much that by Monday it will be possible to make a fuller disclosure of what is going on than would have been possible had the debate taken place to-day. In the same way, questions on our relations with Russia should, I think, be answered by the Foreign Secretary, though I may have a word or two to say about Russia later. With regard to what the right hon. Gentleman said about the Protocol, I think those three points that he raised and to which he said he hoped we were going to give very serious consideration—those three points themselves show what folly it would have been on our part to have rushed into either the acceptance or the rejection of that Protocol without giving them both by ourselves, and in conjunction with the Dominions, all the investigation which their importance requires.

With regard to inter-Allied debts, I think the House will agree that the King's Speech had already attained a length which rendered it desirable not to include anything which was not absolutely necessary, and it was difficult to draw up a brief paragraph on so complicated a subject as this. But I think it is a subject that should be debated in this House and debated before long. If it can be arranged to take this subject, as I hope it can be, before the Gracious Speech leaves this House, I should very much like to have a discussion in the course of next week. The Chancellor of the Exchequer will be prepared to take his part in the discussion, and I think it will be of very great interest and may possibly be of very great help to him to have a frank expression of views on this subject from all parts of the House.

With regard to Singapore, I do not know whether the Leader of the Liberal party has changed the view he originally held upon Singapore, but I would just say this much. While we go back to the same principle that his Government supported, and Mr. Bonar Law's Government supported, we have not yet come to a decision as to the length of time over which the works will be spread out, nor have we yet come to any arrangement as to the contribution which may be given either by this country or by those of the Dominions who are particularly concerned.

May I ask whether there is any communication with the Dominions upon that very important subject?

Yes, we have begun already. The question has been raised. I should like to express my thanks to the right hon. Gentleman for the things he was good enough to say about a recent speech of mine. We shall welcome indeed support in this House where the Opposition feels that it can support us, but even to secure unity in this House we cannot go back on certain pledges which we have given during the Election. Of course it is natural for a leader of the Opposition to say that I am going in for Protection and various things of that kind. I would not wish to weary the House, but I will read one sentence by which I stand from a speech of mine: The right hon. Gentleman congratulated me on my luck, but I think the greater part of his speech was spent in bemoaning his own. It is true he gave us, as he has given us in every Parliament, some engaging figures on electoral values, I do not know whether I was more pleased to hear him make his calculations or to see my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Liberal party immediately begin to engage in his. As he is a far more able exponent of free speech of all kinds, than of figures, he called to his help my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Sir John Simon), who has recently been dealing with large figures in another capacity.

I will give my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition all the comfort he can derive from contemplating my family on this side of the House, and any possible divisions there may be in it. I am quite content with my happy family and I hope his family is as happy. I express one more word of sympathy with my right hon. Friend. There has been, perhaps, more ebullience in this Debate than is usual on the first day of a Session and it arises largely from the fact that many of those who sit behind me are new Members, and they are not able on the first day to take quite at its proper value the passionate utterance of the Leader of the Opposition. I think if the Leader of the Opposition were asked the question which was put by a certain young Englishman to Napoleon he would give very much the same answer. This young Englishman spoke to Napoleon and said: "I thought I should find you very stern and severe." And Napoleon said: "Yes, the world does not really know me. I am thought to be very violent, but I am not at all so naturally. I have been obliged to assume it to awe people. My portraits represent the Emperor and not Napoleon." That speech represented the Leader of the Opposition on the first day after a very unsuccessful election.

The Leader of the Opposition asked me several questions which I shall do my best to answer, although I have partly answered some of the questions on which he desired information in my reply to the Leader of the Liberal Party. As to the inquiry into food prices the two Oppositions differ, and I find my sympathy going with the Liberal Opposition. [HON. MEMBERS: "Naturally!"] I shall sympathise with hon. Members opposite by and by. I often did so during the Election. I often said I had great sympathy with many members of the Labour party. With regard to food prices there will be an interim report on the two most important subjects of meat and bread. I cannot say how long it will be before it comes out, but I quite agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George) that it is most important to get, in the form in which you do get evidence in a Commission of this nature, the exact facts as they exist to-day. Far more danger than the benefit which would possibly accrue may easily result from rushing into some premature form of legislation on so difficult and complicated a subject.

With regard to agriculture, I would only say a few words to reassure the House. The agricultural interest as we all know has been through an extraordinarily difficult time, and I do not mean in using those words so much a difficult time economically as a difficult time politically. It has had for election purposes programmes made for it time after time by every party in the kingdom, but has had no guarantee if a majority happened to put its own party programme into power, that it would have any permanence in the maintenance of that policy, and it has had the experience of the Corn Production Act. Accordingly, the whole industry, while suffering from economic depression is also suffering rather from a surfeit of politicians. In those circumstances I thought the best way of handling this question was to go straight to the industry itself—I am aware of the risks and to say, "Now this is a very difficult and complicated and very technical industry. You in your various ways have been engaged in it all your lives. Can you help the country by telling the country what measures of any kind you think would set your industry on its legs and as we desire, preserve a still substantial amount of arable land in this country."

I hope very much that before long that Committee will get to work, and it is perfectly obvious that if they can agree on the measures that may be requisite, they will have to submit them, in the first place, to the Government, and it is then that I am hoping to consult the leaders of the other parties to see whether the suggestions that are put up by the industry itself are suggestions that we can adopt as a whole, or in part, or with alterations, and make into a national policy that will ensure for them that continuation and that permanence which is absolutely essential. That is our whole object in this matter, and we believe it is the only practical way of dealing with it. It may be that, in spite of all our hopes and efforts, we may fail, but we shall not fail until we have done our best. I am sorry I do not know what the Leader of the Opposition referred to when he spoke about certain agreements of which he had read in the Press as to the parcelling out of territory in Northern Africa. I am not aware of anything of the kind.

All that I meant was this, that within the last few days there have been suggestions that we might come to agreements which would give us a free hand in Egypt, by agreeing on matters relating to the parcelling out of territory in Northern Africa. I have seen it in papers of some authority, especially foreign papers, and the real purpose of my question—I did not believe it was true—was that I thought it would be advantageous, especially in certain foreign countries, if the Government said so.

I will make a point of looking into the exact words of my right hon. Friend, and the matter shall be dealt with next week in the Foreign Office Debate. With regard to Russia, the Leader of the Opposition attacked my friends, and possibly myself, for the violence of our speeches during the Election. I have heard that done before. I am not conscious myself of having used extraordinarily violent language, and I should have thought that, on the record of the last Election, in spite of what the right hon. Gentleman said, honours were much more even than he claimed this afternoon. Certainly, if I am one of those whom he accused of angling for votes, a form of sportsmanship in which every one of us has taken part, I have always myself tried to fish with clean bait.

( holding up a leaflet ): Does the right hon. Gentleman call that clean bait? [HON. MEMBERS: "Order!"]

Sent out by the Unionist Association. You all used it, but you do not like it now.

Although I remember quite well what was done in the last Parliament, and I think it was done from our benches, I think it is a matter of great regret that things of that kind should be brought into the House of Commons. Everyone who has taken part in an Election—and I have taken part in a great many—knows that always—I say it with infinite regret—and on both sides, not only are things said but there are things printed, that never ought either to be said or printed.

rose ——

I am not going to give way. This is an extraneous matter to this Debate, and I repeat my regret that this should have been brought in again, just as similar charges with illustrations were brought in in the last Parliament. I do not think it ever does any good. It only stimulates the party feeling in the House, and the proper way to get rid of it is for each of us to have guard of our tongues. I was referring to the subject of Russia, on which I wish to say a word or two. The view of the Government—and I expressed it quite clearly—throughout the Election was that, while for various reasons, which it is not necessary to go into at this moment, we were unable to sanction the Treaties that had been arranged by the late Government, we maintained, and we maintain still, that all the benefits which can be obtained to-day, or are likely to be obtained in the near future, are being obtained, and will be obtained, under the Trade Agreement of 1921, and we have no desire that the normal trade intercourse, small as it is, should not go on under that Agreement. We shall be only too pleased if the forecast, which I have often made in this House, of the possibility of increasing trade in the present conditions, is proved to be false in practice.

The right hon. Gentleman asked us if we had in mind three subjects: the Washington Convention, the mining situation, and the question of some of our own industries under the action of the Dawes Report. I can assure him that I have myself kept all three points in mind. We are considering the first one, and, with regard to the second, I am beginning to consider it very seriously now. With regard to the Dawes Report, we are watching very closely, and have given special instructions to have the position of those industries watched, to see what is going on with regard to iron and coal in France and in Germany. I have some sympathy, I confess, with what the Leader of the Opposition said about the possibility of a new type of house being introduced that is not pleasant to the eye, but I will say this, that at a time like this the first necessity is to try and get houses, and if houses, even of a more temporary type, would help to ease the situation in the slums of this country, it is a time after all when the health and well-being of our people must take precedence even of æsthetics.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to Motions. Does he extend it to Private Bills? Will those be postponed till we meet in February?

Private Members' Bills, yes. The Bills it is essential to dispose of before Christmas—and I do not think any of them are controversial—are the Expiring Laws (Continuance) Bill, the Continuance of Charging Powers (Canals) Bill, the Law of Property Act (Postponement) Bill and the Law of Property Act (Amendment) Bill, and the Address which the late Government were going to have brought forward, and upon which, I believe, there is general agreement, for the appointment of two additional Judges, that they may be appointed forthwith. There are also certain Orders, but those can be taken after 11 o'clock, relating to gas and electricity undertakings. Those mean, as soon as they get through, more employment. If time permits, we are very anxious to proceed as far as possible with two other Bills which ought to have been passed a long time ago, but which, owing to two General Elections having taken place instead of Autumn Sessions last year and this, have had to be postponed. These are Bills relating to the Irish Free State Bill, with its Money Resolution, as to land purchase in the South of Ireland, and the corresponding Bill belonging to the North of Ireland. We hope to get through some early stage, possibly the Financial Resolution, of the War Charges (Validity) Bill, the British Sugar Subsidy Bill, and the Agricultural Rates Bill. It is proposed to proceed with the ordinary business of the House on Thursday and Friday of this week, continuing the Debate on the Address on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next week. We hope to be able to adjourn on Friday of next week, and we propose summoning the House after the Recess on the 10th February.

Do we meet at 11 o'clock on Friday, or 12 o'clock?

At 11 o'clock on Friday. There will be a Motion to that effect on the Paper to-morrow. I should like to say, in conclusion, how grateful I am for the kind expression of congratulation from both sections of the Opposition to my two hon. Friends who proposed and seconded the Motion to-day. The longer any of us are in this House I think the more we realise the great difficulty of that task, and the more grateful we are to Members who perform that task with such skill and grace as those two hon. Members did to-day. I would like to tell the House that they are a very fair sample of an admirable vintage that matured this autumn.

6.0 P.M.

In rising thus early to address this House upon the Gracious Speech from the Throne, which I have considered with a great deal of care, I wish to avoid anything in the nature of party animosity. Those who sit with me on these benches differ fundamentally in our outlook upon the problems of to-day from those who sit on the opposite side of the House, and also from those who sit on the back benches below the Gangway; and in attempting to criticise the programme set out in the Speech from the Throne, I do not, of course, expect to find in it the line of approach to the problems of to-day which we on these benches take. But I recognise that there are matters of concrete procedure which are to some extent common to the programme of all parties, and it is from that point of view that I have looked at the proposals which we are invited to consider at the present time. Though I confess that some of these proposals fill me with considerable alarm, and, further, that there are many omissions, as to which I shall have something to say later, there are at least some things put forward for which I am profoundly glad, and for which, I feel sure, the Government will find that they have support in all quarters of the House. There may be some who, from a purely party point of view, would very much prefer that the Government made a speedy muddle of everything, went back on all reforms which we attempted to carry through during the term of office of the Labour Government, and that in that way this party might, at a very early opportunity, gain overwhelming support from the country, and so return to office. Personally, I do not take that view, because, in common, I believe, with the majority of Members of this House, I set the interest of the country above that of any particular party, and, in so far as Members on the opposite side of the House, and in so far as the Government do carry out a policy of concrete reforms, of which I and those of this party can approve, I shall be only too glad. I shall not take the view of the statesman of old, who was disgruntled, and complained that his opponents were stealing the clothes of his party.

If, for instance, on such questions as education, unemployment, pensions and other matters which have been advanced by our Government, the Conservative Government were to go back, then we should simply have in the country a kind of battledore and shuttlecock of reform and reaction, and we should get no further. But if, on the other hand, the Government of to-day are honestly endeavouring to carry out reform in the concrete proposals which owe their origin, in many cases, to the Labour Party, then it will set us free to pioneer still further, and suggest other methods of concrete reform.

Let me illustrate that by a few specific examples. Take, first, the question of unemployment. I remember, although I was not in this House, the day when Mr. Keir Hardie first brought forward the question of unemployment. At that time he was the only member of the Labour party, and his proposal that the House of Commons should devote any of its time and consideration to such a question as unemployment was treated with derision by the vast majority of the House of Commons. I am very glad to see to-day that Members opposite, being, as the hon. and gallant Member who moved the Address informed us, a new and reformed Conservative party, are prepared, on the question of unemployment, to extend all measures that are likely to alleviate the present distresses.

Then, let us take the question of education. I remember when my right hon. Friend the Member for Central Newcastle (Mr. Trevelyan) came into office, he found it necessary to reverse the engines with regard to education, to stop the reaction and false economy then going on, and to widen the scope of education in many ways. I am very glad to see that we are promised continuous development of this very necessary system for the nation. I remember, again, the question of old age pensions. I remember, in the days gone by, some of my friends were the only people who put forward the proposal of old age pensions, and, again, their views were treated with scorn and derision by the older Conservative party of those days. I am very glad to see that the new and reformed Conservative party are going forward to increase old age pensions, and, further, that they hope to introduce through insurance a reform which I have long advocated—in fact, I think I was almost the pioneer in this country to put it forward—pensions for widowed mothers. Then, too, I am very glad to see that they propose to deal with such questions as legitimation and main- tenance, the guardianship of children, and a very much needed reform, the extension of the system of probation. So far as those go, they are steps in the right direction, many of them proposals which we, or our predecessors in this party, have put forward, and I may yet live to see the day when, we having meanwhile been pioneers, and investigated and made clear a great many items of our programme, a still newer and more reformed Conservative party will carry out the principles of Socialism to which, by that time, they have become converted.

But that is the brighter side of the picture. It is still only in promise, and I hope very much that it may be carried into effect. On the darkest side of the picture, which, as I said, fills me with alarm, I do not propose to enter on this occasion. But there are two matters of omission to which I do wish to make reference to-night. The first of those is the question of capital punishment. We have seen only to-day in this country how very wide and extended among the population is the growing feeling of opposition to capital punishment. I believe that it is the spirit of the age to feel outraged by the deliberate taking of life, even in the judicial form which is known as capital punishment. It is not only the actual injury to the persons so dealt with, but the injury to all the persons concerned with this judicial act. I know, as a fact, that those who are in the prisons feel very bitterly what has to be done. Governors of prisons, warders, executioners, all those connected with the deed, have felt it very strongly, and I believe that the community itself feels that the time has come when this old procedure, the last remnant of the old law, must be done away with, and I hope very much the Home Secretary, taking into account the large and growing feeling on this question, even though the subject is not included in the Speech from the Throne, will find an opportunity of introducing and carrying through a Bill for dealing with the abolition of capital punishment.

The other question, which I regret very much is omitted, is that of the equal enfranchisement of men and women. Of course, this is not the opportunity to deal with that, except merely as a passing reference, but I do want to point out that there are two grounds at the present time on which women are excluded from enfranchisement, both, I venture to suggest, very wrong grounds. The first is one of age, and I do suggest that the exclusion from the franchise of all women under 30 years of age is a very bad thing, because it is the younger women, at the age when new impressions are taking shape, whom we ought to seek to interest in political affairs. If we leave the woman, when she has got more leisure and more opportunity of forming her mind, uninterested in political affairs, and give her the vote at a later age, when the cares of the home entirely exhaust her attention, we are not getting the best from the women's vote that we ought to get. Further, we are leaving out a large class who are occupied in trades, and who form a very large, important and increasing part of the productive system of this country. We are leaving them unrepresented, which, I suggest, is not just from the point of view of the State. With regard to the women over 30, I venture to suggest that there, again, the method of exclusion is unsound. I had a letter from one of my constituents recently, in which she pointed out that she was entitled to a vote, but, at the call of duty, when her sister died, she went to act as housekeeper to her brother-in-law, who had several children. By the fact of her going to live in the house of her brother-in-law and to look after his children, she lost the qualification which would have entitled her to vote. When it is remembered that one of the principal vocations of women is the care of human life, you are, by the continued exclusion of women over 30 on certain grounds, placing an obstacle in the way of their fulfilling those particular vocations for which women are specially fitted, and you are placing a slur upon them from the political point of view. I venture to suggest, therefore, that the time has come when both those grounds of exclusion should be done away with, and there ought to be equal franchise for men and women.

