Before we part from this Motion, may I take this opportunity of asking the Prime Minister or the Secretary for Scotland whether it is the intention of the Government during the business of this Session to make any statement in regard to the terrible position in Scotland, particularly relating to the evictions of people? Are we to have any statement on this matter before the House rises?

The hon. Member may have an opportunity to raise it on the Address. In any case it will be open to him to raise it on the Adjournment.

Seeing that newspaper reports are in order as subjects for inquiry, and seeing that in the leading newspapers in Scotland there has been circulated a paragraph stating that the Secretary for Scotland intended to take action in this matter, are we not to have any statement from that source on this question before the House rises? I am not asking for a statement at the moment, but what I am saying is, that on this very important Scottish question there ought to be some statement before the House rises.

I would suggest to the hon. Member that it is open to him at any date to put down a question, and it is open to him any night after 11 o'clock to raise it on the Adjournment.

Yes, that is the ordinary way, but—

This is not relevant to the Motion before the House. It can be raised and is to be raised in further discussion to-day on the Address—so I was told by one of the hon. Member's colleagues. It has nothing to do with the Motion now before the House.

While it is quite true that this matter may be raised in the course of the Debate on the Address, and may be raised even on the adjournment of the House, what I think my hon. Friend wishes to do—[ Interruption. ]

Allow us to get a chance. Do not start bullying here.

I want to suggest to my hon. Friends opposite that if they come down to Glasgow and try to howl down anything that makes for the prevention of evictions—[ Interruption. ]

The hon. Member is addressing a point of Order to me. I want to hear what the point of Order is.

I am not going to stand this thing much longer. [ Laughter. ] You may laugh!

I am waiting to hear what the hon. Member's point of Order is. If he addresses it to me, he will be heard.

What I want to ask the Prime Minister is whether, in view of those statements that are evidently made by the Secretary for Scotland in Scottish newspapers relating to evictions and the situation in the Clyde Valley, the Government are going to bring in any separate piece of legislation in this Session dealing with this very urgent question. The Secretary for Scotland has already made a statement—

We cannot have speeches on a point of Order. The Prime Minister would be out of Order in replying to that question on this Motion now before the House. May I point out that the hon. Member for Bridgeton (Mr. Maxton) is in possession of the House on the Debate on the Address and can continue the discussion by putting that question to the Government

I have a further point of Order on this Motion before the House. This Motion proposes to take all the time of the remaining days of the Session for the Government. I want to raise this question in a private way, and this Motion will debar me. This Motion keeps me from raising it as a private Member. It is quite true to say that Scotland can get a half-hour after 11 o'clock. That is not what I want. What I want is that we shall get a decent statement on the question, not from the Member for Bridgeton (Mr Maxton), but from the Secretary for Scotland. It is an important question in Scotland. I must oppose the Motion.

I rise to oppose this Motion proposing to take Private Members' time for the rest of this very short Session. I presume I am in order in giving my reasons for opposing this Motion without jeopardising my right to open the general discussion to-day, in the course of which I propose to deal with the general affairs of the whole British Empire as outlined in the King's Speech, rather than with this somewhat local

question, which I and my friends in the Clyde area are particularly interested in. Towards the close of the last Parliamentary Session the time of Private Members vanished practically altogether. The opportunities for Private Members in this House are already very limited. This House has been out of action for a very long period. There are many other questions which I am sure other Private Members in other parts of the House are interested in, just as we are particularly interested in this question of evictions. I think it is grossly unfair for this new Government, with all the power that they wield from their vast majority, to filch from various sections of this House the very limited amount of time allowed us to bring up matters which have not a general interest for the House, but which are, nevertheless, of vital importance to large sections of the working-class population outside. For these reasons I shall oppose this Motion.

Question put:

"That, until the Adjournment of the House for Christmas, Government Business do have precedence at every Sitting, that no Bills other than Government Bills be introduced, and that no Ballot be taken for determining the precedence of such Bills."

The House divided: Ayes, 277; Noes, 81.

Friday Sittings

Motion made, and Question proposed:

"That, during the present Session, the House do meet on Fridays at Eleven o'clock, and that Four o'clock and half-past Four o'clock be substituted for Fire o'clock and half-past Five o'clock, respectively, as the hours for the interruption of Business and Adjournment of the House on that day."—[ The Prime Minister. ]

May I ask the Prime Minister one question? This Motion has regularly been moved now for, I think, two years, but the fact that the Standing Orders still say that we are to meet at Twelve o'clock on Fridays causes all the tickets in the Admission Order Office to be printed with the time Twelve o'clock. I want to ask the Prime Minister whether he can see his way to amend the Standing Orders so as to make the meeting of the House at Eleven o'clock on Fridays permanent. I think it would meet the convenience of the House, and would enable the Admission Order Office to issue tickets for Fridays earlier, because they would know that the House would meet at Eleven o'clock, and the tickets could be properly printed for Eleven o'clock.

I will gladly consider that question, but, of course, it would be a matter to consider which would take the longer time—to alter the time on the admission tickets or to alter the Standing Orders of the House.

Question put, and agreed to.

Resolved,

"That, during the present Session, the House do meet on Fridays at Eleven o'clock, and that Four o'clock and half-past Four o'clock be substituted for Five o'clock and half-past Five o'clock, respectively, as the hours for the interruption of Business and Adjournment of the House on that day."

I wish to repeat a question which was put yesterday to the Prime Minister, and repeated again to-day in the course of Questions, but not yet answered. It is a question in reference to the Zinovieff letter. Unquestionably, one of the greatest influences, in fact, I think the greatest single influence, in connection with the decision of hundreds of thousands of electors in the recent General Election was the influence exerted by that letter, and it is natural that we should return to the subject in this new Parliament, and follow up, if possible, the inquiry which a sub-Committee of the Cabinet has instituted into the authenticity of that letter. We have been assured by statements in the public Press that the Cabinet is convinced of the authenticity of the letter. To-day we learn from the Prime Minister, in his answer to a question, that the Cabinet had before it a copy of that letter. Our allegation is that no original letter has been seen, that this Committee of Inquiry, like its predecessor, could discover no original letter, that there is no original letter, and that only a copy has been before those who have had to consider this matter. We are, therefore, entitled to ask, upon what evidence does the sub-Committee of the Cabinet base its conclusion that this copy of a letter is a copy of a genuine original?

My right hon. Friend yesterday, in a succession of questions to the Prime Minister, asked whether we could be assured of some inquiry—we assume what might be termed an independent or appropriate or effective form of inquiry—into the reality or otherwise of this rather important document. One of the silences of the Prime Minister's speech of yesterday afternoon was that in which no answer whatever was given to the question of the Leader of the Opposition, just as to-day no answer has been volunteered to the question as it has now been repeated. Of course, during Monday and the following days, possibly, reference will be made to this general subject of Russian issues. But if there is ground for delay in reply on this particular point of the document itself, we must press for some statement of the reasons as to what that ground is. This document did play so important a part in securing for the Prime Minister a very large part of his majority that he should show no hesitation whatever in the demand for an inquiry into the genuineness or otherwise of the document. It is not enough for the Prime Minister to ask us to accept his immense majority at its own value. Therefore we say that this document must materially affect our general future relations with Russia, just as it so materially scared and affected the minds of many thousands of honest electors. It is not enough to ask us to be satisfied with the assurance that the Government are convinced that this document is authentic without having revealed in any way whatever to us any of the evidence upon which they rely.