In so far as the Government are really putting forward an honest attempt to carry out certain concrete measures of reform, I believe that they will have support from us on this side of the House. Differing though we do in the fundamental outlook on questions, nevertheless we shall be able to support them in concrete proposals. I hope that they will not allow some of the more extreme men in their own party to deflect them from what, I believe, is the honest intention of their leaders, but, in the meantime, while they are doing these things, we on this side will go forward pressing wider measures of reform which, we believe, are necessary, and which, at a future time, we believe we shall be in a position to carry out.

I have no wish to detain the House at any great length, but as I may not have any opportunity of expressing my views for a few weeks, I hope I may be permitted to offer a few remarks. My intention in rising is to suggest one or two possible pitfalls which the Government in the future will do well to avoid. In doing this I should like at once to say that I most fully endorse every word in the Gracious Speech, and also have been more than delighted with such administrative action as His Majesty's Government have taken up to the present time. I want to call attention to what appears to me to be the real interpretation of the General Election. I think the first lesson we can learn is that the British people will tolerate almost any kind of Government by their own countrymen: they even regard a Socialist Government with a certain amount of equanimity, at any rate, for a time: but they will not tolerate interference in our private affairs from foreigners, and much less from foreign revolutionaries. I believe that that was one of the great reasons for the extraordinary change of opinion at the time of the General Election. Indeed, I think that the Leader of the Opposition rather bears that view out when, in his speech a little while ago, he talked of the great panic and the great majority which arose from the Zinovieff letter.

The great hoax!

Secondly, it appears to me that while the British people will not be governed by foreigners, they do expect to be really governed by those who, after all, they pay to govern them, and they are particularly tired of that policy of scuttle and surrender to extremists which we have seen almost since the conclusion of the great War. The first point I am entitled to suggest is this: that the decision of the people was a Conservative victory without any possible doubt whatsoever. I am well aware that some of my leaders in the last two or three years held the view, and expressed it very positively on the platform, that never again would the Conservatives come into office except with the aid of Liberal crutches. That view was expressed very eloquently, and that we, the wicked Die-Hards, were taking a fatal course when we decided that everything must be subordinated to the fact that we believed that the Conservative party must once again express its own soul. I never held that view or believed that there was any doubt but that Conservative principles in this country would be displayed once more at a General Election. I made an attempt to become a permanent capitalist by winning the Election competition in the "Daily Mail" I am glad to say that I was not so very far out of my estimate of the popular opinion, as in my coupon, three weeks before the Election, I got the Socialist vote exactly right, and the Independent vote exactly right; the only place I went really wrong I did not quite understand the exact estimation in which the Liberal party were held by the electorate of the country as a whole. I confess that I gave the Liberal party a better show. I gave them 70 votes. I am very glad indeed to see that one of the results of the General Election has been a clarifying of the political atmosphere. In spite of anything hon. Members in opposition may suggest, there really is no need for the kind of alliance that has been suggested between Liberals and Conservatives. The alliance with the Liberal party which we were told was extremely important to the Conservatives, if it were carried out again into action, means placing a milestone round our necks. I think our countrymen have a perfect abhorrence of mixtures of any kind. From childhood upwards they dislike them. They can understand something which is red or which is blue but they have no use for an anæmic pink represented by the Liberal party at the present time. For the same reason I hope to hear no more nonsense about "Constitutional Liberals." You might as well talk about international patriots!

Having said that, I would reiterate once more that the great majority of this House of Commons at the present time is a Conservative majority, and, being Conservative, I believe I am speaking the opinion of a great number of the younger men whom I was very glad to see elected in the last election, and many of whom I have had the privilege of speaking for in the last four or five years, and I believe I may say that nothing could be more abhorrent to them than Coalition measures. I think when you examine the Government there is a certain amount of Coalition dressing on the Conservative salad. In fact I do not deny that there is something in the look of the Front Bench which seems distantly to remind me of the Conservative wing of the Coalition in days gone by when I used to sit in the corner opposite and watch their great deeds. But I admit there is all this difference, because fortunately the Prince of Denmark will no longer be on the bench, and therefore we welcome as good Conservatives the prodigal sons. To me no fatted calf would be adequate. I hope the Government, being no longer under the spell of that statesman, will realise that with this great Conservative majority behind them they have only to go fearlessly forward and to carry out Conservative principles to hold office for the next 20 years.

May I say just one word on that subject. I have felt for very many years that it really does not matter, if people get wiser, that they ultimately change their party, provided they end up in the Conservative party. After all, a rose may smell as sweet under another name. I do want to congratulate the Prime Minister on his courage in taking into his Government those who have not always agreed with him in the past two or three years, and have been inclined to express their disagreement—that he has taken them into the Government, thereby undoubtedly uniting the whole Conservative party. It is not only courageous but chivalrous. I hope the action may be remembered to the credit of the Prime Minister for very many days to come.

It may be asked, what do I mean when I say that I hope the Government will not fall into the error of producing any more of what one might call Coalition measures, which I know would be detested by the great majority of young Conservatives returned to the House? What do I mean by Coalition measures? I mean this—that during the War we as a nation and the British Dominions suffered a colossal loss in man-power, suffered some- thing like a million deaths, in order to preserve the British Empire. That being so, I never could understand why immediately at the conclusion of hostilities our statesmen at that time should have thought it wise to do everything they could to placate the forces that were anti-Empire, and surrender to any kind of agitation which was raised in different parts of the Empire. There was a kind of sickly feeble sentiment going, I suppose, through the world, after the War amongst those who had taken no part whatever in the War. It was that you must show the white flag, and surrender everything you had. That gas attack came from America, not, let it be said so much from the nation, as that the matter was put forward by the President, who was doomed to be relegated to the history of the past. The suggestion was, that the great pill to cure every earthquake was that of self-determination. Under the spell of the wizard we were carried away, and I cannot help asking this question, Were the whole Front Bench in the Coalition really convinced that in handing over the Government of that great collection of nations in India, which go to make up the Indian Empire, were they really convinced they were to be better governed than when they were governed by this Mother of Parliaments from Westminster?

I ask exactly the same question with regard to Egypt. I suggest that we never would have been landed in these present troubles at all but for the fact that we were drugged by this Coalition spirit of surrender to the extremists. I do not wish to raise the question with any heat whatsoever, but I am wondering how many hon. Members in the House really in their heart of hearts believed that the Coalition was serving the cause of humanity when they surrendered. I am well aware that we cannot go back on these decisions at the present time, but I do believe that one of the great reasons why the Conservative party was returned by this great majority was that the electors of this country are sick and tired of surrender in different parts of the Empire, and intend to see that that kind of thing does not happen in the future, unless we are absolutely convinced that it is going to be for the benefit of the whole human race.

After all, there are two things to do, either to govern the Empire or to admit ourselves an inferior race and clear out. These are the two alternatives; but we cannot have it both ways. I had a letter from a most distinguished Egyptian only three days ago—I regret I cannot give his name—but in his letter he said:

I want to say one word with regard to an omission from the Gracious Speech from the Throne which caused me considerable sadness. I do not think there is any paragraph calling attention to the extraordinary effect on this country of the aliens in our midst. I do not want to speak at length on this question, but so long as we have got our own working classes living 10 or 12 in a room, as I know they do in some cases, and so long as we have got the present state of unemployment, it seems to me to be absolutely immoral to allow any aliens to come into the country and aggravate the difficulties of our people. Looking through the police court reports day after day, I am enormously impressed by the fact that the grand total of crime in this country is so largely contributed to by those who have alien names. [An HON. MEMBER: "Mr. 'A.'"] I do not think that was a proper remark to make. Is it good form or good taste? If you are going to call that gentleman an alien I think it is most regrettable; but I would rather not be drawn into that matter. I am not talking of criminal English people, but I am talking of criminal aliens who are allowed to come into this country, commit crimes and remain here, and we look to the Government to send them back to the countries whence they came.

May I say this word with regard to what the ex-Prime Minister told us when he was talking about Russia? He kept on saying, again and again, "Are we going to have an inquiry about the Zinovieff letter?" The last Prime Minister himself had an inquiry into the Zinovieff letter, and I think his answer to that was, "Nothing doing; nothing very much further can be said." What is the good of having an inquiry into this letter, into the one question as to whether the letter was a forgery or not? The Zinovieff of that letter was a perfect lamb of mildness compared with the Zinovieff who made public utterances in Russia in June and July which were reported in every newspaper in the country. What is the good of wasting further money on an inquiry unless it is suggested that this letter of Zinovieff's proves there has been a change of heart on his part, and that he has really become a, most mild revolutionary as compared with what he was? The Prime Minister should not waste any time on these things, unless it is absolutely necessary. The Leader of the Opposition makes a great mistake if he imagines that the Conservative party or, I think, the Liberal party have any quarrel with the Russian people. We have nothing but sympathy with the Russian people. Our quarrel is with those alien tyrants who are crushing the spirit of Russia. Zinovieff and his companions have declared that their main objective in policy since last June is the destruction of the British Empire. I notice that Mr. Purcell, who was in this House last Session, says that Soviet Russia is

Nonsense.

The hon. and gallant Gentleman says "Nonsense," but will he tell me who they are? Perhaps he is going to say his friend Zinovieff.

He is not my friend.

His name is not Zinovieff, but Apfelbaum. Perhaps the hon. and gallant Member is going to say Trotsky is a Russian?

Krassin.

I think that even M. Krassin's origin is very, very doubtful.

Oh, no.

Of those who are really responsible for the government of Russia, the contest is very close between two, a gentleman named Trotsky and a gentleman named Zinovieff. Zinovieff does not think Trotsky goes far enough. Trotsky's name is Bronstein and Zinovieff is Apfelbaum. M. Nickinoff, who, I understand, paid a visit to Lossiemouth, has got five different names, but his original name, you can take it from me, is Finkelstein. I am only mentioning these facts because I want to beg His Majesty's Government and Members of this House, of whatever section they may be, not to imagine that the Bolshevist peril has passed away. These people in Russia, I know only too well, are no good friends of the real representatives of British workers. I know that. They do not mind whom they destroy, but their ultimate aim and goal is destruction, and if this House fails to realise that the Bolshevist Government is waging ceaseless war on the British Empire, through China, through India and through Egypt, we shall be failing to realise the greatest danger this world has ever known. I know that we have statements from hon. Gentlemen opposite that Russia is the true expression of the working-class heart, and I am not at all sure that the hon. and gallant Member for Central Hull (Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy) does not agree with them. It is perfectly true that the present governors of Russia are very clever men, but it is also true that they absolutely destroyed even the beginnings of democratic representation which were set up in Russia, and I say that for true diabolic evilness they have never been equalled in the history of the world. [An HON. MEMBER: "Black and Tans!"] There need have been no Black and Tans if we had not had any of those sentimental announcements about governing Ireland. I do not want to go back to the Irish question, but the difficulty started with Mr. Asquith and with Mr. Birrell. It was owing to their failure that the Government were faced with the situation existing at the present time and with all the trouble we have had there. But I was talking about Russia, and I say that in spite of the fact that some people who go to Russia have the wool drawn over their eyes the main objective of Bolshevism is the destruction of the British Empire. You may think that is a good thing. I know the hon. Member for Battersea thinks the British Empire ought to be destroyed. I have heard his speeches, and I think I am right in saying that is the view of the hon. Member for Battersea.

Which Battersea?

I am not talking about the Noble Lord who sits for one of the divisions for Battersea (Viscount Curzon), but the other Gentleman who sits for Battersea (Mr. Saklatvala). This being the fact—though the hon. and gallant Gentleman (Lieut.-Commander Ken-worthy) takes all these things very lightly—let us be warned and guarded the whole time, because, although the Bolshevists have come to realise that they cannot destroy this country here at home, they are seeking out the soft places of the Empire and concentrating the whole of their energies on bringing sorrow, misery and disturbances on those parts. When people scoff and laugh at the Bolshevist peril so far as the British Empire is concerned, I ask them to consider the appalling misery and murder of the campaign in Georgia and to note what has happened in Esthonia in the last few days. I believe this country runs only one great danger from Bolshevism, and that is in not realising how far those people are prepared to go. I rejoice to think the Treaty is at an end, but I ask His Majesty's Government to realise that from the moment the Treaty ended Bolshevism was at war with this country and has tried to do everything to destroy us and to weaken the British Empire. Therefore, it is more than ever necessary for the Government to do everything possible to unite the Empire as the sole and only bulwark of Christianity and civilisation against the Bolshevist system.

I do not propose to follow the hon. and gallant Gentleman (Sir H. Croft) in his attack on the policy of his own Government or the subject on which he has just spoken. I want to say a word or two with regard to matters of domestic policy which come very close home to those who live in these islands. I greatly regret the somewhat indefinite references in His Majesty's Speech to the twin problems of housing and unemployment, problems which are very much in the same position to-day as they were when His Majesty's Government left office. I say that because it is clear this is not a responsibility of any one particular party. Since the Government were last in office we have had the Labour party in office, and the position, unfortunately, is practically the same now as it was 12 months ago; but I do hope it may be possible, with good will on the part of all parties of this House, to do something to relieve the appalling condition which confronts our country, particularly in the industrial areas.

There is in the King's Speech a reference to signs of improvement in trade. While it is perfectly true, taking the average of the country, that there are signs of improvement, I hope the Prime Minister realises, as I am sure he does, that there are other districts where those signs of improvement are not obvious, and where things are going from bad to worse. The Prime Minister knows well the condition of the iron and steel trades. Instead of trade improving, you have there a condition of things worse than it was some months ago. May I, as an illustration, take some figures from the town which I have the honour to represent, which is the centre of the north-east coast iron and steel industry? There we have the appalling condition that there are 2,000 more unemployed to-day than there were in April of this year. It is little comfort to districts such as this to be told that there are signs of trade improvement. There are other industries where the position is on the down grade, and the Prime Minister ought to turn his mind in the direction of seeing if it is not possible to do something for those districts which are going from bad to worse. We are now facing the fourth winter of discontent, and the coming winter will be a time of great trial and excessive hardship unless something more is done to relieve those districts which are now so exceptionally oppressed.

I have turned up the figures issued in the Ministry of Labour Gazette for the last month, and I find that whereas the average for unemployment is 11·1 per cent.; in the shipbuilding industry it is 38 per cent. and in the marine engineering industry 24·8 per cent. There you have an appalling condition of things which has been going from bad to worse for the last three or four years. Taking the figures for the town which I have the honour to represent, we have a condition of things in which the ratepayers are badly in default, and where every other person you meet has not paid his rates for the last half year. There are over 7,000 in default for the last half-year's rates, and the arrears of rates amount to £136,000 out of a total of £313,000. That is an example of the appalling condition of things which is prevalent not only in my own district, but in all the iron and steel districts of the country. If you take the North-East Coast, Sheffield, South Wales or Glasgow, you will find evidence that in those particular districts things are going from bad to worse. I appeal to the Prime Minister, with his keen business knowledge, and to the Cabinet to try and do something better than merely doling out money to the able unemployed for no services rendered. Surely that is the height of folly, and it would be far more sensible from a business point of view to find work of a useful character for a, much larger portion of the unemployed.

The local authorities throughout the country have schemes which they are prepared to put in hand at once if only adequate financial assistance is forthcoming. For the last four years these local authorities have borne the heat and burden of the day, and their finances are exhausted by continually increasing rates. Therefore, it is impossible for them to do more than they are doing, and the Prime Minister should see whether he cannot get from the Exchequer sufficient funds to ensure that work of a useful character can be put in hand which will employ much larger numbers of the unemployed. There is much work which might be undertaken in the further extension of our roads. To-day the road service is altogether inadequate. We have schemes for main arterial roads, but it is a fact that a number of schemes are held up because the local authorities say that they cannot place the burden on the rates for a benefit which will not be immediately felt by them.

There are such schemes as the reclamation of the foreshore and the extension of docks. For those and similar schemes the Government should endeavour, if possible, to provide greater assistance in order to carry them out. I know that the unemployed grants have been raised to 75 per cent. for half the period of the loan, but that only amounts to about one-third of the total cost. Where you have rates at 20s. in the £ it is quite impossible for those districts to add further to their financial burdens. In some parts of the country you have a Poor Rate at 1s. in the £ whilst in others the Poor Rate is 7s., 8s., 9s. and even 10s. for the same national service. The care of the able-bodied unemployed is largely a national and not a local problem, and a Measure of equalisation should be passed in order that those burdens may not press too heavily on the poorer districts which are now carrying a burden far in excess of the rest of the country, and conse- quently those people who are least able to bear the burden are being penalised.

The Prime Minister should make a special grant like the necessitous school areas grant which has been found to be a safe and sound scheme with regard to the administration of school areas, and give in these necessitous areas some special grant for this purpose. If you turn to the various reports of the meetings of the various iron and steel companies you find every chairman refers to the way the industry is handicapped and competition made more difficult because of the burden of local rates on the cost of production. In pre-War years the cost of local rates used to amount to about 3d. or 6d. per ton on the production, but it has now grown to as much as 10s. per ton, and this is a great handicap on the revival of trade which is so essential in order to absorb the unemployed.

Then there is the moral position. We have to consider the effect upon men who are walking the streets year after year unemployed. Some of them have been unemployed for the last three or four years, and they have gone through a period of exceptional distress. Consequently, the morale of these men has been sapped, with the result that even if trade does revive they will be unable to fulfil the role. I hope the Prime Minister will see whether it is possible to appoint a special Committee to deal with this abnormal situation. I want the Prima Minister to realise that while trade may be showing some signs of improvement in some districts, in other districts it is going from bad to worse, and those districts should receive special attention and have special assistance in these abnormal times.