Yesterday the Prime Minister rather deprecated the introduction into the House of Commons of any reference to these matters of painful election controversy. Why should we refrain in the House of Commons from discussing the means by which so many right hon. Gentlemen won their seats? I do not think there ever was an election in which we were subjected to such gross and sustained misrepresentation of our attitude towards our own country, its welfare and its people, and of our real purpose in seeking trade relations with the Governments and peoples of other lands. If constitutional Labour effort is to be so grossly misrepresented and mishandled, the advent of revolutionary Communism is assured. The Prime Minister appeals in his speech, as well as in the Speech from the Throne, for a spirit of good will and for an attitude of national unity towards the great problems with which we are faced. These appeals will be in vain unless a very much larger number of his following can fight as fairly as he did. It is particularly unfortunate that the exploitation of political values should be pursued so bitterly as they have been in our relations with a foreign country. If these were differences affecting only purely domestic matters of opinion, one could pass them by, But they very materially affect the peace of the world and the general future well-being of Europe, for I am certain, whatever anyone on the benches opposite may say, that none will allege that it is possible for us to have a guarantee of enduring peace in the world until Russia is brought into closer and more effective friendly relations with the nations of the world. Our trade and our business remain in a condition of the greatest difficulty and danger until we are placed upon a footing of more real friendly relations with that great country. One argument used, I suppose, hundreds of' times a day during the course of the recent election was that any money we had in this country we wanted for the development of our own trade and business. The answer may be found in the Press of yesterday, in which we were informed that a new foreign issue was subscribed immediately 15 times over. We well know that there is a large margin of money ever ready to flow to opportunities for employment, and we honestly suggest to the country, as we proposed had we remained in office to suggest to the House of Commons, that it would have been an act of the greatest mutual benefit for this country to find, as it has for other countries, some of its money for Russia in order that thereby many lines of benefit should accrue to ourselves, that guarantees for that money should be secured, that Russia should redeem her obligations, that her debts should be paid off, and her money should be spent in our country in large part.

Upon these lines we proposed to raise, as it was never raised in this House, the real issues of the proposed Russian loan. We were met in the country, though not in this House, with language which I would challenge any other hon. Member to repeat during the course of these debates and in the light of the terms of the Speech from the Throne. I quote you only the language of first-class brains. Lord Birkenhead, a member of the present Cabinet and Secretary of State for India, speaking at Aberdeen on 21st October, denounced the proposed loan as an infamous scheme, a scheme to lend money to the thieves, rogues and vagabonds of Moscow. I gather that hon. Members below the Gangway are anxious to restore the normal relations of trade and business dealings with the rogues, thieves and vagabonds of Moscow. I suggest to hon. Members that they cannot have it both ways. They must make their choice. Either they must side with such language as I have cited, or they must take the side of what is a party manifesto, under the name of the Speech from the Throne, which we are now discussing. The Prime Minister yesterday backed up the terms of the Speech from the Throne by alleging that in the agreement of 1921 we have all the provisions necessary and suitable for the continuance of trade relation with Russia or for their full resumption. I challenge that conclusion. If he will turn to the agreement of 1921, he will find that it was merely a preliminary and was described as a preliminary in both the opening and the closing paragraphs of that agreement. The then President of the Board of Trade, acting as a loyal Conservative, the right hon. Member for Hillhead (Sir R. Home), was the first representative Scottish gentleman and English Minister to shake the bloodstained hands of the Russian representatives who were then brought to this country, not by Labour but by the Coalition Government, in which both Liberals and Conservatives were amply represented. Therefore, the agreement of 1921 was not the last but the first step, expressly described in its two parts as preliminary action, to be followed up by other action. Other action was taken. Additional efforts were made by the Government of the day, both at The Hague and at Genoa, in 1922. The right hon. Member for Norwich (Mr. Hilton Young), who was then at the Treasury, spoke as the spokesman officially uttering the views of the Government of the day, at the Conference at Genoa. Referring to the misconceptions on points of view between the Russian mind and the British mind, he said:

Are there not admittedly many fruitful and many mutually beneficial provisions in that agreement which was reached in August last with the Russian representatives? Why should not efforts be made to save these valuable provisions from the wreckage which lack of better relations with Russia is certain to produce? There are the fishermen's interests, at which some hon. Gentlemen opposite laughed yesterday; but to those who are immediately affected by the arrangements that were made, they are not a matter for laughter. There are the financial interests of British nationals. There are the better provisions that we made to prevent the mischievous propaganda, which we deplore and resent. All these provisions in the Treaty, if they could be secured by discussion, if they could be secured without the benefits and counter-benefits of the loan, are matters well worth the energy and time of our successors. Let me quote another important statement made at the Conference to which I have referred, by the right hon. Member for Norwich:

Reference was made in the course of yesterday's Debate to the altered position of the Government as compared with the last Government in the matter of having brought to an end the system of rule by minorities. It is true that within this House the position is altered, but outside this House it has not so completely changed. The immense majority which the Government have secured over any possible combination within these walls means that the Government are not embarrassed by the defects of the three-party system as far as it works in the House of Commons. But what mandate can the Government claim to have got on the basis of votes cast in its favour, as compared with the votes cast for candidates against them, for a number of the things that are recited in the Speech from the Throne? As far as the country is concerned, we are still being ruled by a minority Government, for by far the greater majority of votes were given for candidates opposed to those who stood on behalf of the Tory party. We are entitled, therefore, to ask whether the Government are going to use the majority which they secured in 1924 to pass a number of proposals which were rejected by the electorate in 1923.

4.0 P.M.

There seems, by statements in their speeches as well as in the Speech from the Throne, to be some intention in that direction. It is to me an extremely disappointing Speech in respect to everyone of the three greatest domestic problems which now confront us, namely, houses, prices and work. In the matter of prices, we are to have an inquiry. I welcome this investigation and the statement of the Prime Minister yesterday that there is to be an interim report or reports with regard to the prices of meat and bread. It is, I think, essential that without delay we should find out where goes that very big difference between the amount received by the producer of bread or meat and the price received by the retailer when the ordinary consumer goes to a shop to make a purchase. I would suggest to this present Cabinet that, if not they, certainly their predecessors in 1919 and 1920 lost their way in a reckless abandonment of a number of the Wartime provisions that became necessary to restrain the ascension of prices, to prevent profiteering and to make it impossible or nearly impossible for certain wholesalers or traders to obtain the excessive prices which they were able to secure under the conditions of artificial trade which then prevailed.

I do not mean that we should have permanently continued every kind of regulation, law, or administrative act which at that time did something to defend the consumer, but I do say that the Parliament of 1919 and 1920 showed itself too precipitate in accepting proposals then made completely to destroy every vestige of restriction which then did a good deal to steady and regulate prices during those conditions of shortage. Sc much indeed was that so that, of a Ministry like the Food Ministry, all that has remained is just a certain semblance of organisation relating to the" transport of food in the event of it ever becoming necessary for the State to take action should any condition of unusual shortage ever appear. I say that in that way we threw away many valuable lessons of the War, and we assumed too early that those appeals for national goodwill and a high level of patriotism would reflect themselves in the minds of the trading and commercial community of this country, who would not seek any undue advantage because of the position of special privilege in which they were placed through those conditions of shortage. While we ought not to continue all our wartime measures in our days of peace, it was a reckless and thoughtless act on the part of the Government of the day completely to abandon all the lessons learned during those years of war.

I want now to draw attention to what I think are two very important gaps in the Speech from the Throne compared with the party manifesto of hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite when they appealed for the support of the electors. In their manifesto, they said a great deal about the ex-service man, about his grievances, and about how other Governments had not redressed them, but not a single reference to the ex-service man or his grievances can be found in the Speech which is now before us. Why have we this adroit silence now on the part of those who have to fulfil the promises so lavishly made by them during the few weeks of the Election? There was a marked silence, compared with the party manifesto, in the Speech from the Throne on the great subject of education, for in the manifesto we find this statement: of these professions or intentions in the Speech from the Throne. It surely will not be alleged that all these lines of progress in the matter of education are to be pursued without any change in the law. Surely the argument will not be offered that these are to be the subject of administrative action only. I think, then, that we might have some statement as to why, upon these two great and important matters, affecting immense groups of the electors, namely, those millions interested in education and those millions interested in the fate and treatment of ex-service men, we had such eloquence during the course of the Election and have such complete silence now that the moment has been reached for a fulfilment of any of their pledges.

I want just in a closing remark to make a reference to the question of economy, for an appeal is made to the nation in the Speech from the Throne for every economy which can be reached consistently with our national or international interests. We, on this side of the House, assuming that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the Epping Division (Mr. Churchill) had to be in the Cabinet, rather welcome the position which eventually was offered to him, and which, no doubt, he eagerly accepted, for there, I suppose, it will be less possible for him to work mischief than anywhere else. One marks the suddenness of his conversion. We had only a few months ago the spectacle of the right hon. Gentleman opposing an official Conservative candidate almost within reach of these walls, and now he walks quietly into a Conservative Cabinet as though he had never been out of one. It might be said of the right hon. Gentleman, if of no other, that at some time or other he was right on every question, for he has supported each point of view on nearly every subject. Until the Government of the day comes nearer to Lahour spirit and to Labour policy in the big Departments of expenditure, national economy, that is to say, the saving of money for this country so far as that money is acquired for national revenue, will be impossible.

What are the big lines of expenditure? They are Army, they are Navy, they are education. Take, first, those three. How will it be possible for the Government to keep faith with their manifesto on education and save under that head? It is out of the question. How are we to construct a great naval base at Singapore, and save in respect to the purposes of the Navy? How can we keep up our pronouncements about the might of Empire and our preparedness for war in any emergency, and save on the Army? The other two big lines of expenditure are in the matter of pensions for war dependants and the sufferers from the War, the ex-service men, their widows and children. No effort dare be made further to curtail, more than they may be curtailed by the ordinary operation of nature, the allowances in that direction. But the biggest single item of national expenditure is also one which I conclude there is no intention on the part of right hon. Gentlemen opposite to touch. That is the payment of War Loan interest. We ourselves have made our position plain. We are opposed to in any way reducing the interest payable to those who made a contract with the Government and lent money during its time of need, but our other proposals have not had fair examination. We are convinced that eventually the Government, some Government of the future, will be driven to them. You cannot for generations go on paying at the rate of nearly £1,000,000 a day in interest. Not by any method such as the Sinking Fund plan so far proposed', or any other device yet advocated from any financial quarter, can we materially reduce that heavy burden of £1,000,000 a day as interest for War Loans that we had to raise.

I was interested yesterday to hear the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George) lament the great burden of interest which we have to provide because of our failure to get back our money from those to whom we lent it. Russia we denounce without restraint, but dare any Minister or supporter of the present Government utter a word of criticism about France, a country which owes us quite as much as Russia and a country which makes not the slightest sign of paying a farthing either of interest or of capital? I think the right hon. Gentleman might return to that subject and let us know why, in his days of power, he did not take some more effective action to make it impossible for us to live under the condition which yesterday he described, that condition being that we have to pay nearly half the revenue raised by taxation upon incomes in paying for this money which we lent to the various Allies who acted with us during the course of the War. Our consolation, then, is that it is only by a return to Labour theories, to Labour principles, to Labour proposals and to Labour policies that any redress can be found under any one of these heads, either by this Government or any one which may succeed them.

Any new Member who, with the diligence of a new boy at school, has attended throughout the two days of this Debate, must have been truck by the extraordinary variety of the topics which come under discussion in the King's Speech before any definite Amendment is moved to the Address to the Throne. The right hon. Gentleman who has just spoken has given a good illustration of it, for he has quite legitimately ranged over a very remarkable series of topics, and it is impossible for anybody following him in the Debate to avoid appearing to be rather discontinuous in his contribution. The right hon. Gentleman began with a reference to the Zinovieff letter. That subject is one which the small band of Liberals who sit on these Benches may well regard as spectators, while the two Front Benches dispute as to which of them first decided that the letter was genuine. I confess I should have thought that the question which the right hon. Gentleman put so pointedly to the Prime Minister, when he wanted to know where was the evidence that the letter was genuine, would have been much more properly put to the late Prime Minister. For my own part, neither at the Election nor at any other time have I ever been so bold as to assert that the letter was genuine. I have taken a much more moderate view —the view that the right hon. Member for Aberavon (Mr. J. Ramsay Mac-Donald), then Prime Minister, could not possibly have done what he did in reference to the letter unless there was the strongest possible evidence that the letter was genuine, and I do not think that the country will be very easily misled on this subject by questions at this time of day addressed across the Table to the new Prime Minister.

Then the right hon. Member for Platting (Mr. Clynes) dealt with the subject of the Russian Agreement. I do not think that he did justice to the solid judgment of the country on the matter. He is right, I think, when he complains of grossly extravagant language which was used in some quarters during the General Election, in which the language of denunciation took the place of plain businesslike argument, and where, I have no doubt, a portion of the electorate was very seriously misled. But the reason why the solid judgment of the country was pronounced against the late Government about the Russian Treaty was not that it is fundamentally wrong to make agreements with Russia, but that it is fundamentally silly to make such an agreement as that with anybody. Really, the right hon. Gentleman who has just spoken must have a very short memory. It is only a very few months ago that the late Prime Minister was asserting, and asserting with indignation in this House, that those who suspected him of being prepared to pledge this country in this way were doing him a grave injustice, that he repudiated utterly the idea of doing for Russia what he was not prepared to do for our own Dominions and other countries, and, indeed, that anybody who had the impudence to suspect anything to the contrary was no gentleman and ought to apologise. It surely is rather strong meat, after that, to learn from the last speaker that the whole explanation of the view of the country on this matter is that the electors were driven frantic by exaggerated and deplorable language. I lament such language as much as anyone, and I took no part in it, but it is perfectly plain to all who argue this thing as a matter of business that it was the solid business sense of this country which rejected that proposal, whatever may have been the extravagant language used in same quarters.