I am quite aware that there is no one more qualified to address the House on social matters than the hon. Member (Mr. T. Thomson) who has just sat down, but I would like to point out as a remedy to the state of things which he has disclosed that the Government intend to see that trade is pushed in every possible way. While we realise that there must be temporary measures, nevertheless we are going to try to get down to the bedrock of the question, and not only secure markets in Europe which we have not got at the present time, but also secure by colonial preference our colonial markets, which will do more to relieve the situation than all the schemes which have been referred to.

I would like to inform the Leader of the Opposition that far from Imperial Preference not being a matter of discussion at the last Election, it was, in fact, one of the very important subjects discussed during the campaign, and it was one of the prime points upon which we got a great deal of support for our present majority. With regard to the Egyptian question, I think the attitude of the Government, and the firmness with which they have handled the situation, has met with the general approbation of the vast majority of the people of this country. In a speech which the Leader of the Opposition made a few days ago, he declared that, while in every way he deplored the terrible murder of a very high public servant, yet he seemed to think after that was done that other methods should have been brought into play, which, in my view, would not have had the effect of restoring confidence to the Sudan and Egypt, which has been the result of the present policy.

I would like to say a word in reference to the housing problem, because it seems to me that, while we are going into new methods of construction, all of which may be good in themselves, we have to secure that more men are engaged in the building industry in order that the houses which local authorities want to build, and for which they have schemes sanctioned, can be built. We want to see that more labour is available to build those houses. I hope the Government will be able to find some scheme under which, at any rate, more men may be employed in the building industry, and this is the only way to ensure a more rapid building of houses.

Another point to be dealt with is the opening out of more brickfields in order to get the number of bricks required for the building industry as a whole. Therefore, I hope that the Government will seize every opportunity of developing new brickfields, because, notwithstanding new methods of construction, we are bound in the majority of cases to come back to brick buildings, which after all provide sound houses for the people. I welcome the Agricultural Conference. In my own humble way, I have always said we have to try to get the country to realise that agriculture must be dealt with from a national point of view. This industry for a long time has been the battledore and shuttlecock of those in office for the time being, and the alteration of the Act during the time of the Coalition Government, when guaranteed prices had to be dropped, created a want of confidence in the Government of the day among agriculturists. I am glad to see that we are to have this Conference.

There was one point in the statement made by the Government upon which I want to say a word or two. It is said that there has been too much tendency to consider the agricultural problem on terms of corn-growing alone. That is the real problem, because, by corn-growing, and that alone, the vast majority of the poorer kind of land you want to get into cultivation is affected. If you consider that all the other by-products mentioned, such as butter, milk, and so on, are ever going to fill the place of corn-growing in England, I think you are making an entire mistake.

7.0 P.M.

You must have corn-growing; you must have your straw to make manure. You can have the best artificial manure you like, but it will never give the same effect on poorer lands as the home-made manure. The question of corn-growing is one you have got to solve, and the land which I wish to see brought back to cultivation is not on a corn-growing level. Speaking for my own county of Kent—the Sittingbourne and Faversham area—much of this type of good land can look after itself, hut it is the indifferent type of land that somehow has got to be dealt with, and it does constitute a large amount of the acreage of this country. If we are going to solve the agricultural problem and find work for our own men on the land, we shall have to utilise this land. I, therefore, regret that sentence, because I do not think we can exaggerate the importance of coming to a decision as to what we are going to do on corn-growing. I do think, on the question of corn-growing, the Government have got really seriously to consider, not what is going to be done with this better and more fruitful kind of land, but what is going to be done, if you mean to get a million acres back into cultivation, with that more inferior land, unless you can give much more encouragement in the way of artificial and home-grown manure. I venture to bring this subject before the House to-night, because one realises that this Conference is going to sit, and there may not be another opportunity before Christmas of saying another word on the subject. It is because of that I have ventured to introduce the matter, and to ask the Government not to allow that sentence, which makes corn-growing only a subsidiary part of the inquiry, in any way to deflect them from realising that it is on corn-growing alone the problem will be solved. I thank you, Mr. Speaker, for giving me this opportunity, and I may say once more that I welcome the Gracious Speech which has been delivered to-day from the Throne. I am quite certain that Speech will give confidence to the country to look forward to the future, so that when the end of this Parliament comes, probably five years hence, the Government will have carried out what they have set out to achieve.

It has become the custom at the beginning of a new Parliament for the protagonists of each side to say how it is on the one hand you have won and how it is on the other you have lost. We have not been spared that entertainment this afternoon. I observe, in the course of the remarks of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George), that an attempt was made to explain to the Leader of the Opposition why it is that the Labour party does not represent as large a number proportionately of the electors of this country as do the Members of the Liberal party. I do not think that they occupied their time overmuch with superfluous expressions of condolence with us. Indeed, I think it would be much more profitable to have an inquiry to discover why it is there are so very few Liberals on the benches opposite, and, if I may, I would suggest the explanation might be found in a reference to the Biblical story of Haman and Mordecai. One of these particular gentlemen was seeking for political power and I think it was Haman who determined to get rid of his colleague Mordecai. By way of disposing of his rival, he had erected a scaffold in readiness; but in due time Haman found his way to the scaffold and Mordecai took the place of Haman. There is a good deal that reminds us of Haman in the political efforts of the right hon. Gentleman in the last few months. I am not, of course, referring to the old leader of the Radical party.

Parliaments have been called by various names at various times. They have been called Long Parliaments, Short Parliaments, Addled Parliaments, and the Bare-bones Parliament. I have been wondering what would be an appropriate name for this present Parliament. It appears to me it would not be inappropriate to describe it as the Parliament for the Promotion of Penitent Prodigals, for there are many who have been promoted in the last few days. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs once set off for a far country and lived on the husks of Coalitionism for some time, and, then, after being shown the door at the Carlton Club, he desired to return to his father's house, and great was the welcome he received from the old homestead. But there is another prodigal of equal interest to us, who has recently been promoted too, and who will sit in a few days side by side with the Prime Minister as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is the prodigal of quite engaging interests. He has been so many things and has been called so many political names in his time. He, too, set out almost at the same time, if I remember rightly, when the right hon. Member for Carnarvon Boroughs went on his great political pilgrimage. He took a little longer to come home, but when he did come home I gather there was an elder brother at home who was not particularly glad that the fatted calf had been killed so early—I refer to the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Hillhead (Sir R. Home). He, like Mr. Asquith, has gone to the East, I presume, to consult the Sphinx. When the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Hillhead discovered that the fatted calf had been killed to welcome a political younger brother, he promptly said, like his predecessor, he would not go in, but in response, I will not say to blandishments, but to the encouragement of the right hon. Gentleman opposite, he ultimately went in on the plea doubtless that at some future time another calf would be found to be killed in his honour as well.

In the Gracious Speech from the Throne there are various items of interest to people in varying degrees. If I may begin by way of congratulation I should like to do it in this way. I would like to congratulate the Prime Minister on the fact that he has put in terms the very valuable promise that the educational institutions in this country are not going to be starved, but, on the contrary, encouraged and developed during the period of his office. I welcome that pronouncement with very great eagerness because, as the House will agree, in the ultimate result the future of this country depends upon the measure of the educational facilities that are accorded to the general masses of the people of the country. I want to congratulate the Prime Minister, if I may, on that very valuable sentence in the King's Speech. But there are certain subjects conspicuous, to use a hackneyed phrase, by their absence, and one in which I am particularly interested is a subject which is distinctly dear to the people whom I represent in this House.

My constituency is chiefly a mining constituency and, as the Prime Minister knows, the coal trade in South Wales at this moment is passing through a period of very great difficulty indeed. In my constituency, for instance, in the Northern end of it, at least, there are several pits which have been closed, and, as I gather, are likely to be permanently closed. That involves large numbers of people in that area in very great financial difficulties. The difficulties have been intensified, I regret to say, by what I cannot call anything but a somewhat sharp trick on the part of the people concerned. The owners of some of these pits knew very well that they were going to be closed down, and yet went to some of their workmen and agreed that those workmen should buy their houses just a few months, or weeks, in some cases, before the pits were closed clown actually. The result is these people are committed to living in those neighbourhoods because their money is bound up in the houses which they have bought. I would like to put this point to the Prime Minister. There are in my constituency men who are eager to work, who would work every day if they could get it, and are at the pit on each day work is available, and still, owing to the peculiar difficulty attending their work, large numbers of them go home week after week now with less than 10s. in their pockets to maintain their lives upon. That is a most grave situation and one that cannot surely be allowed to be prolonged for any indefinite length of time. I would urge upon the Prime Minister that an inquiry should be set up at the earliest possible moment, that the most sympathetic attitude should be adopted by the Government towards these people in their terrible distress.

The second point is the question of housing. Housing was the subject of some controversy between us in the recent Election, people on the one side claiming that the 1923 Act was the only solution to the difficulty, and others claiming that the 1924 Act was the better solution. I would put to the Prime Minister a statement of the position in the valley where I happen to live. It is a valley almost entirely composed of mines—it is completely a mining community. There are six urban district councils operating in that area, two of which comprise my constituency. In the whole of that area, as far as my information goes, not a single house has been built under the Chamberlain scheme. Down below my constituency is a tunnel, and after passing through the tunnel you come into the Cardiff area; and in passing into the Cardiff area you pass through a fairly well-to-do residential district in which literally scores of houses have been built during the last 12 months or two years. I am not complaining of that; I admit that middle-class people, like everyone else, should have houses; but the point I want to make is that when these miners pass in the train down their valley to Cardiff, as they do from time to time, and observe that these scores of houses have been built for middle-class people while none have been built for them, is it not natural that they should develop a sense of grievance when they cannot get housed as others are being housed? I plead, therefore, with the right hon. Gentleman that in these areas which have peculiar difficulties, because of the fact that they are newly-developed areas, with roads and sewers and so on all requiring to be attended to at once, and having to be provided under the difficult conditions of dear money and so on—I plead with the right hon. Gentleman that some special methods should be devised for providing houses for these areas, so as to relieve the awful overcrowding on the one hand, and to relieve in another way this sense of grievance which the people entertain.

I should now like to say a word or two concerning the question of Russia, which has been discussed here this afternoon, and I do so because one appreciates that next Monday, when the Foreign Secretary returns, all of us cannot get in in the Debate, and we have, therefore, to avail ourselves of the opportunity now, lest perchance we may not be able to catch your eye next week. A good deal of discussion has taken place this afternoon concerning the Zinovieff letter. I may say that in this matter I am expressing my own view and no one else's, but I think some of us have to speak quite frankly, and I propose to do so. Whether we agree or do not agree with the allegation that those on the other side of the House used this Zinovieff letter for political purposes, is beside the point. We did see the Zinovieff letter used; about that we are all agreed. It was used against the Labour party. I want to ask, is it not entirely fair and proper that an inquiry should be asked for concerning the authenticity of this letter? I know that people on the other side would say, "Ah, yes, but when we put to you last Session a demand on the Campbell affair, you refused an inquiry." Very well, I admit that; but no Member of this House will compare in importance the act or alleged act of one man named Campbell with the act or alleged act of Zinovieff. Campbell was comparatively unknown, and, moreover, his letter appeared in a paper of comparatively small circulation; but in this instance the letter has been used with such effect as to have the result that it has changed the policy and the politics of this country, and might, indeed, have influenced the politics of the Continent as well. [HON. MEMBERS: "Nonsense!"] Well, it is a matter of opinion, and it is a matter of vital importance. Here is a letter which certain people say betrays a vast conspiracy. Very good. You asked people to vote upon it. [HON. MEMBERS: "NO!"] I beg pardon, no one will deny that; and in large numbers of constituencies, as I think my Friends below the Gangway will admit, large numbers of their votes were transferred from them to the other side so as to prevent one of our people from getting in, in places where there was no pact at all.

Is this letter genuine or is it not? Has anyone seen the letter? If it is only a copy, who can tell me whether that copy is an accurate copy? What guarantee have I that that copy was a fair and literal copy of the alleged original? Millions of votes have been transferred upon the basis of it. [HON. MEMBERS: "No!"] Oh, yes. Presumably the present Government think it is genuine, because they have already said so in their letter to the Soviet Government; but the previous Government's Committee of Inquiry did not say that they thought it was genuine. What they said was that they were not able to say it was not genuine. [ Laughter .] That is a substantial difference. I have not the acute sense of humour that Members on the other side have. Supposing it to be conceivable that a letter of that sort could have been sent from an American organisation suspected of being, let us say, in accord with or under the domination of members of the American Government, would you, would any Member of any Government act towards an American Government in the same way as you have acted towards the Russian Government? Surely, if your foreign policy is something that you want to be respected in the world, you must treat all nations alike, and, therefore, you have no right to attempt to bully one Government, much as you may dislike it, as I do myself. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"] Yes; I am the only Member of Parliament on these benches who can say that he has had a definite Communist candidate against him at an election—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh, no!"]—a candidate——

You are wrong even there.

Very well, I withdraw; but anyway I was the first. Therefore, I have no sympathy with them, but I do believe that it is of vital interest, in establishing good relations in the world, that we should know the truth concerning this letter. I plead, therefore with this present Government, that with the new knowledge which they say they possess, they will set up an impartial Committee to deal with this matter. That brings me to another point which I desire to make upon the Zinovieff letter. The more I examine this problem, the more do I see the necessity for setting up in this House of Commons, somehow or other, a Foreign Affairs Committee which will deal with foreign affairs and before which members of the Government responsible for foreign affairs will have to give evidence, as is the case on the Continent. If there were such a Committee in this House at this moment, it would not be necessary to have partisan statements concerning the letter from the Labour Government or the Tory Government; you would have a Foreign Affairs Committee constituted of Members of all parties to investigate the matter without any bias at all.

Passing now to the question of Egypt, I want to make it perfectly clear that I have no difference at all with the Government concerning the strong action that they took in the sense of expressing their abhorrence of the terrible act which was perpetrated upon the life of the late Sirdar in Egypt. I am wholly at one with those who protested against that vile act. I have always preached, and I hope to continue to preach, that there is no salvation for any oppressed people along the lines of violence. That is my candid opinion, and I do not see any reason why I should withdraw it. But that is a different thing from agreeing with the exhibition of the mailed fist as we have seen it in Egypt. To begin with, I take exception to the sum of £500,000 demanded by way of indemnity. I agree, if you like, that you should demand compensation, fixing a reasonable sum, but £500,000 as an indemnity from a very poor country like Egypt seems to be a colossal sum to ask. I am expressing my view, and that is my honest opinion; I think it is too much of a sum. Moreover, I am entirely at one with other people who have already expressed the opinion that it was a profound mistake for the Government seemingly—I do not say it was their intention—to seize upon the death of this gallant gentleman as am occasion, one might almost say an excuse, for putting forward certain demands that had no relation at all to the murder itself. For instance, what had the question of the irrigation of the Sudan to do with the death of Sir Lee Stack? Absolutely nothing. The result was that you created in the minds of these people the feeling that you seized the situation and, if I may be forgiven the statement, that you, as it were, hid yourselves behind the body of the late general in order to get out of the Egyptians things that otherwise you would not have secured.

I would put another point, which has not, as far as I can see, been put in this House. I want to know what was the good that was expected from that portion of the ultimatum to Egypt which demanded the suppression of public assemblies in Egypt. I venture to say that it was an unwise move. As the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs has said, the vast majority of the people in Egypt are not guilty of this crime. They are innocent of it, and, in removing from them the right of public assembly, you are involving them in a punishment which ought to have been applied to only a few people. You stopped public assembly; what is the result? You do not stop the plotters; they will meet underground just the same; and it is worse to have men plotting underground out of sight than it is to allow them to express their opinions freely in public assembly. I think it was a wrong move, an unwise move, and in a large measure it is an unjust move and an interference with the independence of the Egyptian people themselves. Moreover, if this is to prevail how are the people of Egypt to express their national aspiration if they are not entitled to attend popular assemblies to do so?

I wish the Government had shown their willingness to use the League of Nations on this occasion. I am inclined to think they are not quite proud of their action. They seem to have been very busy in the last few days offering various suggestions? and subtle explanations. They have deemed it wise, I understand, to explain to the League of Nations why it is not called in. That implies, anyhow, that they have some arriere pensée on the question. I heard a few minutes ago on the other side a gibe at the Bolshevists concerning their treatment of Georgia, with which I agree if you like. Everyone in the House denounces the Bolshevists for having overrun Georgia, and having crushed her independence. But what is the Government to say to them now? Suppose the Bolshevists turn round and say, what right have you to talk about Georgia? How do you treat your nations? [An HON. MEMBER: "There is no analogy at all."] There is never an analogy when our case is concerned. I think there is a very close analogy. Georgia being independent and Egypt being said to be independent, and the proper thing would have been for the country to be big enough and bold enough to refer this difficulty to the League of Nations for arbitration. I should like to ask the Prime Minister how he reconciles his statement concerning the view of the Government in regard to the League of Nations with this new move to start again upon the Singapore policy. How can he reconcile those two policies, on the one side to rely on the efficacy of reason and on the other side to prepare resources of war? I invite the Government even now, before they start building this base at Singapore, to abandon the project and thereby show its belief in the efficacy of reason as applied to international problems.