The Debate on the Address, as I have said, covers a very wide range, and contributions are likely to have a very discontinuous air. The Debate at the beginning of a new Parliament, and when a General Election has caused a change of Government, may really be reduced to the simple question, How did the Government get their majority and what will they do with it now they have got it? The Prime Minister always adorns his speeches with some pleasant analogy, and he would prefer to put it, "What bait had he and his friends been using and what fish have they caught with it?" We may observe, at any rate, that one bait which was very extensively used even by the most fastidious and truthful of fishermen (for some political fishermen claim to be truthful), is the statement made again and again by the Prime Minister in the Election, that nothing that he would do would involve any new taxes upon food. I notice that, now the Election is over, some of his supporters are not quite so certain about it. I have carefully traced every speech which the Prime Minister made during the course of the late contest, and I challenge contradiction when I say that on no single occasion did he attempt to qualify that by introducing what has since been so much used as a qualification, namely, the suggestion that after all it is only the staple foods of the country which are referred to in this connection.

The truth of the matter, of course, is that you cannot put into operation the last resolutions of the Imperial Conference unless you are not only prepared to contemplate taxes on some foods, but are prepared to invent and increase taxes on those foods for the express purpose of carving out your preference. That was what was meant by the President of the Board of Trade, who has now resumed his old office, when he said only a year ago that they wanted to make preference effective; and when the time comes, as I hope it will come in the Amendment which the Liberals will move to the Address, to deal with this matter, I do not think there will be any difficulty in showing that already we are on the eve of a transformation scene in which this assurance of no taxes on food will be fundamentally modified step by step in the interests of what plain people call Protection and other people prefer to describe by some other name. I will not deal with the matter now, because it will be more proper to raise it on the Amendment which the Liberals have put on the Paper.

But I venture to ask a simple question now. I see in the King's Speech very carefully selected language, which speaks of further preferences on goods imported into this country from the Empire. The House observes no mention of food and no mention of Protection. Would somebody be good enough to tell us in this Debate—who better than the Chancellor of the Exchequer?—will he be good enough to define what this Protection is which the Government are pledged not to introduce, and would he be good enough to explain what is the difference between it and the Safeguarding of Industries which the Government propose? I recall that the Prime Minister, in November, 1923, actually had a General Election for this special reason, that he was convinced, as he said in his manifesto, that no partial measures such as the extension of the Safeguarding of Industries Act could meet the situation. Is that his view now? If he is going further, what is the good of pretending that he is not, as a matter of fact, surrendering to the Protectionists? If he is not going further, what has happened between November, 1923, and December, 1924, which would justify him in saying that what he now intends to propose is really going to meet the situation? He has colleagues, as we know, who take, at any rate, a more sturdy view on this subject. I will ask the House to listen to a single quotation from a speech by the right hon. Gentleman who is now the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and who had his own comment to make when the present Prime Minister was using this very moderate and ambiguous language. On 8th November, 1923, in an address to the Compatriots' Club, the present Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs said of this half-hearted suggestion:

I rose mainly for the purpose of referring to inter-Allied debts, and I am indebted to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for coming into the House after I had notified him that I intended to deal with that subject. May I, however, in a few sentences refer to another aspect of the King's Speech, one of the most comforting and satisfactory features of it? I refer to the paragraph which says:

How many Liberals?

All of them voted for it. Quote me a single Liberal who refused to vote for old age pensions. In that Division, 12 Conservatives voted for the Third Reading of the Bill and 11 voted against it. More than that, in those days to which Lord Birkenhead looks back with so much affection and concern, the days when the House of Lords could do what it liked and the House of Commons could never hope to control it, the Leader of the Conservative party in the House of Lords spoke of this Measure as the very first duty of a democratic Parliament towards our people.

I turn to a subject which I particularly wish to recall to the attention of the House. It was mentioned yesterday by my right hon. Friend the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George) and was also discussed briefly by the hon. Member for Ilford (Sir F. Wise) in the interesting speech he made yesterday. It is the question of what is the view taken by the new Government of the new circumstances which have arisen in regard to inter-Allied debts. The broad facts, of course, are known to all of us, though, indeed, they can hardly be too often repeated until we get quite clearly the view of the new Government. Here are the simple facts. We lent in the course of the War some £2,000,000,000 to our Allies. We guaranteed another £1,000,000,000 for our Allies. There is a total of some £3,000,000,000, the interest on which is something like £130,000,000 a year, which may fairly be regarded as a liability incurred by the taxpayers of this country, not on their own private or national account but on behalf of partners in the enterprise of the War. The United States of America—and this is worth observing—refused to lend these vast sums to our Protectionist Allies on the Continent, and they were only willing to lend supposing they got the guarantee of Free Trade Britain.

I observe that the Leader of the Opposition still takes great credit to himself in connection with the Russian Loan for the distinction between borrowing money with the obligation to repay it, and letting other people borrow it while you only guarantee it. For my part I have never been able to understand what material difference there is between the two operations. One of the most surprising things in the election campaign was the inability of many Labour speakers and candidates to appreciate this elementary fact, that if one gentleman borrows £100 from the bank and somebody else guarantees the overdraft, that somebody else will, none the less, be called upon to repay the money. If it is any comfort to the Labour party, they will no doubt observe that in the case of our borrowings from America we were not borrowing for ourselves, but were only guaranteeing somebody else's debt. [HON. MMEBERS: "You did it!"] The country did it, and I would like to point out that the only difference of which I am aware between the one operation and the other is this, that if the British Government borrows money in the foreign money market itself and directly, it very often is able to raise the money at a lower rate of interest than the rate of interest which is charged if somebody else borrows the money, and the British Government simply guarantees repayment. [HON. MEMBERS: "You did it!"] I am not saying who did it or who did not do it. Members of all parties were concerned in it.

We want you to bear your share of the responsibility.

I think my hon. Friend might commune with the late Home Secretary and some others and see whether they had anything to do with it. Perhaps he might even commune with the right hon. Gentleman who spoke last and who was up to the neck in it. However, if I ma^ address you, Mr. Speaker, which is always a good rule, I would say it is perfectly plain that, wherever the blame may lie, the liability rests upon us, and I do not understand that there is any party in the State, or any section of any party in the State, that seriously suggests we can get out of this liability by repudiating it. I can quite understand the view, and I think there is a great deal to be said for it, that in drawing up a statement of our own accounts and in deciding what to include in our Budget statement it is a wise thing to write down and in some cases write off the debt owed to us by this, that or the other Ally. That is prudent accountancy, and anybody who looks at the Budget statements —I have here the financial statement of last year—knows that we in this country, following a very much sounder and more prudent financial practice than some of our Allies on the Continent, have never included in our Budget statement either reparations from Germany or these liabilities of our Allies

A new situation, however, has arisen. We read that there are now going on between France and the United States negotiations on the subject of the settlement of such claims as America still has against France. I must say that to my way of thinking, whatever may be the prudence which justifies our writing down these claims against our Continental Allies in our own ledger, it is an intolerable situation if, after we have under- taken to repay money which was really borrowed for our Continental Allies, there it now to be an adjustment between America as it may be and France, while Great Britain, apparently, has no say in the matter. The view that in any case this was a most serious and possibly even a fatal difficulty in the way of British finance is not a view that is limited to our friends on the Labour benches. It is a view that was expressed with the greatest deliberation and the greatest authority at a very critical moment in our history by no less a person than Mr. Bonar Law himself. In December, 1922, when Mr. Bonar Law was Prime Minister, just before he went on that excursion to Paris when he had his famous interview with M. Poincaré, there was a Debate in this House on the Appropriation Bill. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer may recall, that Debate took place on 14th December, 1922. On that occasion, as it happened, I was commissioned or authorised, not only for myself and my immediate friends, but for a rather wider circle than usual, to put some questions to the Prime Minister of the day. They were questions which had been considered and approved of, not only by Mr. Asquith and my right hon. Friend the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs, but by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Aberavon (Mr. Ramsay MacDonald) as well. These questions were put as a piece of concerted action by the whole Opposition in unison for the purpose of ascertaining from Mr. Bonar Law what was his view and the view of his Government on, among other things, the question of reparations and inter-Allied debts. May I read the answer which Mr. Bonar Law at that time gave on this tremendously important subject. He did not shirk the questions; he did not ask for further time to give his considered view, but he dealt with the debt to the United States specifically in a most important passage of his speech, and he then went on to say:

We therefore desire to know how far the Chancellor of the Exchequer regards as assets the debts that are due from our Allies. Does he finally wipe them off the slate? Does he consider them things which are still ponderable and worth making provisions in respect of? The taxation per head in France is far lower than the taxation in this country. I have not, as a fact, got the figures for this year, but the taxation per head in France a year ago was something like £9 12s. per head, whereas the taxation in Britain was £17 9s. France, it is true, has an Income Tax, and so have we, but the Income Tax in France is a comparatively small affair and it is certainly a fact that their rich men do not pay on the scale that we do. I am not complaining because there is a heavy Income Tax on riches in this country, but I think it is much more than the interest of any individual set of citizens, and is essential to the interests of the country as a whole that we should learn now what is the view which the Government takes of this very important matter in its novel aspect. I press the question with great respect across the floor to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, because he is the man to deal with it and also for the reason which my right hon. Friend who spoke last gave. The striking thing in the composition of the new Government is that the Prime Minister, dealing with a most distinguished man who has hitherto been known rather as a spender than a saver, should put him, not in a spending but in a saving Department. He is the poacher turned gamekeeper. I think the time has com when we should have from the Government Bench a plain statement from the new gamekeeper of how he proposes to preserve what little game there is left, and by what means he proposes to secure that it is not filched away from this country by persons who have no better right to it than ourselves.

As I see the King's Speech, it is a speech which is addressed to the future rather than to the past. We are concerned in a new Session, and still more at the opening of a new Parliament with the future. I came across a French book the other day, the title of which was, "Life begins Tomorrow." That is not a bad point of view for the House of Commons to take in considering the commencement of a new Parliament.

As I see the Debate upon the Address, it must necessarily wander over a large number of subjects. In its essence it affords the House an opportunity of taking a broad view of the whole picture and trying to see the policy of the Government of the day as a whole. I believe that we are at the commencement of a new epoch. We have been through the war, we have been through a dark and difficult time since the war. But I see daylight coming, on one condition, and that is that the Unionist party, with a great majority behind the Unionist Government, should, follow and act up to the appeal of the Prime Minister at the Albert Hall the other day for devoted service, for hard work coupled with common sense, and a refusal to follow the example of the Opposition of ignoring human nature. Those qualities I believe will help us to win through. The Unionist party seems to me to have found itself. It has the virility of a new party, though there has been no break with the past. It still holds the torch of social reform which was handed down to it by Shaftesbury and Disraeli, but it has grown and progressed very rapidly in recent years. The right hon. Member who spoke last commented on the progress that it has made. Does he complain of it?

Not a bit.

Let us look to the future and never mind about the past. What does it matter whether we have made mistakes in the past? We look to the future, and progress as every true reformer does progress. What more do you want? We are all social reformers to-day. I remember in the years shortly before the War, the Unionist Social Reform Committee was a mere fraction of the party. To-day it is the whole party. The Conservative party has progressed infinitely with the times, and as I see it we have an opportunity such as has mot been presented for half a century. In the Prime Minister's admirable and stirring address at the Albert Hall the other day, to which we all listened not only with interest but, I believe, with complete concurrence and support, there was a passage that particularly struck me. He was talking of democracy, and this is what he said. I want to quote a passage or two from his speech: against the Bill, which was to lower the franchise slightly. Lord Shaftesbury wrote him a letter after his speech, which is really astounding if compared with to-day. He says:

5.0 P.M.

The first moral that I would like to impress upon the House is that the Conservative party is a party of progress, a party that moves forward, a party that tries to adapt itself to the needs of the times. But there is a second moral, that is, that the two-party system in this country is more consistent with the genius of our political spirit than the group system. What to-day is the use of a Liberal party? The Liberal party has diminished in numbers and is scantily represented on the benches opposite. The Liberal party was drowned at the Election. My right hon. and learned Friend who spoke last and others have been engaged in trying to apply artificial respiration in order to revive it, pumping into it the pure oxygen of academic Free Trade. Let the body die, and let its great soul come and find a haven of rest inside the Unionist party! What are the reasons for maintaining this Liberal party in the country to-day? They are artificial. One Liberal will tell you that it provides an alternative for the electorate at a General Election to the worse evil of a Socialist majority. That is not practical politics. Does the Liberal party of to-day imagine that it is going to convert a sufficient number of electors who have been supporting the Socialist party to give them a majority? Another view is that by expounding the fallacy of Socialism they are going to convert a sufficient number of electors in the country to wipe out the Socialist party. That is not practical politics. Let us adjust ourselves to realities. Let us look at the working of the group system on the Continent. You see France with 14 groups and Germany with 10 and you never get a stable Government. You never get a majority that is really effective. In other countries on the Continent the group system has degenerated to such an extent, and the machinery has so failed to work that they have substituted for Parliamentary Government the Government of a Dictator. I do not believe that this country will ever have the group system. The lines of demarcation between one group and another group are too narrow for a vast electorate of 20 millions ever to comprehend them. What happened at this Election? Why were so many votes given to Conservatives that had previously been given to Liberals? In those cases Liberals voted for Conservatives, simply because the electors could not see what difference there was on broad lines between a Liberal and a Conservative, and they wanted a stable Government. That is the broad position in this country at the present time, and, as I see it, the real questions to which Parliament has to address itself in the years to come are much more likely to be solved successfully if we address ourselves to them on their merits, and if we pay a little less attention to the preservation of a party which the electorate told us pretty plainly at the last Election has no reason for existing as a separate party.