I do not propose to follow the last speaker, except to agree with him as to the position of the coal trade, and the necessity, as far as possible, of assisting it in some way. The hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Mr. T. Thomson) spoke of the appalling state of the trade of the town he represents. I agree with him, but he must realise that you have two markets. You have your home market and your foreign market, and Middlesbrough probably more than any other town is dependent on the foreign trade of the country. No doubt the hon. Member saw in the "Times" of 10th October and 22nd October two letters from the Chairman of the Great India Peninsula Railway. They gave the tenders for various goods—the highest and lowest British and the highest and lowest Continental tenders. I take the position of locomotive boilers from the second letter. The highest British tender was £109,000 and the lowest £94,000, and the highest Continental tender was £104,000 and the lowest £54,000. I think that may illustrate to him what is really wrong with trade, and although palliatives may be necessary, I contend that Middlesbrough—and I take this town as an example of the North East Coast—cannot possibly prosper until you get some rectification of the figures I have read. There are other difficulties to contend with as well. One great difficulty is our large adverse balance of trade. We are undoubtedly suffering from that at present and if you compare up to the end of October, 1923, with the end of October, 1924, there is a huge adverse balance of over £100,000,000 comparing 1923 with 1924. How is this paid for? If you take the position in 1923, roughly our invisible exports were £300,000,000, made up of income on investments, national shipping, bankers' commissions and other services, and the balance was made up so that after you paid the amount of excess of imports over exports there was a balance of approximately £97,000,000 to invest in foreign securities Yet to-day for 10 months of the year our adverse balance is £100,000,000 greater than it was in the previous year. Why is this? Chiefly because commodities and raw materials are higher than they were in 1923. I will take the instance of wheat. The import of wheat for October of this year was 10,000,000 cwts., and it cost £7,000,000. In 1923 for the same month the imports were 7,000,000 cwts. and the cost was £3,500,000. That is one reason, but there is also the position which is mentioned by the hon. Member who last spoke in regard to coal. Coal is bad in South Wales. It is also bad in Northumberland and Durham. It was better last year because of the position in the Ruhr. When Mr. Bonar Law was not successful in dealing with the reparations problem the French went into the Ruhr. That helped our coal trade. It enabled us to sell to France and Italy, and it benefited us, and we are suffering from that at present.

We have heard a great deal about Russia. The position of trade in Russia is so insignificant that it is hardly worth mentioning, but as it has been mentioned I should like to give the figures of the nine months' exports of British goods to Russia. In 1923 it was £1,700,000, and in 1924 it was £1,800,000. That will not improve our trade. These are official figures. I quite agree that parts of our trade are better, as is stated in His Majesty's Speech. The cotton trade is better, but till you get an all-round improvement you cannot possibly settle the unemployment question. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George) spoke about the stability of exchange. He is quite right if he refers to the mark. It is almost stable. It is almost coming up to the £ sterling. The mark is at a premium to the £ sterling, but if the export of gold takes place from America to this country, and I believe it is taking place, the gold being for German account, the mark will probably go to a discount to the £1 sterl- ing. But it is necessary to have some sort of stability in exchange so that your manufacturers will be able to quote in the foreign currency of the particular country. It may be asked, with this big adverse balance of trade, why is our exchange with New York so good at present? In the ordinary course the New York exchange goes down at this time of the year when the manufacturers are buying commodities and raw materials. I have not seen the quotation to-day, but yesterday it was 4·70. I contend that that is due to the investment of American money in foreign securities. In October the New York market took up eight foreign Government loans, the total amount being 214,000,000 dollars. That must help your exchange. But if you consider the reduced amount of our exports to the United States, comparing it with 1923, it must be the large amount of investment by Americans in foreign securities that is keeping our rate of exchange up to the benefit of this country.

The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs referred to interallied debts, a most important problem, almost vital to this country. I am pleased to hear there is a possibility of a day being given to debate this question, but you have to do it as a whole. It is a most complicated business and unless it is dealt with in a comprehensive way I fear that it may be a failure. Reference is also made to the Dawes report, and I am pleased to hear what the ex-Prime Minister said with regard to watching certain industries which were affected by the Dawes report. One most important thing which the whole country should insist on is that German taxation should be equal to our own. We all know it never has been equal to our own. We have always been more heavily taxed than the German. It was one of the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles that the enemy should be taxed as heavily or more heavily than the Allies. That has never been the case. I sincerely hope that will be put into force and will be carried out in full. It will make it fairer to our traders if the German is taxed as heavily as we are. Mention is made of the Safeguarding of Industries Act, Part 2, which came to an end on 19th August. It is difficult to see quite the position of a new Act in regard to the Safeguarding of Industries if you are dealing with exchange. It is no good if you have stability. If you have inflation, like you had with the great German inflation, it assisted us in a small way but it was never carried out to the full, and I hope if a Bill comes in dealing with it, it will be dealt with in a businesslike way, and it will not only affect Germany but also France and Italy and any other country with a depreciated exchange. There is no mention in His Majesty's Speech of a gold standard. I am sure everyone will agree that that should be considered as affecting our trade, but, at the same time, probably the speech was long enough, and a technical problem of that sort could not possibly be mentioned in the Gracious Speech. There is one thing that will affect our taxation, and I should like, as a humble back-bencher, to congratulate the Chancellor of the Exchequer upon it, and that is the starting of another conversion loan. There is a sum of £135,000,000 due in February, and that will reduce taxation and help the industries of the country if it is converted. There is also the necessity for economy, and I am pleased to see it stated in the King's Speech that economy in every sphere is imperative. We all agree with that.

Even in the King's salary.

We all realise the necessity for economy, and I firmly believe that the Conservative Government will carry out the policy of economy.

I should like to pay my humble tribute of praise to the Mover and Seconder of the Address, particularly in the case of the Mover. The Seconder of the Address is a new Member, and the House knows that it is somewhat of a trial, even for an older Member, on a similar occasion, to tackle a subject of the character with which the hon. Member had to deal. I do sincerely congratulate him on the modesty and ability with which he seconded the Address. The Address has been submitted to the House as a guidance, and as such I accept it. It is long and, as my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said, somewhat vague, but, at the same time, it is very interesting. There are two sentences in the Address which commend themselves particularly to me. One says:

The hon. Member who moved the Address made this remarkable statement, that the Government had received an answer from the country in no uncertain voice. If he were here I would respectfully submit to him that the voice of the country may be interpreted as the voice of Jacob, while the hand was certainly the hand of Esau. The hand of Esau got into my election, and there was a chamber of horrors, which was not the fault of my opponent. It was not a chamber of home manufacture, but was manufactured at the headquarters of the Conservative party. With that exception, I have no complaint to make. With respect to this "no uncertain voice," may I give the House a quotation from a Conservative weekly newspaper in connection with the Oldham election? It is headed "Lady Diana's Ordeal." The paragraph says: party deal are represented by the policy of Oldham, the solving of our problems will rest upon a basis of tripe and onions and fried fish. That is the kind of piffle that was sent out during the Election, and that was responsible for the "no uncertain voice" to which the Mover of the Address referred.

The Prime Minister, in a closing speech of the Election, told his followers that the flowing tide was with them. His ship of State is now riding upon the flowing tide, but he has a very mixed crew. He has camouflaged his house flag. Instead of Protection, it is now Colonial Preference safeguarding of industries. As a guarantee of good faith he has promoted the right hon. Member for Epping (Mr. Churchill) to the quarter deck as Chancellor of the Exchequer to support him there as signal officer. I sincerely trust that the right hon. Gentleman will not meet the usual fate of Jonah before the voyage is over. I would warn the right hon. Gentleman that if he does not watch very carefully, a full-blooded Protectionist house flag will be brought forward when he turns his back, and when he pulls down his house flag the other will go up.

A further point of interest in the speech is the appointment of a Commission to inquire into the prices of food. That is a very commendable object, and I sincerely trust that the Government will go the whole hog. As far as I am concerned, irrespective of party, if there is any good in the Commission I shall do all I can to help the Government to carry it out. We have had some experience of Commissions. I remember that in 1892 I gave evidence in this building before a Commission appointed by the Government of that day, under the Chairmanship of the then Lord Derby, to inquire into the question of unemployment and the cost of food. That Commission reported, and there have been other Commissions since. There have been the Sankey Commission and the Holman-Gregory Inquiry, and all these Commissions and Committees have reported in favour of substantial and drastic reform; but the respective Governments that appointed the Commissions treated with contempt the reports of their own Commissions. I am afraid that the same fate will overtake the Commission now suggested by the Government.

What has the Commission to inquire into. By inference, the Commission lays it down that profiteering is immoral and ought to be stopped, but while this House admits the morality and legality of profit in any shape or form, small or large, you cannot draw any broad line. If profit is bad it is bad, whether the profits be large or small. It is no use coming back here with a report, because even if anything were done on the report there will have to be something more than a mere inquiry into the prices of food. As far as the wages of the working classes are concerned, they depend entirely upon the cost of living. On that particular basis all trade disputes are settled. The first thing inquired into is the cost of living. If the cost of living is high, wages go up, but nothing like in proportion to the cost of living. If the cost of living goes down, down go the wages. If the Commission presents a report and if the Government legislate, and I wish they would, but I am afraid they dare not do it—[HON. MEMBERS: "Where are they?"] They are not here. It is the usual thing.

They are wining and dining while our class is starving.

Order, order!

8.0 P.M.

When anyone attempts to deal with these matters, they sneak out of the House. I want these facts to go home. Once you begin to admit, by inference, the morality of profit, you cannot draw the line between low and high profit. Even supposing the impossible—and it is going to be impossible—and the right hon. Gentleman promises to bring in any legislation to stop profiteering in food. This will then become the basis of the workmen's wages. Therefore there will be no benefit to the workman whatever. His purchasing power will do down in proportion to whatever drastic and compulsory reduction the Government's legislation imposes. I regret to say that they have not convinced me that there is any honest intention on their part to deal with this matter and to come to any solution of any kind whatever. Again let me quote the paragraph in the King's Speech about

"increased goodwill, friendship and mutual confidence."

I wonder if the framers of that had the necessary sense of proportion to know what it conveyed? I passed recently some of our hotels in London where revelry even to riot was going on, and I saw there an ex-service man and spoke to him. He was one who was recruited and conscripted. He was at first C3 and then, when men were earnestly and anxiously wanted, was promoted to Al, was taken away with the knowledge that he had the germs of disease in him. If he had been left in his occupation he might have gone on as he was for years and years. But service aggravated his condition. He was demobilised and discharged with no pension. He applied for a pension but was refused. He went to work but could not stand it, for the exertion brought back the aggravation again. He applied for a pension again, but was turned down by the tribunal. That is the story that man told me; and those people talk about "increased goodwill and friendship." I sincerely hope that this Government will, as foreshadowed in the King's Speech, carry out some of those promises. If they do not, let me tell them, as a moderate man, that they are living in a fool's paradise which will become apparent before long.

In the Gracious Speech that we have heard from the Throne to-day I regret that there was no very extensive mention of the very large possibility of constructive policy with regard to health matters. The Prime Minister has worked out gradually a complete programme of constructive policy for the nation, and yet it seems to me that, owing possibly to pressure of other more urgent matters, he has failed to put before the public, as I hoped he would wish to do, the enormous importance of the health factor from whatever point you look at it. You may look upon the health question as a matter of humanity or you may look upon it as a matter of economy. The two things, in the end, work out to the same effect. But if we take the material aspect, which appeals so largely to business and practical men, may I just remind the House of the actual facts that have been ascertained to show how important to a constructive policy is the health of the nation. Simply take two figures that I can give that have been worked out. If you take the national income, which has been estimated at something like £3,000,000,000 a year, and class £2,000,000,000 of that as due to personal service, it is estimated that the actual saving of life during the past 60 years, the actual increased expectation of life which is registered, amounts to an actual saving of £200,000,000 a year. Therefore, the health efforts of the last 60 years have resulted in a definite increased income to this country of £200,000,000 a year. Any constructive policy must aim at expanding those measures, actions and agencies that have led to that improvement.

I believe we all of us, from the respective sides in elections and elsewhere, referred with great gratification to the improved health as though it were a thing that went on by itself. Some people, in advancing extra measures, and especially, I may say, in this House, are always relying upon Government help as if it were a policy of Government measures and Government money put out that is going to improve the health of the nation. A saner and wider view surely is that Government help is necessary, but it is only effective and useful in so far as it does help to back and stimulate private initiative and private effort. The things have got to work together, but the whole improvement is due to an improved public policy which is based upon private enlightenment, education and action. Therefore from this point of view it seems to me that in this constructive policy we are considering at the present time we want to see that Government measures are being introduced that will help, on the lines of experience, the continued improvement in the public health.

Now let us take a single instance of this, a question that has not been referred to in the Gracious Speech to-day, one which is imminent and ripe for solution at the present time, the question of tuberculosis and the removal of tuberculosis from tuberculous milk. In the economy estimates that have been made, it is shown that we have already reduced the tuberculosis death rate to something like one-half of what it was 20 or 30 years ago. Therefore we have to aim at the elimination of that other half. It is shown that if we were to eliminate that other half it is estimated that we should increase the national income by £94,000,000 per year and the Exchequer by about £5,000,000 a year. Therefore, surely this is a policy which economically is worth while going in for, and from the humane point of view we are all agreed that it is a thing which would be eminently desirable.

What is the position? In 1914, at the beginning of the War, regulations were introduced in order to assist in the elimination of tuberculosis. They were extended in 1915, and an Act was brought in, the operation of which was postponed for the time being owing to the difficult conditions of the War. That Act has never been put into force. Those Regulations came to an end with the War, and they require renewal now in the light of some amendments in the light of modern experience. The case for dealing with tuberculous milk is urgent and imminent. I do hope that we may get some help together from all sides of the House in order to give the backing that is necessary to provide the funds for introducing these Orders and initiating an active campaign for what we on the health side and others, people in the veterinary profession, believe is possible now, to actually eliminate tuberculosis within the next 10 or 20 years. [An HON. MEMBER: "Under private enterprise?"] Yes, private enterprise is essentially at the basis of it, but it is to be stimulated by Government help. This constructive policy which we are considering really mentions only one point. That is the question of housing, which is vital, we all recognise, to the health of the nation. I think all of us are fairly well agreed, after all the controversies of the past two or three years especially, that the measures at present in force require supplementing mostly by action rather than by statutory provisions. I am glad to see the actual and definite mention of private enterprise in the Gracious Speech. Private enterprise is not realised as having done a very large amount. Hon. Members on the other side often say, I am sure quite genuinely, that it is impossible nowadays to go in for a scheme so that the working class should possess their own houses. I quite agree that it does not solve the housing problem. It is not suggested in the Gracious Speech that it does. I may remind hon. Members and the Leader of the Opposition rather gave us an instance of egregiously misquoting in this connection, that the Speech says: That is all we say. Nobody on the other side or this side of the House could deny that that is a proper statement of the case, in order to help people to build their own houses and own them, which everybody would realise is an ideal that everybody would like to have—if they can also feel that they can get rid of their property if it is necessary. To show that that ideal is even attainable in the present time, may I just remind the House of the enormous operations of the building societies at the present time. I have these figures. I was unable to get them, I forget whether from the last Government or the Government before, but I got them privately from the Halifax Permanent Building Society. This society alone has funds exceeding £12,000,000 for this purpose. They were able to give me approximately, not finally, but approximately, the figures for the amount that has been advanced by building societies in the five years 1915–23. There were advanced sums of no less than £110,603,549 —over £110,000,000—and the number of dwelling-houses that were built as the result of these moneys were 290,626 within five years. They were mostly built without subsidy. That means they are not included in the figures that are given of buildings at the present time. They are houses built for small professional or middle-class, or better working-class owners, up in the North especially, where the better-paid workers are keen on owning their own houses in this way. Therefore that is a very material addition to the solution of the building programme that is going on. If we see that programme fulfilled during the course of the next 10, 15 or 20 years, as it may be, we shall see blocks of houses, great regions of houses growing up all over the country. The essential thing is to see to the distribution of these houses. The Prime Minister in one of his speeches outside this House said that we have to consider not only the building of houses but the distribution of them. The building of them is at present being carried on to a certain extent under town planning schemes. But town planning schemes have lagged behind since 1909 when that great ideal was first established. A Bill was brought in in 1919 to make the adoption of town planning schemes compulsory, but the schemes so far refer only to areas that are to be built up. I hope to see the pace increased and that we shall insist that all areas shall get town planning schemes prepared very soon. In addition, we want new legislation to enable us to complete town planning by applying it to already built-up areas. All who have had experience in the large municipalities recognise how difficult it is to deal with the large areas where slums are being pulled down or are to be pulled down with the intention of building up again. There are no powers for town planning in such cases. We want a Bill which will enable us to adopt town planning for areas that are already built up. It is an urgent problem.