The really big task in front of us to-day is that of improving the lot of the masses of the people in our country. The field is immense, and one must choose in dealing with it. I would like to take the subject of housing as an illustration of the kind of attitude that we ought to adopt. Housing to-day is of all domestic questions the most important that we have to face. In 1923 and 1924, the House concentrated its attention on the provision of new houses under what is known as Part III of the main Housing Act. Its attention was little directed to the question of slum clearance, and it is upon the question of slum clearance that attention ought now above all things to be directed. The Acts of 1923 and 1924 are in full operation. The Act of 1923 is working far better than its draftsman realised when he helped to put it upon the Statute Book. As the present Minister of Health who put it on the Statute Book said the other day at a meeting of the Conservative Women's Reform Association, in a speech which seemed to me to cover the ground as admirably and as widely as the ground could possibly be covered, under that Act a vastly greater number of houses have already been built than anybody appreciates, and in addition there has been a vast number of houses built by private builders who have bad no State assistance at all, so that the rate of building in this year has already come up to and passed the rate of building before the Finance Act, 1909–10, which so interfered with house building in this country. That being so, I submit that we ought to pay almost the whole of our attention to the question of slum clearance. We all know, or most of us know, some of the bad areas in our great cities. In my own constituency in Liverpool, there are some of the most horrible blots on civilisation that anyone can imagine. Last year, in Liverpool, there were 11,064 families, each of which was living in one room only. There are street after street of houses which are horribly overcrowded. It means the impairment of the health and happiness and efficiency of countless human beings, physically, mentally, and morally, and it has got to be stopped. There is no problem that is more urgent or more insistent upon Parliament to-day than this problem.

I would like to offer, with diffidence, a few practical suggestions to the Minister of Health, whom I am glad to see here at the moment. They fall under different heads. The first, and perhaps from one point of view the most practical head, is that of finance. As we know, under the present system the Ministry has power, under the Act of 1923, to make advances for improvement schemes up to 50 per cent, of the annual loss incurred by the local authority in carrying out the scheme. Still, the cost of these schemes is very heavy, and for this sort of reason. As we know, an area is scheduled. It comes before an inspector of the Ministry, who holds an inquiry, and within the area he paints with one colour the portions that are insanitary and with another colour those portions which are included, though not insanitary, in order to make the scheme satisfactory as a whole. The basis of compensation for the insanitary parts is by the Act of 1919 merely the cleared site value, the vacant land and nothing else. The broad moral principle underlying that system, which is a modification of the earlier provisions of the 1890 Act, is that that sort of thing ought not to be allowed to grow up and ought not to be allowed to exist. It is contrary to sound moral views, and it is contrary to the public health of the community But for the portions that are included in the scheme, not for that reason, but because it is convenient for the scheme as a whole to include them, full value has to be paid on a higher scale of valuation. You may get various buildings, like public-houses with a high compensation value, and the total cost of the scheme is often very great, apart altogether from the question of rebuilding on the site. My first suggestion is that the possibility of extending the cleared site value basis of valuation to certain other areas than those which are directly insanitary and where the broad moral principle can be invoked fairly ought to be considered. I think there are certain cases where it may be extended.

I do not apologise to the House for going into these points of detail, because they are of primary importance, and we cannot get progress rapidly unless these practical points are dealt with. The second point is this. In any improvement scheme of that kind you always have approach roads, and very often, in connection with an improvement scheme, you have large arterial roads, new roads, made. Where those roads are made and an improvement scheme is carried out, the effect nearly always is to increase the value of the neighbouring land, the land along the roads and in the neighbourhood of the scheme. That increased value at present, as a general rule, is merely presented as a gift to the owners of that neighbouring land. There are certain exceptions. But in justice it belongs to the public. It has been made, and it has been created, by the expenditure of public money and public effort, and by that alone. During the War, I had the honour of being chairman of The Land Acquisition Committee, and in our second report we unanimously reported very strongly in favour of the drastic application of the system of betterment, as it is known—the system of imposing on those owners of neighbouring property who benefit by the expenditure of public money the obligation of paying back to the public some portion at any rate of the increased value which they get. The difficulties are not in the principle, but solely in working it out in practice. They are great, but, speaking as' one with as large a knowledge, I suppose, as anybody in the House, I do not believe them to be insuperable.

There is another comparable principle which can be applied. It is usually called recoupment. It is the principle under which the authority carrying out the improvement is authorised by Statute to buy strips of land for a certain depth back along the line of improvement and bordering on it, whether it be a road or whether it be the improvement itself, and to realise the whole of the increased value by developing that property and subsequently letting it or selling it. In the case of streets, it is an easy system to carry out, but I venture to think that it ought to be carried out in connection with this whole question of the improvement of our cities by the removal of slum areas. Mark you, if that be done, and if betterment and recoupment are both applied, you at once get a substantial contribution towards either the capital or the annual expenditure that the local authority incurs in carrying out the schemes.

Lastly, over and above any possibility of a reduced scale of compensation, consistently with justice to the persons expropriated, and a recovery by means of a betterment charge or recoupment, in my submission the time has come when we are in such a position in this country that in order to get these improvement schemes through more rapidly the State ought to make a larger contribution for the specific purpose of getting the thing done quickly. There are many local authorities who hesitate very much, and there are great difficulties in the way of local authorities. It is not always easy; in fact, I may say it is always difficult to take a course which involves an increase in the rates. There are a great many people who oppose it, and there are n, great many people who are narrow-minded and who make it difficult. I suggest that the 50 per cent, limit of the 1923 Act should be raised to the highest point as is consistent with preserving the financial incentive to economy and efficiency by putting a portion of the loss on the local authority, say to 75 per cent, and, in addition, it seems to me that the initiation of the schemes at once without waiting is so urgent that the State ought to make a capital contribution at the outset towards the whole cost of the improvement scheme, regarding it as a matter of public health of the first importance.

So much for the financial suggestions that I have to make. The next point upon which I want to dwell for a few moments is that of certain practical difficulties in the way of carrying schemes out. Those practical difficulties fall under two heads. The first is that there is a sort of vicious circle, from which the local authority cannot extricate itself. You have in this central city a large area, a slum area —I call it that for shortness—[An HON. MEMBER: "It is right."] It is right in a sense, but some of the trouble is due, not to the insanitary condition of the houses, but to the overcrowding of the houses, which, in themselves, are not in- sanitary. I meant to include both. You have a district of that kind in the city. The local authority decides to clear it at the first possible moment. What has it got to do with the displaced residents? They must be re-housed. Where? The moment you ask that question, there are only two possible answers. One is to let those residents go to the outskirts of the city, where new houses are being built, if they will go—and it is a very big "if"—and house them temporarily, or permanently, in houses that may be four or five miles away, and mean a long tram ride into the city, while you are re-building the area, the other is for the local authority to acquire some large, disused warehouse, or factory sites, or yards within the centre of the city, for which they will probably have to pay an enormously high price. In either case, you have got to build for the reception of the persons displaced.

We begin with the assumption that they are far too crowded where they are, because there are not enough houses in the area. You must, therefore, have a very much larger area to house the number of persons displaced, or you must build upwards in tenement buildings, and house them on a smaller area, by having a very large number of houses to the area. One of these things has to be done. I am not sure if the displaced residents had to go to the outskirts of the City, it would not be well to give them free tram fares, or reduced rents, or some bait to tempt them to go there, because I venture to submit it is a sound principle of slum clearance, applicable to the vast majority of the persons displaced, that the population of the area should be re-housed on the same area, or within the immediate vicinity of it. It is a very important aspect of this whole question. The majority of the people who live on a given area have, as a rule, lived there for a long time. Their daily lives are so adjusted as to make that area convenient for them to carry on their daily avocations. Take my own constituency of Liverpool. There are a vast number of men employed, directly or indirectly, on the line of docks. That is a casual trade. They are engaged by the half-day; they have to attend at the dock-stand twice a day— at 6.45 and 12.45.