We all know, in walking down Regent Street or any of the main streets, and still more when we go into some of the side streets in areas ripe for re-building, that the whole of London is now in the process of being re-built. [HON. MEMBERS: "Business premises in the West End!"] It is not only fn the West End. The houses are largely coming to an end of their life all over London. The building was done very largely in the middle years of last century, and we can see a vista before us of the old London gradually coming to an end and its houses being replaced. We want that replacement to be done on proper lines. The authorities should have power to take over sufficiently large areas and to reconstruct them, not simply to improve streets where they are, but to make a change on a much larger scale. This procedure will have to be brought into relation with the traffic problem, which is only at the beginning of its difficulties now. It is owing to the traffic problem that the attention of the people has been directed to the fact that it is necessary to get people out of London. You cannot do that with a population congested as it is now. It could be done with improved prosperity and an enormous increase of motor cars, as in towns abroad. The two questions must be dealt with together. The problem can be solved only on the principle of the satellite city, the principle of the garden city, which has already been tried at Letchworth and Welwyn. There you have had industries started in the country and there has been a complete life for the population established in the country from the beginning. Under such conditions you can make traffic facilities such as they should be. I hope that the larger scheme I have suggested may find a part in the Government programme. It is not mentioned in the Gracious Speech, although it has been mentioned frequently by the Prime Minister and by the right hon. Gentleman who is fortunately now in charge of the Ministry of Health.

There are certain other health services which I hope that this Government may be able to help. We have been told that a Factories Bill, a consolidating and amending measure, is to be brought in. The Bill introduced in the last Parliament was a very mixed Bill, and from the health point of view it was sadly lacking, in organisation especially. It was retrogressive and reactionary in one sense. It took a large measure of local administration out of the hands of the local sanitary authorities and brought it back to Whitehall. It made no arrangement for a proper Medical and Health Department in Whitehall, and it showed no understanding of the necessity of linking up health in the factories with toe general health system of the country under the Ministry of Health. Some such system must be devised and carried through in the near future. You have several Ministries of Health now in existence. The Factory Department at the Home Office is almost a Ministry of Health in itself. Health problems under the Board of Education almost to demand a Ministry in themselves. The Ministry of Health is the third. You have large Health Departments in most of the other Government Departments. Yet there is no scheme for linking these things together. It is puerile and absurd to go on in this way. You must have a proper staff arrangement to get them linked together, with a common policy for working together instead of working as now, in separate watertight compartments.

Other things ripe for solution are in the stage of inquiry by Royal Commission or Committee. That stage is essential, although it has been jibbed at by the last speaker. It is necessary to ascertain the facts, as in the case of the Royal Commission on the Insurance Acts. I hope that the medical profession will make a very great contribution to the inquiry in order to get a natural solution of the problem of panel treatment for health. Then there is the Royal Commission on Local Government. Arising out of that I hope that we shall get the problems of local government finally settled, especially with a view to a proper settlement of the health services. We have the inquiry of the Hospitals Committee, and I hope that we shall get a scheme out of that. There are large problems arising, above all, in connection with the different medical services of the Government. I hope that Members in all quarters of the House will help towards a solution of these problems. Doctors cannot be obtained for these services now. Unfortunately the position of the medical service in India is such that all young medical men to-day are being frightened from giving their services to India as so many magnificent men have done in the past. What is the attitude of the Government towards the Lee Commission with regard to the medical service in India. If it is proposed to abolish the medical service and to provincialise it, the result will be that you will not get men for this essential and humane work in India. Then there is the question of the Royal Army Medical Corps. That corps is in a most perilous position. Recruits cannot be obtained. The same remark applies to the Colonial medical services.

These questions should be looked at by the Government, not in a piecemeal way, but as part of a definite health policy which will have regard to all the different factors. Although these things are not mentioned in the Gracious Speech, I hope that that is because the Gracious Speech was already long and over-burdened and that it is meant to deal only with the problems immediately facing the Government. I hope that this Government will live up to the magnificent traditions of Tory, Conservative and Unionist Governments of the past by introducing such legislation as will have the splendid effect of legislation passed by those Governments throughout the last century.

With the speech to which we have just listened, or at any rate the sentimental part of it, we on these benches could very well agree, but unfortunately while the high idea of humanitarianism sometimes peeps through the speeches of our friends on the other side of the House, we find when we get down to the real elements of the case that they look at everything from the £. s. d. point of view. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear!"] I am glad to hear hon. Members opposite say "Hear, hear," because it saves me from the accusation that I am merely trying to score a point over the hon. and gallant Member who has just spoken. In his statement regarding the saving of life through the betterment of health conditions during the past 60 years he did not stress the fact that so many lives had been saved, but he stressed the fact that the economic value of the lives saved amounted to £200,000,000. With regard to the lives which he estimated could be saved—the tuberculosis patients—nothing was said by him as to the necessity of saving those lives for the sake of the lives or for the sake of the relatives of those concerned. He said that the saving of those lives meant an economic saving to the country of £94,000,000.

May I say, as a personal explanation, that I take it for granted we all feel for these people. I was trying to bring out a concrete fact to show the magnitude of the problem.

I accept the explanation of my hon. and gallant Friend, but I would point out to him that hon. Members opposite and members of their party outside the House cannot take exception to the attitude of those on this side of the House when we resent ourselves and our people in the country being looked upon by individuals like him from the £ s. d. point of view alone. That they do so is, I submit, the impression that may be left upon any reader of his speech in the OFFICIAL REPORT to-morrow. It is that view against which we protest—that we should be looked upon as additional capital value to the country instead of human beings like the hon. and gallant Member himself and his friends. [ Laughter .] Of course hon. Members opposite laugh. [An HON. MEMBER: "It is so silly!"] The silliness always rests with hon. Members opposite. That was shown by the Home Secretary when he addressed the letter which he did address to Mr. John Syme "as man to man"—a letter to a man whom he accused of being a lunatic. The right hon. Gentleman should have addressed it as from one lunatic to another. We look upon hon. Members on the back benches opposite who interrupt in that manner as being just what the hon. Member himself has described just now.

The Front Bench is no better.

At least they do not interrupt in the way in which the Back Bench Members interrupt. The hon. and gallant Member who last addressed the House referred to the abolition of slums and the rebuilding of London, and spoke about walking down Regent Street. He knows there are no working-men's houses, in Regent Street. All the labour employed there is engaged in setting up new business premises at a much enhanced value compared with the previous buildings. If hon. Members opposite are so intent upon recreating the working-classes districts of London by sweeping the slums out of existence, surely the material that is being used in rebuilding Regent Street and the West End could have been used for the building of good sanitary dwellings in the East End of London instead of the steel houses and tin houses which it is proposed to put up for the workers of this country. Why should the workers put up with makeshifts of houses? We find the Duke of Atholl acting as commercial traveller in connection with a Domestic Welfare Exhibition in Glasgow and explaining the virtues of steel houses for working people. Yet this same nobleman has taken exception to the style, architecture, size and cost of a house that a bank is proposing to erect immediately outside the gates of his ducal home in Perthshire. He says this house must be built in a certain style of architecture, must be of a certain size, and must cost a certain sum of money, simply because it might offend his aesthetic taste when he comes down his drive to his big gates and looks upon it. Yet steel houses are good enough for a worker not merely to look at but to live in, according to this view. I object to the working class being put upon such a cheap estimate as to be told that anything is good enough for them. For the workers of this country nothing is too good, and the best only is good enough. If hon. Members opposite claim the right to have the best for themselves and those belonging to them, they cannot deny us the right to demand that the same things shall be used and appropriated for those whom we on this side represent.

The Speech delivered in another place and read in this' House to-day may be considered exceptional, not only for the things it contains, but for the things it emits. Those omissions are just as wonderful as the little side references to various things the Government propose to do if it has a long life. We propose to do our best to shorten this life if we possibly can. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear!"] I am glad the Prime Minister agrees; I hope he will take the earliest possible opportunity of declaring the life of this Government at an end. [An HON. MEMBER: "Hari kari!"] I do not think they have the courage to commit hari kari. One of the points in the Speech is the reference to a desire to have goodwill, frankness and mutual confidence among all parties in the industrial life of the nation. This is a wonderful statement in a period of industrial depression which has followed upon another period during which the employers took advantage of conditions to reduce the wages of workers by over £600,000,000 per year. That does not say much for goodwill, frankness and mutual confidence between different sections in the industrial life of the nation.

The Prime Minister, as one who understands something about industry and has some connection with industrial affairs, surely will not object to the working people of this country demanding and taking all steps that may lie in their power to win back some, if not all, of this £600,000,000 of wage reduction which they have suffered during the past 2½ years. I have spoken of the housing problem, and there is another point that is omitted from this Bill which includes part of the housing problem. There is that part which at present is affecting very wide districts in Scotland, particularly in the industrial areas, where for two or three years past, and in some cases for four years, men have been unemployed and unable to earn anything that would enable them to cope with the rents that a previous Government thought fit to increase, with the result that we are seeing to-day. Last Saturday, in Glasgow alone, in one Court alone, 20 decrees were issued to evict people from their homes.

Only a week before that we had one of the most astounding spectacles, one of the most degrading spectacles, that one could witness. We had a man who actually was willing to pay the full rent for the house that he was in, but, because he had not had the factor's consent to go into that house, but merely the consent of the previous tenant, the factor refused to accept the rent from this tenant, and sent down the sheriff's officers to evict him. The tenant resisted eviction, the sheriff's officers and police were called in, they took the man captive, handcuffed him after a struggle, and carried him face downwards to the nearest police station. That man fought for his home, and hon. Members opposite and below the Gangway here were appealing outside in the country during a period not so very far distant in point of time for young men like this one to go out to France and to Flanders to fight out there for their homes. This same individual did so. He went out to France and fought for what he considered was his home in Scotland, but when he gets back he finds there is no home, and when he goes into a vacant house, and even offers to pay rent to the house proprietor for it, he is turned out of that house with his wife and family. He and his little children are thrown on the streets, and he is taken to prison for fighting for his home in Scotland, while you would have decorated him for fighting for his home had he done it in France or Flanders.

These are the conditions with which we are faced where we come from, and can hon. Members wonder that we come here and make our protests in the name of the people to whom those indignities are offered and upon whom those degradations are thrown? You are having books written: "Why Glasgow is Red." Come to some of the houses in which we see our people living, for which they are paying rents,, rents increased by 40 per cent., increases sanctioned by the Government of the party opposite. Go into those houses, and you will find seven, eight and nine people, adults and children, huddled together in one room not 12 feet square. You will not bring in a Bill to stop evictions, and you make no mention of bringing in a Bill to prevent house-owners taking rent for the insanitary houses in which people are living to-day. You put your food inspectors out, and they call in shops, and pull up into court some poor one-business man for selling adulterated milk or butter, or some other bad and impure food. You fine him, but you reward the house-owner, who compels people to live in insanitary conditions, by allowing him to take 40 per cent, increase on his rent. You should take him and put him in prison.

There is no mention of anything of that kind in the King's Speech. How, then, can we, who sit on these benches, and who come from places where the people are demanding better conditions, asking that the Government shall look after them as a Government is supposed to do, go back to those people and tell them: Parliament is going to look after you; the Government have brought in a King's Speech which is going to do wonders; they are going to set up Commissions and Inquiries, they are going to go into all the details, and some day, some time, a long way ahead, conditions will be so improved that your grandchildren will receive any benefits that may come? It is all very well for us in this House, who, in comparison with many of the people outside, are in comfortable circumstances, to sit on these benches and gibe at each other across the Floor, to use little party stratagems against each other, to try to act the gentleman towards each other, to speak affably, to be upon our best behaviour. Those people down there cannot understand, and they are the people for whom we are fighting in this House and for whom you are governing, to whom you should govern.

As long as we have conditions such as we have in our big centres, not only in Glasgow, hut here in London, in Leeds, in Liverpool, in every centre in this country, unless you are going to cut out what has been described as the cancer of Empire, you are not governing this country. You may pass any Bills you like. You may bring them into this House and with your majority go through the lobbies and put them on the Statute Book, but if those Statutes do not bring happiness, if they cannot bring prosperity, if they cannot wipe out the misery, the degradation, and the horrors in which those people live, you have legislated in vain for them, and your Government has been a mockery and a delusion to those people. You talk of establishing the Singapore base to protect the East. Why cannot you rebuild your cities here, to protect the lives of the people who are living in your homeland? Why go to the East to build a base? [An HON. MEMBER: "Because your trade conies from there."] I suppose the forty-five millions who are living in this country do not require food or clothing. They do not deal with any trade.

Where does the tea come from?

Is tea the only thing that comes to this country, and, in order to get tea into this country, have not the people here to manufacture goods to send out in exchange for the tea? Do not be silly, man. Take a lesson from your Prime Minister, who knows something about trade, and evidently you do not.

Perhaps the hon. Member will address the Chair.

I may point out that I was addressing the House and you, and the House through you, but hon. Members opposite interrupted, and I have a perfect right, surely, to take cognisance of an interruption and to point out that not all the trade of this country comes from abroad. The great mass of the trade of this country is home trade and not foreign trade at all. If the hon. Member will examine, the trade statistics he will find that I am correct. Probably he will then be able to follow a discussion of this kind a little more intelligibly. I want to ask this Government, with all the majority that it has, what it intends to do in regard to profiteering. Are we to be content with this inquiry? We have had inquiries already. The various offices are stacked with reports of inquiries upon food, upon raw material, and upon housing materials. The Government have all that is necessary for any use to which they care to put it, or for any Department they care to entrust with the framing of a Bill. They have all the information that is required to bring in some Bill that will stop profiteering. The Prime Minister has set up a Commission on food prices. Two ladies have been appointed upon it. I am not objecting to the two ladies who are there, I am not objecting to the composition of the Committee, except in so far as to ask why have the Government not appointed a woman or two women of the working-class, who know more about how harshly those prices affect them than do the two ladies upon the Commission? Why is it you always take people who cannot give the actual facts from every-day experience? Those are the people you ought to have upon your Commission, and you have not got them upon it. I submit that there ought to be upon the Commission individuals able to give to it that every-day experience that it is necessary to have.

I want to touch upon another point. The Minister in charge of the Department concerned is not present. I am not making any complaint against him for that, because no notice has been given that I intended raising this point, but I hope someone on the Front Bench will convey to him the point I want to raise with regard to unemployment benefit. There is a growing concern among people who are on the unemployed register at the present time at the way in which they are being treated. We have raised this point time after time, and it has become aggravated in the past few weeks. Men are asked to submit evidence that they are genuinely seeking employment, and they produce certificates from foremen in works they have visited, making application for work. These certificates are signed by the foremen to whom they have applied, but when the unemployed workman is called before the Committee, those certificates are brushed aside as not being worthy of consideration, and as not establishing his claim that he is genuinely seeking employment. The regulations laid down that documentary evidence can be submitted. What documentary evidence could you have of a stronger character than a certificate signed by a foreman that a particular individual has made application upon a specific date for employment? What better guarantee could you have that the man was seeking work? Yet I have known men who have produced six, seven and eight certificates, and who have come to me, after being turned down by the Committee, and have produced the certificates saying, "These are the certificates I submitted to the Committee, and here is a note from the Committee, sent through the post, informing me that I am refused benefit because I am not genuinely seeking employment." I want to ask the Prime Minister to see that that complaint is conveyed to the Ministry of Labour. It has, as I have said, become aggravated during the past few weeks.

Another point I want to take up with the Department is the idea of asking young women—in many cases girls—to go from their homes 100 and 150 miles to take up positions either in domestic service or in hotels. Girls who have never been from their homes, girls who in some cases have had no experience, girls of an age when they ought not to be leaving home, have been asked to go to a strange place where no hon. Member on the other side of the House with a daughter of the same age would allow her to leave the security, safety and comfort of his home to go. Yet you find that these girls, when they decline to go, as they do in some cases, from Glasgow to Elgin, a matter of about 150 miles, are refused any further unemployment benefit for six weeks, on the ground that they have refused suitable employment. For refusing to go to Perth and places in the North of Scotland and the North of England girls have been refused benefit. Take the case of two young girls who refused to go to a hotel in Elgin, when within 12 miles' distance of Elgin there were many girls who would have filled the position. Yet girls from Glasgow and other Exchanges were refused benefit for six weeks because they declined that situation. Because they decline that one particular situation, you probably find a score or 30 girls refused unemployment benefit. They are becoming suspicious that many of those situations are only so many traps to get them off the exchange. Some of them, when they say they will accept a situation, are asked to wait a few minutes—in some cases for an hour—and then they are told by the manageress of the exchange that they are sorry the situation has been filled, and there is nothing for them now. In circumstances such as these, can you wonder that girls, and men as well, are beginning to grow suspicious of the machinery of the employment exchanges, and are becoming afraid that many of the things they are asked to do are only so many traps? I want to ask the Prime Minister in all seriousness, and the party behind him as well—I do not refer to the remnants of the party below the Gangway, the Radical crew—but the party on the opposite side that many below the Gangway fought side by side with at the election. [HON. MEMBERS: "Get on with it!"] Is it disquieting to you? [HON. MEMBERS: "NO!"] I am asking the Prime Minister, the Leader of the party, to try, if he intends what he says in his speeches, if he means what he said, and I have read into his speeches—and I do not think I have read wrongly, an idealism that I have not found in many of the speeches made by his followers—I am hoping that he is going to do his best to translate that idealism into the statutes that he passes in this House. If he allows those behind him, animated by hatred and bigotry—that is, some of those behind him—some of those we have met around conference tables in discussing wages, and hours, and conditions of employment—if he allows that type of individual to dominate his party I want to tell him frankly that his party will be wrecked before it goes its full years. The working classes of this country are not going to tolerate much longer their intolerable conditions. They have had them too long. They have been promised by Members on the Front Bench and by Members sitting on the Back Benches on the other side better conditions because of what they have undergone. They have found every one of the promises and speeches made to them broken. I am not referring to those sitting on the Front Benches at the moment, but we know that certain Members behind the Prime Minister will do what they can to prevent things being done as they ought to be done for the people of this country.

In conclusion, I want to suggest to the Prime Minister, if he cares to take a suggestion coming from one who may not get the support of the other side, though we do not object how we have fought, we can fight back just as hard; I want, I say, to ask the Prime Minister if, during the course of this Session—not the short time before the end of the year, but in the Session that will follow in 1925—if he can give to this House, and through this House to the people outside, the expectation of a guarantee that there are going to be Measures introduced into the House to increase the people's standard of comfort, to improve living conditions. If the right hon. Gentleman can guarantee that, and guarantee the people that, then he will have done well. But let him bear in mind that every Measure introduced by the Prime Minister and his party will be submitted to a test by the Members upon these benches. That test will be how far the Measures brought in elevate the people of this country into a state of comfort more in keeping with our standard of civilisation. If such Measures cannot pass that test they will have the strongest opposition of the Members on these benches. If they pass that test they will have our support.

9.0 P.M.

I desire to make some general observations upon certain omissions from His Majesty's Gracious Speech. I refer particularly to the development of industry. The matter, I trust will not be controversial as I refer more particularly to the fact of no reference to electrical development or anything connected with our coal resources or their conservation. I feel that I take an entirely disinterested view when I suggest that it is not in the best interests of an industry itself, or of the general public, that any particular industry should be made a political plank in any party platform. The difficulty is that when a Minister takes hold of an industry in this direction he generally is not able to get a correct perspective of it from its proper economic standpoint of the selling price of the commodity and of all concerned. The outlook of the politician is that he wants some grandiose scheme, far-reaching and large, which he may tell his constituents that he took some part in putting into force, and very often the vital factors that those concerned are working for are lost sight of.

The matter I particularly wish to refer to is the necessity for co-operation between the two great industries which produce light, power and heat, an active cooperation in the public interest and in order to get the maximum economy in coal consumption. The House may remember that during the War, when we were pushed to our greatest extremity to conserve the resources of the country, two or three committees of inquiry were set up, the Coal Conservation Committee, the Nitrate Products Committee, and the Fuel Research Board amongst others. As a result of their work they put forward several recommendations, and part of those recommendations were put into force by the Electricity Supply Act, 1919. That dealt, however, with only a portion of their recommendations—such as could be put into operation by the Electricity Commissioners in the endeavour to coordinate the electricity supply of the country to prevent any wastage of coal. Another very important recommendation, really more in the spirit than in the words, was the necessity to conserve our coal resources. Coal is a national asset and an asset that is wasting, and anything that can be done to prolong the life of our coal resources should receive the active support of every Member of this House, without distinction of party.

The production of 95 per cent. of the electricity in this country necessitates the consumption of coal under boilers for producing steam. In the sister industry, the gas industry, coal is carbonised under different conditions, and brings about different results. One ton of coal produces, approximately, 10,500 cubic feet of gas, 11 cwt. of coke, 10 gallons of tar. Tar, we all know, is utilised for road spraying, and in addition there are upward of 100,000—in fact, there is no limit to the number—derivatives, from coal tar. We also get from that ton of coal a quantity of ammonia which is very valuable to this country. The suggestion I wish to make now, and I hope to go into it in more technical detail at some future time, is that the right way to deal with this matter to meet the case of coal conservation and electrical development is through active co-ordination between the two great sister industries of lighting and power, namely, the gas and electrical industries. Sufficient can be said to make out a case for inquiry on the subject. Coal is an asset which must be conserved in every direction. A suspicion and prejudice has grown up between the two industries, it is difficult to say how or why, but it is admitted on all hands. It is admitted in the fourth annual report of the Electricity Commission; they admit difficulties in that direction; and they would also prefer further powers to put into operation the findings of the different committees that have been set up. I am submitting merely a few general observations at this moment, because I understand this is one of the few opportunities one has for dealing with general business during the Debate on the Address, and I desire to say no more now.

The Debate so far has wandered over questions connected with the General Election, and I desire to say only a word or two on that part of the Debate. To-night, those of us who have listened to the Debate have heard over again, as we hear on all these occasions, the sentiment that everybody here has the same good feeling towards the unemployed people in the slums. There are a number of the younger Members on the other side of the House of whom the Prime Minister is very proud. It so happens that I have met a number of them, in my lifetime, in settlements in the East End and other places, and I would like to put it to them that the experience they live through in those settlements is very much the experience my hon. Friend the Member for Govan (Mr. N. Maclean) has lived through, and that I have lived through. But they have only lived through it from the windows of a settlement. We have lived through it some of our lives, though the gibe may be thrown at us that we, myself included, have seen it from rather more comfortable surroundings. But that is not the difference. The difference is that those who have found their way into industrial settlements from universities have gone there very much in the spirit described by, I think, the Noble Lord the Member for Oxford University (Lord Hugh Cecil) at a University settlement meeting in Oxford at which I was present. He asked those young men to go down to the East End in order that they might learn how to govern and administer the people of the East End. I have always thought that that is the wrong attitude of mind altogether. I want rich young men to come down to the East End and to other industrial centres to teach the poor to hate their poverty—not to hate the rich, but to hate their poverty, and to determine by their own united efforts to get out of their poverty-stricken conditions. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear!"] I am glad to hear that applause, because there is not one hon. Gentleman opposite who has lived in a university settlement who will not agree with what I am going to say, that those of us who come here out of those districts do so because the poor have got together and believe that by sending us here this place will make the laws necessary to enable them to use their collective power for individual advantage.

I always feel when I hear the Prime Minister that I am listening to the kind of man whose speeches and writings I read when I was quite young, the sort of man who belonged to the Young England party, who felt that they could, as it were, square the poverty on the one hand with the riches on the other. No miracle can do that. The one is the accompaniment of the other, and nothing we can say or do can get over that. There is no young man in the Tory party or in the Liberal party who has devoted any time to the social condition of the people who will not agree that the great mass of the poverty is poverty the people themselves are not responsible for and ought not to be suffering under at all.

No one can deny the truth of something the Prime Minister said last Session. Standing at that Box he said this—if I am not quoting him exactly, it is the sum of what he said:

Last Session the Members of the Labour party were continually gibed at in regard to their remedy for unemployment, and we were told that we did nothing. If everything you said about us is true, at any rate that does not excuse you from putting forward your proposals for dealing here and now with unemployment. I have read the King's Speech, and I see no hope for any of my friends in the East End of London. I see no light for the people living almost on the top of one another, and many hon. Members opposite know of these conditions as well as we do. I see no hope for any of them. You may boast that you have wiped out OUT party, and we may boast that we have wiped out the Liberal party, but there is something on trial to-day in Britain which is of more importance than whether one side or the other wins, and it is whether this House is going to produce schemes to lift people out of the morass of poverty.

I am perhaps not as orderly a listener as I ought to be, but I do try to understand the points of view of other people, and the longer I listen the more certain I am that the only real solution is to find out how to distribute the result of our productive power amongst the masses If a Government can find £40,000,000 or £50,000,000 needed for the Singapore base, or the other millions devoted to armaments, then we ought to find the necessary millions to take people out of the slums. I did not intend to speak to-night, but the Member for St. Albans (Lieut.-Colonel Fremantle) referred to the question of housing. In this connection we have to consider two questions, the physique of the people and the question of finding employment for them. With regard to the physique of men and women, I still practice as a Poor Law guardian, and last Tuesday I sat on a relief committee for about three hours and we had before us case after case of phthisical people living in one room. I do not know what to do with them, and it is no use standing up in this House and saying what ought to be done. As a guardian of the poor I am faced with that problem, and all I can do is to dole out more relief to enable them to go on spreading consumption.

There is no way out of that difficulty until this nation takes the matter in hand, and decides to spend millions of money in clearing the slums. If that were done at this juncture, you could at one and the same time re-house the people and find multitudes of men work. The idea that in London you cannot do this is nonsense. I travel from the Last End of London up here regularly, and it is all very well for you to say that a man like me ought not to have class bitterness, but I cannot help it. I came along Leadenhall Street the other day. It is being rebuilt, and hundreds of thousands of pounds are being spent upon it at this moment. If I go into Regent Street and the streets around, I find that they are pulling down and building most magnificent palaces. I say that all that work ought to have been stopped until we have dealt with the slums.

We are continually told that if money is spent in one direction it cannot be spent in another, and that is perfectly true. You cannot rebuild the centre of London and rebuild the circumference at the same time, and if this Government is not really in earnest, and if all the young men who have come here full of enthusiasm and sit on the other side of the House are in earnest, then they will not allow the Government to get away from the housing problem with just what is proposed in the King's Speech. What makes me feel so bitter is this. I remember that Will Crooks years ago almost drew tears from the eyes of hon. Members in this House by a speech on this subject. It is, however, a fact that the very slums that he talked about are there still in Poplar. Talk about economy! What is the use of it when your nation is going back to the C3 condition? What is the use of telling the people that we must not go on spending money because we shall cripple industry? We do spend money in other directions. You spent it at the other end of this building this morning.

I do not mind you saying that I spend more money than I ought to do. I stand the same condemnation as anybody else, because when it comes to a question of comparing me with the slum dweller I am in the same boat as hon. Members opposite. We are told that we cannot afford to do what I suggest, but if people have more than they need surely they could make sufficient sacrifices to do these things, because it has got to be done before we can find a proper remedy. You may say what you please about private enterprise, but every step forward in civilisation has been a communal step. [HON. MEMBERS: "NO!"] Yes, every step. I do not deny that individual men and women have proposed certain things, but when it has come to carrying them out it has been the communal effort that has done it. Every amenity of life that we enjoy is provided by the community. We spend money on roads, and I hear hon. Members ask whether this or that particular surface is right or wrong. What is the use of building fine roads if the people have not the means to use those roads? [HON. MEMBERS: "They have!"] No, they have not if they are in a semi-starvation condition. What is the use of building big schools and insisting, as the education authority does, that each school must be built so that each child has so much cubic space of air to breathe, if you do not see that the child has a proper amount of air to breathe when it is sleeping? What is the use of saying that you must have so much cubic space of air and scientific arrangements for health in school when apparently you do not care twopence how the child is living at home? All that the Socialist asks, all that we ask, is that the same communal wealth which you spend to educate the child and to give the child an educational start in life ought also to be spent on its physique in its home and under every other kind of condition.

You talk of having beaten Socialism at this Election. You may have beaten some kind of bogey theory which you have in your mind, but, if you believe in progress, you have to make up your minds where you want to progress, and you cannot progress except by more and more collective and communal effort. [HON. MEMBERS: "NO!"] Yes, every speaker who has spoken from those benches to-night has wanted something more done by the Government or by the State. There was not one but said that this, that, or the other must be done. When we say that we want Socialism, what we want is that the industry of the nation shall be organised as you organise it when you build a road. You build a road that people may use it. You do not question who uses it. It is there for the use of the community. We do not understand why we cannot manufacture clothes, boots, food, and all the necessities of life for the service of the people in the same way. I cannot see the difference at all. I do not see any difference between the provision of a road and the provision of a house. In every Measure dealing with housing you go a little step our wav. You have already done one very big thing. Tories and Liberals alike are all agreed that housing can no longer be left to private people. You give a subsidy for the building of a house. Some people will enjoy that subsidy, and the people who are not enjoying it will very soon demand that they shall also enjoy it, and that you shall give the same measure of support to all houses as you are now giving to some houses.

We want those principles applied all round. We want those people who talk of sympathy to face realities. We deny that this country is poor. We deny that there is any reason for anybody to be in a condition in which tens of thousands of people are to-night. We deny altogether that there is any need for any child to live in a slum. We deny that there is any need for any child to be underclothed or underfed. We deny altogether that this country need have in its midst any people who are suffering from preventable diseases, diseases that come from slumdom, underfeeding, and poverty. Some people, I know, suffer from overfeeding. We deny also that any other principle but the social action of the community can get rid of the evils which everybody says he deplores. Everybody is anxious that something shall be done. When one gets to my age and one has heard year after year, in church, in chapel, in cathedral and in public meetings, how many people are anxious that all this shall be cured, one asks oneself what is the use of all this talk, what is the use of all this sympathy, if, at the end of 60 or 65 years, one has to sit down and say that the condition of the people in the East End grows steadily worse.

You have allowed masses of boys and girls to come out of school and to drift hopelessly up and down the streets with nothing to do. You have wasted your money on them, and now you are wasting whatever of moral they learned in their schools. The young men and women of every industrial centre, not all of them, but masses of them, are having every scrap of goodness crushed out of them because of this horrible disease of un-?employment. I maintain that if on housing and agriculture you had done what some of us asked you to do—refused to give a single young man a penny for nothing, but had taken him out into the country and said, "We took you out there to teach you how to kill; come out into the country, and we will teach you how-to earn your bread," then, even if you had not got a penny back in money, you would have done a great deal if you had preserved their moral. But neither Government would do this. It was urged upon three Ministers of Health, and it was turned down each time. The result is that the East End of London is full of young people out of whom all the heart and goodness is being crushed, and I do beg those on the other side who have come here fresh—and I want to believe that they have come wanting to do something to lift up the people—to try and consider whether these things which we ask you to do are not the things that you ought to do.

It was not my intention to intervene in the Debate to-night but for a remark which fell from the lips of the right hon. Gentleman for Aberavon (Mr. Mac-Donald). He referred to the effect of the removal of the McKenna Duties on the motor-car industry, and, although he said he could not deal with fantastic figures, some of the figures which he himself quoted were very fantastic. The removal of those duties affected my own constituency very seriously, and I feel that the remarks which he made to-night should not pass without some challenge, because, as the result of the removal of those duties, some 600 of my own constituents have been thrown out of work. Although I admit, and admit gladly, that the position has improved, still a great many of those who were employed in building the Morris cars have not yet come back to work, and the unemployment problem in Oxford to-day is very much worse than it was this time a year ago. I do feel that if those duties had been continued, as we all hoped that they would have been continued, not only would there have been no unemployment, or practically none, in Oxford to-day, but there would have been a very great absorption of labour not only there but in the surrounding district. I have seen the Morris works grow during the last two years. They received a very severe setback by the repeal of those duties in August, and, although they are recovering to something like the position in which they were this time last year, they have not increased and recovered to anything like the extent that was expected. Consequently, there has been a great deal of unnecessary suffering among those who were employed in those works and who live in that neighbourhood.

If, as representing a University city, I may now turn to quite a different subject, I should like to welcome the reference to education in the Gracious Speech which we have heard to-day. I do hope that, when the Government come to deal with this most important question, they will remember that education, after all, is a means to an end. It is a means to fit us to take our part in life as useful and valuable members of the community. To some of us it is given to be great writers or thinkers; to others there is given a greater natural aptitude in the use of our physical powers and manual skill, and I do hope that, in any scheme for the continuation of education which His Majesty's Government may produce, they will remember that not only must you train the brain, but that, if we are to hold our own as a nation, you must give training in dexterity of the hand to those to whom manual dexterity comes more natural than mental gymnastics. Both are needed if this country is to rise to greater prosperity than in the past, or to maintain its present position. Some who are not clever at book-learning are very skilled with their hands, and I sincerely hope that, in any scheme which the Government may produce, they will remember that education is not solely a matter of books, but is also a matter of learning to fit people for those vocations which they may wish to take up in after life, and that there will be included a training in, say, the more skilled handicrafts. It has been said that much learning may drive one mad, and I am sure that there is no better antidote to over-work of the brain than a certain amount of training in the use of the hands. I hope, therefore, that in any scheme the Government may bring forward they will remember that manual work is not less important than brain work.

I regret very much that the Commission that is going to inquire into food prices in this country is not also going to turn its attention to the charges for the distribution of coal in our great cities. I say that because the Coal Distributors' Association of London sent out to most Members of Parliament not long ago a booklet giving the cost for various aspects of the distribution of coal, and, if I remember correctly, the total charge for the distribution of coal in the City of London is somewhere in the region of 14s. per ton. There are two items to which I should like to call the attention of the House. In that booklet, 2s. 2d. per ton is put down for clerical and managerial expenses, and there is a further 1s. 11d. per ton for stationery and other incidentals belonging to the office, so that the 2s. 2d. per ton does not include at all the charges of the office. I would like hon. and right hon. Gentlemen to get those figures into their minds, because I am going to give them one or two more figures with which to compare them. A fortnight or three weeks ago I had to visit a colliery office to deal with the question of the distribution of miners' coal, and the price that is charged for the distribution of the miners' coal to the homes where they live. In some instances the men live as much as two and three miles away, and the colliery company take the coal at a fixed rate whether it is a long or a short distance. The price charged for coal to the men working at that pit was 5s. 8d. per ton, 3s. 4d. of which was for coal, so that 2s. 4d. was charged for distribution; and I had gone to the colliery office to get a reduction because there had been a reduction in the men's wages. We succeeded in getting a reduction of 3d. per ton, so that the colliery company can distribute the coal from the pit to the houses where the men live, and get a small profit on it, at 2s. 1d., per ton.