7.45.

It is impossible for these men, seeking work at a slack time, when it is so important to have work, to make two journeys a day from the outskirts of the city. They will not do it. The people must be re-housed approximately on the site where they have been displaced. Two things follow from that. You have to clear your site, provide temporary accommodation, at least, for the displaced residents; and, secondly, you must in the cities adopt the solution of building upwards. Most of us, I suppose, prefer houses to flats. I believe most workmen prefer houses to tenement buildings, but it is a question of the balance of advantages. It is so important for people to be within easy reach of their work, to avoid long daily journeys, that I believe the light solution is to have tenement buildings of the right kind—not the old kind, but of a kind really adapted for convenience, and with lifts to all floors, with permanent attendants, because women and children cannot manage without the lifts.

I venture to submit that is a solution of the greatest importance in dealing with this problem. Of course, it would involve an amendment of the law, or, at any rate, of the practice. Under the Ministry's Circular issued under the 1923 Act there were not to be more than 12 houses to the acre. I believe 20 is the usual limit. Under the 1924 Act there is a statutory limit of 12 per acre. Under these conditions, in the central districts of our great cities, at least the re-housing of the population, will involve as many as 60, 70, 80 or possibly 100 dwellings, to the acre. And if you can re-house in the main cities particularly, on these sites rather more than the 100 per cent., you will very quickly get a snow-ball rolling, which will solve your vicious circle problem, and enable you to clear other sites, because you will be accumulating spare accommodation in the city at the same time as you are constructing accommodation on the outskirts.

There are one or two other practical points I want to raise before the Government drafts its housing legislation of the Session. It is very important to look forward at this time. There were, before the War, a large number of small house-builders. The majority of the houses of the country—I believe over 95 per cent.— were built by private house builders, large and small. I think there were same 8,000 of them before the 1909–10 Finance Act. As soon as that Act was passed, almost all of them, or a great number of them, disappeared. Why? Because the small builder can only build if he can sell, and it was the investor in house property who, in those days, bought. I particularly commend this aspect of the matter to the consideration of the Opposition as affecting this problem very intimately. Before the Finance Act of 1909–10—the People's Budget—we all know the expression for a gilt-edged investment for a great number of people in this country was, "Safe as houses." Is there any investment that is less safe to-day than houses? We have got to restore confidence to the investor in house property if we are going to get back the small builder. Many small builders exist, and are still available to do the work, but they have got very little money, and they will have to be financed if they are to be got back. We shall not get the mass of houses built with the rapidity we want, nor the competition in the building trade to keep down prices, unless we get the private builder back in great numbers. Before the War the small builder used to rack his brains in order to see how he could save 3d. a week on a house by economy in construction.

The other fellow racked the rents.

They were very low rents, and the public gained by that competition. It was that which kept the rents down, and we want to get that state of affairs back to assist people by getting the rents down again. It may be that the development companies may be of assistance in connection with the private builder, by giving the State a guarantee, if the Trade Facilities Committee were allowed to make advances for the purpose of financing the building trade in that way. We have got to use every lever that is available. That is the point I want to emphasise. We cannot expect the local authorities to do the whole of the building. It would drive the cost of building up. We want to get it down, and it is these small people who will know how to do it. There are a vast number of brickfields out of use. They could be developed in the same way to increase the supply of bricks. I am told there is only one-third of the brickfields being used to-day which were in use in 1909. We want to get them back.

These points, although small points taken by themselves, are of great and far-reaching importance. I put them before the Minister with the greatest diffidence, but in order, if possible, to emphasise the fact that public attention to-day is being centred on all these various detailed questions of the housing problem. Let me sum up finally what I have said. The Unionist party has a great opportunity in the whole field of social reform. Unless it fulfils its mission in that field, it will be ruined as a party, and some other party will take its place. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear!"] I am glad to observe that the Opposition agree. But we can do it; we are keen on it, and if I may speak for the benches behind the Treasury Bench, I believe that the supporters of the Government mean that the Government shall do it.

I hope the political accident which has precipitated me on to this bench will not deprive me of the indulgence which is extended to any hon. Member making his first speech in this House. Complaints, I believe, have been made sometimes that I was not on former occasions a Member of this House. I should like to say that it was not my fault that I was not here on an earlier occasion. I have been listening with the greatest interest to the Debate which has been proceeding here during the last few days, and already I have been struck by the fact that on a very large number of actual legislative proposals there is a far more common line in this House than would appear to people who have just gone through a General Election. I do believe, for example, from the speech of the hon. and learned Member who has just sat down, that he is prepared—and that many other hon. Members on the opposite benches are prepared—to work with us in seeing if we cannot come nearer to a solution of the housing problem. I am quite sure that people like myself, who represent constituencies where really it is quite the exception to find a single house which is decently built, will begin with the actual facts of the situation, and come reluctantly after that to discuss about 'isms—socialisms and individualisms and the like. They will begin with the actual physical necessities of the people as we find them. Therefore, I think that any Member of this House on the other side who in any way impedes the progress of the necessary social legislation because of some particular theory or political purpose is doing a very bad service to the people whom he was sent here to represent. But I want to say that the co-operation, if co-operation it may be, must be mutual. There are several hopes expressed in the Gracious Speech that unity will be found in industry and in various classes of social work. I think that that unity will be very seriously imperilled if the suggestions are made in this House, which have certainly been made outside by many hon. Members opposite, that this party to which I have the honour to belong is not as concerned with proper social reform, and not as concerned with the maintenance and the integrity of this country, as are hon. Members opposite.

In other words, I think—if I may suggest it in all humility—that the suggestion which has been made that we on these benches are a kind of secret revolutionaries going about with dark lanterns to cause explosions, apparently for the mere amusement of doing the thing, might well be given up, and if we are to have some measure of understanding in our working in the House, we must give as well as take in these particular matters.

Hear, hear!

I do not believe that hon. Members opposite do think in their minds that we are those dangerous and subversive persons that the newspapers tell us we are. I do not think they believe it themselves. While every one of us here is going to reserve every right to criticise everything that is done—I have already heard some hon. Members on this side of the House referred to in unflattering terms by the newspapers as extremists—whatever that means—we will willingly co-operate with the Government in making legislation effective and permanent. Therefore, now we are hero I hope that this kind of mutual recrimination will cease or, at any rate, recrimination against us—because I do not think we have ever said these things of hon. Members opposite—at most we have pointed out that some of them may have been more moved by considerations of private than of public welfare; we have never described them as murderers, as seditious persons, as dangerous to the State, or any other of the criminal designations that have been attached to us. At most we have suggested that the desire for wealth has entered too greatly into their interests.