They lose money.

They do not lose money. As a matter of fact, the manager distinctly told us he would not give us a single penny reduction until he had gone into the figures, and if he found he could do it for less he would reduce it. He reduced it by 3d. per ton, so that in that locality coal is distributed from the pit-two or three miles away at 2s. 1d. a ton, while the merchants in London are charging 14s. a ton at the present time, including 2s. 2d. per ton for clerical and managerial expenses. If a colliery manager were told that it was going to cost him 2s. 2d. for all the clerical expenses around his pit—weighing the coal on the pit bank, weighing it in the trucks, and all the office expenses—he would shut his pit up immediately, I do not believe it is costing 2s. 2d. for every ton that comes into London for clerical and managerial charges. My own opinion is that it is another and a secret method for distributing profits, and that there ought to be a close examination and inquiry into these charges with regard to the distribution of the coal in our large cities. Therefore, I regret very much that this Commission that is going to inquire into food prices is not going to direct its attention also to an inquiry as to the real charges for the distribution of coal in the cities. I am fully convinced that, by a proper method of distributing coal and its carriage into London by the local authorities themselves, coal could be distributed right through London for from 5s. to 6s. per ton, provided that the municipality were authorised to distribute the whole of the coal for domestic purposes. They could so arrange that one cart would go into one district, instead of two or three carts going into one district, one to one house and one to another. A great deal of the charge for coal at the present time in the City of London is totally unnecessary, and due to the wasteful method that has been adopted for its distribution. I am only taking London as an example; it is the same everywhere. If we were desirous of giving the householders of London and other great cities coal at the cheapest possible price as far as distribution is concerned, we ought to arm the local authorities, by an Enabling Bill, with power to buy coal and to have a monopoly for the distribution of all domestic coal in their area.

There is another point with which I should like to deal. Not long ago we passed a Workmen's Compensation Bill, which invested the doctors with a tremendous power. It provided that in case of a dispute between a man and an undertaking, where he had received an accident, either of two parties could send him to a medical referee. I then protested against the system of medical referees. If we have to have them, they should be in such a position as to be entirely above suspicion either of one party or the other. There are three medical referees in my own area. One acts for us and examines most of our men. Once he has examined a man on behalf of the workers' association he cannot act as a referee in that case. The other two associations have a man of their own and they keep their experts for cases that go into the Law Courts. It means that in my area there are two eminent specialists, one acting always on behalf of the insurance company and the other on behalf of the owners' society, and when a case comes up in which the insurance man has made an examination, it goes over to the specialist on the other side and he examines it, and when the other man examines it it goes over to the specialist on the other side, and these two are examining each other's cases and giving their verdicts. These men are always entirely on the side of the employers, and are paid direct. It means that the men have no faith in the decisions which are given by the medical men. I put this question to any hon. Member who believes in British fair play and justice. Is it right that any man who is going to sit in the capacity of a Judge, either upon legal or medical points, should be paid either by one side or by the other? What would become of our Judiciary if men could go from the Bar on to the Judge's seat and back again to the Bar, and practise in that way? It would lead immediately to suspicion, if not to corruption. There would be a general outcry against a system of that kind. The system of medical referees is nothing more nor less than that. I would say to members of the medical profession, get above this kind of thing and say to members of your profession that if you are going to act as a medical referee, let it be known that you are going to take cases for neither side, because only when you act in that way can you be above suspicion and can the men have any faith in the decisions you give.

Another question I should like to mention is that of Egypt. I have listened to-night with some little amazement to the position which has been put from my own side. I have agreed with every word that has been said with regard to the question being referred to the League of Nations, but I should have had far more faith in that declaration if, when the Prime Minister of Egypt came over here when we were in power, we had said to him that we were prepared to submit the question to the League of Nations. It is a farce even for the Labour party when they are in Opposition to demand that a question of great magnitude should be submitted to the League of Nations and then when we are in office to do something different. If we as a Labour party have any principles at all with regard to self-determination and things of that character we had better stick to them, otherwise neither Egypt nor India is going to have any faith in us.

There is one sentence in the Gracious Speech on which I should like to say a word or two, because it depends very much on the way in which the words are interpreted as to what they mean. We are all in favour of economy, only we all want to economise in different ways, and while hon. Members opposite have their suggestions, we on this side have ours. We economise on Singapore, and hon. Members opposite economise, perhaps, on education or some other social service. I want to make an appeal to the Government especially on this question of economy not to repeat the mistake that the last Conservative Government made with regard to economy in education. I remember the two painful years that I spent on the London County Council watching the effect of that policy upon that great educational body, because the things that the Minister advises are carried out by the county council, and the carrying out of that policy has effects that probably the Minister hardly himself expects. I remember one thing, very small in one sense, showing how mistaken economy can inflict suffering on very innocent people. The London County Council at that time made certain grants to schools for school journeys. When the Minister urged economy on the County Council, one of the things they said they could economise on was this grant for school journeys. Of course, the hope was held out that voluntary agencies would come forward and supply the money. I myself was aware of one school in one of the poorest parts of Central London where, the year before, they had taken children into the country, and a large amount of the money that was used on that journey came from the London County Council. They had not people to back them up as other schools had to find the money in a voluntary capacity, and the result of that economy was that these children never got their school journey. If there were any children in London who needed a journey in the country they certainly needed it. That is just a very small illustration of what mistaken economy may mean.

Then there is the question of the size of classes. How can one teacher satisfactorily teach 60 children? In the London schools before the War the policy of reducing the size of the classes was being carried out, but it was suspended on account of the War and has not been commenced again, and you can go and see a teacher struggling with 59 or 60 children. An hon. Member opposite wrote a letter to the "Times" suggesting that 50 per cent, of the teachers were Socialists. I suggest that the policy of economy is from the point of view of hon. Members opposite one of the most mistaken as creating discontent and dissatisfaction amongst the teachers. If hon. Members opposite were asked to conduct classes of 60 children would not they be dissatisfied with the position they found themselves in? Nothing to my mind is more mistaken than economy of that kind in the matter of education. I believe that the nation that is best educated is the nation that is going ultimately to lead the world. In our schools we are wasting and losing the talents and gifts of the children. I remember being taken to one of the London schools a few years ago, and the teacher showing me a drawing that had been done by one of the boys. He said that he had sent the drawing to the London County Council School of Arts and Crafts and asked them their opinion of the gifts and talents displayed in that little drawing, and they said that the lad had undoubted talents. The teacher said to me, "What do you think that boy, who has now left the school, is doing?" He added, "He is now a window cleaner."

By our failure to grasp hold of these lads, even when the teachers know of gifts that they possess, is one of the greatest wastes that is going on in our midst to-day. It is a waste looked at not only from the larger standpoint of the interests of the boys and girls, but from the purely business standpoint, because if these children were got hold of, many of them ought to be sent to other schools to be trained for business. I appeal to the Government to deal with this matter. I am hoping, from the interview of the Prime Minister with the teachers, that the Government will not repeat the great mistake that the Conservative Government made when they allowed what was known as the Geddes Axe to bring in economies in regard to education. The more money spent on education the bigger the dividend the country will get.

There is another phrase in regard to the King's Speech which I think we must approach with some caution, and that is where we talk about the burden of taxation. It is the usual thing at the present time to assume that all taxation is a burden upon industry. Take for instance the Income Tax. I am speaking from memory, but I think I heard an ex-Prime Minister say in this House during the last Parliament that he was rather inclined to think that it was only that part of the profits of business that went to reserve where you really felt the burden of Income Tax. My own opinion is that on all the profits made in the joint stock companies to-day, apart from the money that is going into reserve, and on the question as to whether the profits are large or small, the Income Tax has practically no effect. Those who are interested in joint stock companies know perfectly well that we try to make as large a dividend as we can. We do not consider what the Income Tax is going to be; the manager of a great joint stock company is not responsible for that. He is only responsible to make as much money as he can. Then he pays his dividend. If the Income Tax is 1s., 2s. or 5s. it naturally follows that that is a matter which he can in no way control.

10.0 P.M.

When we look at some of the taxation which it is suggested is a great burden upon industry, we have to look at it with this reservation in our mind, that all the taxation that we see is not a burden upon industry. There is another point we must not forget, and that is that it is not so much the taxation but the way in which the taxation is going to be spent. Very often, people argue as if money is better spent by a private individual than by the State or the municipality. I believe that is a mistake. It depends very much on how the taxation is going to be spent. It may be much better, it probably is much better spent by the State or by the municipality than by a wealthy man who has a large income. Therefore, I think the assumption that is often made that it is an evil thing to take money out of the pockets of an individual must be always viewed in the light of the question as to how the money is going to be spent by those who take it.

I should like to refer to the question of housing. I represent the most overcrowded district in the whole of London, and the problem that we have in my constituency, bordering, as it does upon one side, the City, is that the business quarters of the City come into the district of the Borough of Finsbury and keep taking up dwelling houses where people have been living. When you go canvassing at election time in some of these houses, you find seven, eight, nine, ten, and I remember in one case, 11 votes, in what we should call, to look at it, a house of not very great size. That is an indication of the way in which the people are: herded together in the centre of London. Our difficulty is that there is practically no vacant land that any of the municipalities will consider building upon. Certain land was offered to the London County Council, but they said, that the price was such, on account of the value for business purposes, that it was impossible to consider the building of houses for the working classes upon the site. On the other hand, the people who live in Finsbury are not anxious to leave the district. Even if they were anxious it is extremely difficult to find accommodation for them, unless they go outside London; and into the country.

I would like to urge upon the Minister of Health the importance of considering in his housing plans this problem, which is quite a distinct problem, namely, the problem of housing in the centre of a great city, especially in the centre of London, because there it really is different in certain ways from the problem that you find in the smaller towns. I would like him to consider whether he does not think that some action ought to be taken in special places like the centre of London to prevent the people being turned out of houses for business purposes, or houses that may fall empty being taken for business purposes, and whether emergency legislation ought not to but passed to prevent these houses being turned into business quarters until, at any rate, the worst of the housing shortage has passed away.

There is another matter which deserves the attention of the Minister of Health. It is one that for some time has been before committees of the London County Council, but I do not think any definite decision has been come to. I think the plan has been adopted in other countries. It is a plan that is known as zoning—the allocation in a city of certain districts for business quarters and certain districts for housing. Some scheme of that sort would save parts of the centre of London for the housing accommodation of the people who, on account of their work, must live near the centre of London. I hope that this problem of Central London will not be overlooked by the Minister of Health. It is one of the most serious of questions. Anybody who has been to these houses and seen the condition of them, old houses, houses unsatisfactory in everyway, houses in which there is hardly in any case such a thing as a bath-room, that were built long before it was considered needful to have a bathroom in the house, houses that have been standing there for many years, neglected, and many of them in such a state that really people ought not to be allowed in them—nothing is so unsatisfactory as this. I do hope the Minister of Health, in connection with the plans that are outlined in the King's Speech for the whole question of housing, will not forget the extreme importance of the special problem of Central London.

I want to make a few remarks on the King's Speech. I would like to say at the outset that I am not proposing to indulge in a post-mortem examination in regard to the late Labour Government, but after experience in the Election and the experience of my friends, I think I can safely say that we should not need Home Office experts to prove to us that the late Labour Government was killed by poisoned weapons. I and my friends experienced, to an unparalleled extent, misrepresentation, lying and false innuendo in the course of that Election, and I am quite certain that these methods bad a great deal to do with the result of the Election.

However, that is by the way. I want to refer to one or two items in the King's Speech and one or two omissions from the King's Speech. In the first place, I would like to refer to the fact that there is no mention whatsoever of how the Government proposes to deal with our great Eastern dependency of India, that great shining jewel in the British Crown. And when I think of India and of what the Government's intention towards India may be, I am not thinking of Eastern potentates with very large incomes and dubious habits, who seems to be shielded in a way which other people with much smaller bank balances, and much more obscure origins are not. I am thinking of those people, of the teeming millions of that great country, who are looking to us longingly and hopefully for some measure of justice in accordance with our democratic professions. We have said on many occasions that we desire to do justice to the legitimate aspirations of the Indian people for self-government. What do the Government propose to do in order to satisfy those aspirations? What do the Government propose to do in connection with the recent outrage on constitutional practice in India? I refer to the arrests which took place in Bengal in the course of the last six weeks, arrests which were made under an Ordinance of a particularly odious character from a democratic standpoint, and under which an Act going so far back as 1818 was invoked. As my information goes, many of these men who have been arrested in India under this Ordinance have committed no kind of crime whatsoever, and there does not appear to be the least intention on the part of the Government of India to put it to the test whether they have committed a crime or not by bringing them to trial. Unfortunately, the people of India, unlike us, have no Habeas Corpus Act, and it is possible for the Government of India to keep these citizens for a prolonged period in confinement without bringing them to trial and giving them ordinary, elementary justice. I should like to know what the Government intend to do in regard to this particular matter.

There is one other matter which is omitted from the King's Speech. There is no mention whatever as to the intentions of the Government in regard to another place. It is not said whether the Government propose to amend that other place or whether it proposes to adopt a more democratic method, which we stand for on this side of the House and which I believe the Liberal party once stood for, the method of abolishing that place. We should like to know what the intentions of the Government are, because as a democrat myself and as a member of a democratic party I object to the existence of any institution of that sort which is able to stand in the way of the full and free expression of the people I represent I want to refer to one or two items in the Speech itself. I see that one paragraph says that every effort will be made to promote and bring about reduced expenditure. I do not wish to accuse the Government of hypocrisy or Members who support the Government of hypocrisy, but it is a very strange thing, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury) pointed out, that in that very same speech there is a proposal to continue the dockyard of Singapore which is going to involve an expenditure of, it may be, ten or twenty million pounds.

The Mover of the Address said that his party was accused of lacking sympathy for the poor. I think we all accuse his party of lacking sympathy for the poor, and I think we are justified, because we have got to judge his Government and his party, not by their pious platitudes or by their airy expressions of sympathy but by their actions and their intentions as disclosed in the King's Speech. They are deliberately intending to spend twenty millions, or it may be more, on this fantastic scheme at Singapore, for which there is no real need or justification whatsoever. If you asked the working people of this country what you are to do with twenty millions of money which you may happen to have available, whether you are to spend it on this fantastic scheme at Singapore or upon things which the people are waiting very anxiously and very urgently for, like housing, and education, then I am quite certain, whatever the views of hon. Gentlemen opposite may be, that the working people of this country would say unhesitatingly, "the Singapore Dock scheme should go to blazes. We want these £20,000,000 spent upon the things which are going to make our lives a little brighter and happier than they are now." The Mover of the Address said that it was no use attempting to deal with desperate evils by means of superficial remedies. That is a commonplace, but it is perfectly true. If hon. Members look through the King's Speech, if they study it as carefully as they may and consider its proposals in relation to the evils which exist in this country, they will be bound to admit that it is a classic example of endeavouring to deal with desperate evils by means of very superficial remedies.

Take the three questions of housing, unemployment and poverty. Take unemployment first of all. What are the proposals for dealing with unemployment? They count for nothing at all. The Prime Minister himself said, 14 or 15 months ago, that there was only one really effective remedy for unemployment, and yet now that he has a large majority behind him he does not say a single word about attempting to introduce that particular remedy. With over a million unemployed in the country, if the Prime Minister really and sincerely believes in his remedy for unemployment, how wicked of him, how criminally negligent of him it is not to take the earliest possible steps to introduce his particular remedy! In regard to housing, I have heard speeches to-day. References have been made to the conditions in Scotland. I know something about the conditions in the East End of London. A woman came to me only two weeks ago in desperation. Her children were in the workhouse and her husband walking the streets, and she had not anywhere to go. She came to see whether she could find one room in which she and her husband and her four children could live. She was looking as eagerly for the one room as hon. Members opposite might look for a 20-roomed house in Eaton Place or some such place as that. That is by no means an isolated case. An hon. Friend has talked about the number of votes in a particular house in his constituency. In my constituency there is a nine-roomed house with 20 votes. That works out at more than two adults per room.

That is not overcrowding.

There may be worse instances in Glasgow. I want to emphasise how desperate and urgent this problem is. I ask for slum clearances. There is in Shoreditch a slum area which was marked down in 1912 for abolition and the building of new blocks of dwellings. Schemes have been planned, but to this day, although some of the buildings have been demolished, not a single brick has been laid in connection with that scheme. That is over 12 years ago. The Prime Minister said he hoped to carve his way through the forest of interests which is blocking the way to a solution of the slum clearance problem and the other housing problems. If he is able to do so, he will earn intense gratitude from the great mass of people who are now huddled together in the East End of London under conditions not fit for pigs; but I am very sceptical indeed as to the right hon. Gentleman's ability to do it. You can only deal with the housing problem and the poverty problem by paying the necessary price, and the price you have to pay is the taking away from people who have more wealth than is necessary for them, some of that wealth, and applying it to the remedying of these, evils. I do not believe there is in the Conservative party a sufficient will for the well-being of the people, a sufficiently earnest desire to see misery and suffering obliterated from our land to impel them to pay that particular price.

Throughout all the speeches that have been made from the other side of the House to-day there has been a bland assumption that however great may be the evils from which the country is suffering, however necessary it may be to deal in some slight measure with those evils, yet the present system under which Society is organised is to continue. There is an assumption on the other side of the House that this country is to go on for five years or ten years or probably 100 years with the great mass of the people still working—possibly for little more than a pittance—in such a way as to provide luxury and ease for another class. There is the assumption that the employers and the rich people generally are to be allowed to continue to live upon the toil and sacrifice of the great mass of working people. Here we get a clear line of cleavage as between the party opposite and the Liberal party on the one hand, and the party which sits on these benches on the other. While the Conservative party stands for the continuance of the present system—preferring to stop a leak here and put on a patch there and do some sort of ambulance work —and while the Liberal party stands for the same system, we who belong to the Labour party and who believe in Socialism realise that only by not allowing that system to continue can you really grapple with and deal with the miseries from which humanity is suffering. Therefore we stand for a complete reconstruction of Society on an entirely different basis, so that the great motive impelling men will not be the desire to make profit but the desire to serve the community.

I expect hon. Members opposite think we might give up the Debate at this hour of the night, but I hope not, after the speech of the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury). I feel sure that the things he said were very effectively said, and I believe they cannot be repeated too often. There are few in this House who can repeat them so effectively as the hon. Member himself, and I know that hon. Members, who have had knowledge of that hon. Member in previous Parliaments, have always done him the credit of admitting that he is a very sincere and honourable Member of the House. How often we hear it said, however, that he is a dear old sentimentalist, and he has been charged with being over-sentimental. I, for one, desire to take my part with the hon. Member in saying that we are sent to this House to express what is in the minds and the hearts of the people who sent us here. The greatest missioner who ever came to this earth was regarded in those days in a far worse light than is the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley to-day. He took direct action against those who dabbled with money in the Temple, and He may in His time have suffered a good deal of abuse, but His work lived after Him, and there are those of us who feel that in this House, at any rate, we ought to express the point of view that has been expressed so ably by the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley.

I listened with interest, and with every respect, to the very able speech of the hon. Member who moved the Address in reply to the King's Speech, but I was rather surprised to learn that what I had always regarded as being the programme of the Government for the ensuing Session was on this occasion a programme that might take two or three years to work out. If that is to be so, one wonders what we shall get in the next King's Speech before that period has elapsed. I hope that what has been referred to in the King's Speech to-day will become practical politics during the ensuing Session, and I want to congratulate the Government upon having decided not to drop the Bill, which the Labour Government very wisely put on the stocks, to pay wages to shipwrecked seamen. I am very pleased indeed that that is to figure in the future legislation of this Government, and I want to appeal to the Government to make a particular effort to bring in that Bill with the least possible delay, because, as shipwrecks take place so frequently, and as men are stranded in various parts of the world, all the troubles that the Bill seeks to remove are continually being enacted, and it is only right and proper that we should have such legislation as quickly as possible.

I desire also to make reference to the need for more than one inquiry, and I find that in the King's Speech the main inquiry dealt with is the Commission appointed to inquire into the soaring prices. We discovered other urgent needs during the General Election, and I mention this because of the very high feeling which existed, at any rate in the City of Liverpool, and doubtless elsewhere, on the disclosures that were made. It took six years for the disclosures to be made, and it took a General Election to provide the opportunity for those disclosures. I refer to the suggestion that there was cowardice in the British Army consequent upon propaganda that had taken place in 1918, and I think, with regard to those charges, directly or indirectly made, it is imperative that the Government, which is always able to have full knowledge of the propaganda work supposed to have been going on and to have affected the morale of our troops, should be prepared to institute an inquiry and let not only the House but the whole country have the true facts with regard to that matter, and leave no blot on the memory of those who took part in the War at that time.

This is a very serious request that I make, for the very simple reason that, during the Election, an intelligence officer who was engaged on the Cambrai front came to me feeling very keenly indeed the aspersions that had been made, and provided me with a written statement that, within his knowledge—and it was his particular purpose to discover whether any propaganda work had been going on—there had been no propaganda work, and no reports were submitted to him on that front with regard to that particular kind of work. I have undertaken with my constituents to raise this matter in the House of Commons, and I sincerely hope, when we do get a reply to the speeches made on the King's Speech, we shall have some indication of the preparedness of the Government to clear up what was decidedly a very unsatisfactory business during the Election, and let us have an exact understanding, so that such a thing cannot be repeated.

There was also another matter that one felt ought to have been raised, and that was the use during the Election of one of our national emblems by one of the political parties for electoral advantages. It may be that we shall be challenged with desiring to remove a spirit of which our friends opposite claim to have the monopoly. I refer to the use during the Election of the Union Jack for political purposes. It may require some degree of enthusiasm to raise this question, but, at any rate, it is to the credit of our Liberal friends in this House that they have not resorted to this practice. I have yet to discover that the Union Jack belongs to the Conservative party. When during the War recruits were asked for, and examined, they were not asked whether they were Conservatives, and, if they were discovered not to be Conservatives, told they could not take part in the War, and I think it is doing a great disservice both to the Union Jack and any other national emblem to allow such national emblems to be dragged into the mire of party politics during elections, purely for electioneering purposes.

That has been strongly resented, and, in so far as it has been, very properly, considered desirable to protect the use of the Royal Standard from being utilised by any other person than the Sovereign himself, just in the same way as the Royal Standard is the personal property of the Sovereign, and can only be flown at a time when the Sovereign is in residence, I certainly think any national emblem should be debarred from being used for any purpose other than national. [HON. MEMBERS: "Why do you not use it?"] Hon. Members opposite do not seem to realise that we are not compelled, nor do we intend, to stoop to the same kind of procedure for the purpose of catching votes. [HON. MEMBERS: "The Bed Flag!"] It is perfectly clear to my hon. Friends opposite that the brightest colour in the Union Jack is the red colour. It should be remembered that these matters are raised, not simply because Members on these benches desire to take exception to them, but because they have been raised in a very strong way by our electors. While it may, for temporary purposes, in order to establish some kind of bogey against the Labour party, suit the purposes of the Tory party, I am confident in the long run they will suffer from it, and do a far greater disservice to the country by using the national emblem in the way they have done, instead of leaving it to its proper uses. Having said that, I do hope the Government will indicate whether they are prepared to introduce some kind of legislation that will preclude the use of national emblems for party political purposes.

I did not intend to intervene in the Debate to-night, but there was a certain point raised by the hon. Member for Shore-ditch (Mr. Thurtle) which, I think, requires some answer from this side. Before I deal with his point, perhaps I might say to the last speaker that the emblem, as we understand, of another country has been widely used by the side that he represents, and we have no desire to make use of it on our side. Possibly we of this party have—I do not like to use the words—"made use of" the national emblem to make it perfectly clear that we on this side do stand for the national flag, which stands for unity. That is what the Unionist party also stands for. Hon. Members opposite do really forget how this country lives. After all, let us get down to plain facts. Here you have 45,000,000 people, and I think I am right in saying that we in this country only produce approximately, one-third of the food that we require to put into our mouths. The other two-thirds has to be imported, or, in other words, has to be bought. Is that true or is it not true?

How is that to be paid for? It is paid for mainly by exports and the selling in the markets of the world of the goods that we make in our factories. If those goods cannot be produced of a quality and at a price that we can compete with other countries who are also trying to sell goods in the markets of the world then the plain fact is that this country cannot feed itself. I do not care what the Government may be, whether Socialist, Conservative or Liberal. The facts remain unaltered. You have to deal with them. I do not care whether we have a system of Socialism or Capitalism. The facts remain the same. I fought the recent Election in my constituency simply upon those facts. I pointed out to my constituents that the extreme members of the party opposite, and the Communists, knew the facts as well as I do, but that they were deliberately trying, by methods which are perfectly simple, by encouraging strikes, by teaching men that they ought not to do a good day's work for a good day's pay,

Who teaches that?

That they were deliberately trying so to increase the cost of the production of our goods that we could not sell them in the markets of the world. If that once happens the standard of living of the people must go down. Prices will go up and, ultimately, you will get such a state of discontent and starvation in this country that the country will then be ready for the revolution to which hon. Members opposite deliberately look forward. [HON. MEMBERS: "NO, no!"] Most certainly. Hon. Gentlemen opposite have been very disturbed, I understand, by the publication of a certain letter, but why that letter had such an effect was that while the people of this country suspected there was—what shall we call it—a plan of this kind, that letter proved it conclusively. Before the War there were men who knew perfectly well what was going on in Germany and they warned the country—men like the late Lord Boberts—and the country would not listen; but when the danger actually came the people faced the danger and rallied as one man to the defence of their liberties. It was exactly the same thing with the Communist peril. Some of us had understood it, knew what was behind it and what was going on. The people disregarded it to some extent, but the moment the country saw it, as it did in a flash when that letter was published, it said, "We will have none of this thing." We are a slow people to move, but when we do move there is no doubt about it. The result is seen to-day in this House. I tell hon. Gentlemen opposite that until they give up toying with international propaganda of a revolutionary kind, they will never get the votes of the mass of the people of this country.

I want to mention the Singapore base. The hon. Member for Shoreditch (Mr. Thurtle) alluded to it, and all he could say was that £20,000,000 was to be spent there which could be spent on housing. He does not see that that money is being spent for the protection of our trade routes and for the protection of the food of the people. He shakes his head; he cannot understand it; but it is perfectly true, and we on this side, taking the larger view of these things, understand that unless the food of the people is preserved, and the trade routes along which it comes are protected, the people cannot live. In exactly the same way we understand that unless you can produce goods at a price at which you can sell them in the markets of the world, the people of this country cannot live. Those are the facts, and it is no good talking sentiment. The Member for Shoreditch said, "Why does the Prime Minister not produce a complete system of Protection?" The answer is this: He did ask the country for a mandate for a general tariff and the country refused it. The late Prime Minister, in his speech this afternoon, took a totally different line from the Member for Shoreditch, because he said that under cover of the Russian scare the Prime Minister was introducing Protection. How can the hon. Member reconcile the two statements? He cannot have it both ways. What we are doing is simply implementing the pledges which we all gave—I at least put them clearly into my election address, saying I was in favour of a measure for safeguarding efficient industries, after inquiry.

We are accused of lack of sympathy with the working classes. Why, I ask, are we here occupying these benches? Do you mean to say that we did not get our majorities by the votes of the working classes of this country? The fact is that hon. Members opposite always talk as if they alone represented the working classes of the country, but they do nothing of the kind. We claim to represent the working classes. We can see that it is not by the prosperity of any particular section or class of this country that this nation can be prosperous, and it is because of that that we are essentially a national party. Speaking for myself and for many other hon. Members on these benches, we shall see that the policy we carry out is essentially a national policy for the welfare of the masses of the people of this country. If I did not believe that the Unionist policy stands above all things for the stability which is essential for the existence of an industrial country like this, I should not to-day be sitting on these benches.

I should not have intervened at this stage if I had not observed that you, Mr. Speaker, were going to be placed in the position of having to adjourn the Debate for lack of anybody else continuing it. Therefore I am on my feet to save the dignity of the House, because I think it would be a matter of profound regret that the sitting should come to an untimely finish in this way after we have had elected such a very fine majority with such a very fine mandate and with such very noble intentions as have been indicated by the hon. and gallant Gentleman who has just sat down. It seems to me extraordinary that on the very first day when we are filled and inspired by our contact with the electors with a new energy for the recreation of a new Britain, we cannot last out the first full day of the House in Session. It is therefore to save the reputation of the House, and not merely the reputation of a party or a section of a party, that I have intervened without having taken the preliminary precaution of running over in my mind the things that I want to say. I am quite sure that you, Mr. Speaker, will extend to me the greatest indulgence if I should wander into fields which are even beyond the very wide range accorded by the King's Speech. I think the hon. and gallant Gentleman who has just sat down rather misrepresented our point of view when he said our view was that we wanted to encourage an increase of misery amongst the working classes up to such a point that the workers, groaning under their intolerable misery, would rise in open armed revolt against their oppressors. That is not the desire of anybody on these benches as far as I know.

I have said many times that if I had to live the life that the majority of the working classes do, if I had to live in the type of homes that most of my constituents have to live, if I had to be subject to seeing the torture of my children as a big proportion of my constituents see the torture of their children; if I had to watch the steady degradation of childlife from birth through the early days and weeks of the children, if I had to see all that in my own home as millions of workers have to see it, then I would be out in open armed revolt against the existing conditions just now without them becoming any worse than they are at the present time. There is nobody on that side of the House who would tolerate what my constituents tolerate from week to week with stoical indifference. But while we try to secure every possible alleviation of the condition of our people that we can possibly achieve through this Chamber, we do not agree that the continued commercial prosperity and stability of this country are going to be brought about by reductions in wages, by increasing the working hours, or by the intensification of the work rate per hour. If we were to accept the idea that the cost of production must be reduced by lowering the conditions of life in this country to meet the competitive system which internationally hon. Members opposite believe in and support, we would try to work to a system of international co-operation that would abolish international competition entirely. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"]

It seems to us, or at any rate to me—I will speak for no one but myself—a fantastic and imbecile thing that the nations of the world should all be engaged in a great international starving competition in order to get a living. That is the proposition which is put before us by hon. Gentlemen opposite—that our people must get on to a starvation level if they are going to get their share of the world's work; that we have to starve the German out of his job in order that we may get a starvation living over here. Hon. Members shake their heads. I will be glad if any hon. Member, or the right hon. Gentleman on the Front Bench, will in some subsequent Debate prove to me that that is not the logical deduction from the acceptance of the theory of international competition—that we have to get down to the lowest condition of life here in order that Scottish locomotives, English steel rails, Lancashire cotton and Yorkshire woollens may be purchased in same other country of the world. If we were to accept that competitive idea in international trade, we would not even then agree that the cheapening of production was to be brought about by reducing the living conditions of the working-classes, because, after all, the purchasing power of the working people constitutes a very big proportion of the demand for British labour and British production. If it became necessary to cheapen production to meet this international competition, we would say that land and capital should first suffer before working-class wages and conditions.

If you have to compete, try for a change, instead of breaking the wages, instead of increasing the hours or intensifying the labour of the working people of this country—try for a change doing without any interest on capital; try for a change doing without any rent on land. It is an astonishing, an astounding and an amazing thing to me that in these days, when hon. Members opposite and their friends have been squealing more loudly about hard times than the poor people who are actually starving—there have been more squeals from the big commercials, from the big bankers, from the big industrialists, who have been whining about hard times—that when the German loan came on to the market a week or two ago there were seemingly hundreds of millions of surplus capital available at short notice to be poured into the German loan; and again, at the end of last week, we, who have never known what it was to handle more than a few pounds at a time, read in the papers of the Greek loan being over-subscribed to the extent of twenty times the amount asked for. Where is that coming from? Out of this broken-down, this down-and-out British nation, and from that class that, according to their own stories, have been going into the bankruptcy court, that cannot carry on, for whom the conditions are too terrible. Our business men and financiers in Glasgow tell us of the sleepless nights they have spent trying to find work for the decent working classes. Every business man in Glasgow is struggling on the brink of bankruptcy, merely carrying on his business not for any profit he gets out of it but merely to keep his workers around him, in the hope that some day better times will come along and business will resume prosperity; and yet, after five years of this terribly depressed state of industry in this country, there is £120,000,000 of loose fluid capital ready to be invested in a Greek loan, and a somewhat similar amount ready to be invested in a German loan presumably by supporters of hon. Gentlemen opposite, who told us during the War that never again would they shake hands with a bloody German, that never again would they resume trading relationships with the terrible Huns. An hon. Friend reminds me that if next week there were floated on the London market a Russian loan with sufficiently attractive terms attached to it, they would get it oversubscribed a hundred times.

We simple fellows here, we simple people from the Clyde, who are not financial experts, who are not commercial experts, who are not even statesmen, want the great business men, the great financiers and the great statesmen of this House to explain to us how all this surplus wealth comes to be available in the hands of a few people, when in my district decent men and women cannot get a bite of bread, cannot have their roof securely over their head from week to week, cannot walk down the street feeling independent in a country that has all this surplus wealth available for export to the far corners of the globe. Anywhere where the call is made, British capital is prepared to rush to the rescue, but never to the East End of Glasgow, never to the East End of London, never to the slums of Birmingham, never to the slums of Leeds and Bradford. There is any amount of money for investment abroad, which will probably return a dividend of so much per cent., but there is never any serious attempt to pour out the hundreds of millions in serious genuine investment in the brawn and muscle and brain of a decent race in this great Britain of ours—a race which, after all, is the source of every scrap of wealth that is produced, either to go into German loans or into Greek loans. It comes out of the muscle, out of the sinew, out of the body and the brain of the 40 odd million working people, and in no other way. It is created by the common people, and we are here to make the claim that the people who create the wealth, the people who use the wealth, the people who have the means of keeping the nation's life going——

It being Eleven of the Clock, the Debate stood adjourned

Debate to be resumed To-morrow .