I should like, if I may, to discuss for a few moments some of the matters dealt with in His Majesty's Gracious Speech, matters which have so far not received the consideration of this House. I want to slay, in the first place, that I am sure we are all extremely pleased to see that the legislation which has to deal with factories, in the codification of the Factory Acts, is to be continued. The Home Office has been working on this very much-needed codification for very many years. We have not had a comprehensive Factory Act for over 20 years. It would be a great tragedy if the mere change of Government had deprived us of the benefits of all the work which has been put into this factory legislation. It is a good thing that the Government tell us in the Gracious Speech that they propose to go on with the factory legislation which we introduced. Next, I should like to ask exactly what is meant by the reference to the other Measures to be presented for the consolidation of the law of property? I understand that in a few days it is proposed that the operation of the Measure, which is already on the Statute Book, should be postponed for another year. I should like to know, and a good many other persons in practice would like to know, where the Government stand in regard to' this Measure for the consolidation of the law of real property. This has been put forward as the enormous tour de force of Lord Birkenhead. It was passed into law. We are now told that it is impossible to make it work. We are asked to postpone it and are told that it is likely very shortly to be divided into three or four parts. I presume the Measure is one which relates to the law of real property. It cannot be a counterblast to the proposals of the Labour party. When the consolidation of the law of property is spoken of, it must be something different from them.

Again, we are told that there is to be a reform of the system of rating and valuation. Perhaps we shall be told exactly what that means. It may mean many different things. There is no doubt at all that our present system of valuation has to-day got into most extraordinary and expensive confusion. I suggest that possibly it is a little premature to introduce legislation dealing with rating till the matter has been considered by the existing Commission on Local Government, with an extended reference rather more fully in connection with general national taxation and liability to assessment for Income Tax—national taxation as well as merely local taxation.

I now come to a matter about which I speak quite for myself and which gives me some personal anxiety. I mean the question of a Bill to deal with legitimation by second marriage. I hope that this Bill will follow the provisions which I thought were inserted in another place—that persons divorced cannot subsequently take advantage of this Measure—that if a child was born before the divorce they cannot afterwards make that child legitimate with the subsequent consummation of the divorce and on remarriage. It has been pointed out, I think, in this House that you might get a system which would be very like the legalisation of bigamy. The guilty party may cause a child to be born, and may then get a divorce, and subsequently legitimate the child, and then proceed to do the same thing over again. While the general system of legitimation is certainly perfectly right, and has the additional advantage, in my opinion, of being supported by canon law, one must remember that the old system of legitimation existed before divorce was known in its present form. I hope the question of the effect of divorce on legitimation will not be forgotten when this Bill is introduced.

There is a proposal for dealing with the guardianship of children. That, I take it, is the Bill which the late Government introduced into the House of Lords. It was an agreed Measure. I happened to be a member of the Committee which discussed the matter with Mrs. Wintringham, Lord Askwith, and the other people interested, and we arrived at a common measure of agreement as to the Guardianship of Infants Bill. I hope the Bill which is to be re-introduced will be the Bill to which all the interested parties agreed during the last Parliament. I do not wish to take up the time of the House unduly, but I do just wish, in conclusion, to say this: I have been struck very much by the change, as it seems to me, in the outlook which is shown by this particular House compared with the outlook shown 10 or 15 years ago, considering what I have heard of the Debates then, and read of them. The right hon. Gentleman who represents Spen Valley (Sir J. Simon) pointed out that the party opposite 10 or 15 years ago were opposed to the very things they support to-day. I do not complain of that in the least. I think that is a testimony to the influence which the party with which I am associated has had upon this House.

If any question arises as to the usefulness of this party I should like the House and the country to consider how fast this legislation would have proceeded if the Labour party had never been born! Is it a mere accident that over five million persons to-day are concerned for the social conditions under which they find themselves? Are they satisfied that the way in which things are going on to-day are likely to bring us any real betterment? Is it not an extraordinary fact that all these people should be voting as they are and that this party should be increasing as it is increasing, whatever may be the particular number of Members, unless there is something very radically wrong with the system of life which is defended by the whole of this House outside of that body? It is idle to suggest that an agitator, or even a number of agitators, whether in Russia or elsewhere, have moved the great masses of the people to send here, in increasing numbers, members of this party. It has been pointed out, over and over again, how miraculous the growth of this party in the House has been, how they have usurped, or, at any rate, occupied the position occupied at one time by hon. Gentlemen below the Gangway. In my submission, everything that is a most vital reform in political and economic democracy has now gravitated to the Labour party. The Labour party have fought against every conceivable obstacle. They have not had the Press on their side. The party have lacked the use of conveyances at the elections, and, above all, most of those persons concerned with it have always worked under these conditions: that the men who have built up the Labour party have mostly been employed by persons opposed to it, and therefore they have taken their lives in their hands. That shows, I think, to the most stern opponent of Labour that, after all, there is something very wrong with the conditions under which we are living to-day. As a matter of fact, just after the War, when the Ministry of Re-construction was selecting those great records afterwards to be made the subject of inquiry, and then lost, it was stated by people of every shade of opinion that our industrial system was inhumane, that it needed that the worker should be given a share in the control of industry, and that the mere hiring or employment of the workers by large and inhuman, trusts was bound to lead in the end to a class war which some hon. Members opposite—

Mr. Wheatley!

The Ministry of Reconstruction Report was signed by employers, trade union leaders and all kinds of people of different shades of opinion, and the Ministry recommended, in one Report after another, that the workers of this country should be given a share in the control and the conduct of industry. Nothing was done. One of the few attempts which was made by the workers themselves, I mean in the engineering trades through the use of shop stewards, was crushed at that time through the instrumentality of the Employer's Federation. Nothing was done by the State, and the whole thing again was beaten down. I regret that in the King's Speech there is no recognition of this natural and human need for the ordinary man to have a share and vocational interest in his work, of work which is becoming a mere matter of repetition, so that the people more and more look to find their enjoyment in their leisure and not in their occupation at all. It is thoroughly unsound. It is bound to be so so long: as you deny the ordinary worker a share of control in the industry which will give him a sense of humanity and a sense of responsibility. I am not one of those who think one can leave these matters merely to the play of economic forces. People talk of economic laws, but there are also moral laws, and there are also aesthetic laws operating in these matters, and as I see these things, repetition work in the factory and the annihilation of any personal relationship between the employer and the worker, are bound to lead to a cleavage of interest, and a feeling on the part of the worker that, when all is said and done, this country is not for him, that he is merely a cog in the wheel for the production of wealth. That is the moral point of view, independent of pounds, shillings and pence. It is a real human need that people should have restored to them a sense of vocational interest.

I am emboldened to make this point because not long ago I happened to serve on a Committee of C.O.P.E.C. in which a very prominent Member of this House who sits on the opposite benches also took part. He and I signed a joint report. He was a Conservative. I was not a Conservative. That report lays down that the object of industry should be service and not gain. When an hon. Member made a similar remark last night it was not received with great enthusiasm on the benches opposite. Yet this leading member of the Conservative party found himself compelled to sign that report, which we can all read, called "The Report on Profit in Industry," issued by C.O.P.E.C., advocating that the substitution of service for gain is what is needed in industry. I always like to think well, and I think I am entitled to think well, of my fellow people, and I believe that on every side of the House, both across the Floor and above the Gangway on this side and in every party, people are more and more coming to this point of view. The last speech we heard, from my hon. and learned Friend the Member for the Exchange Division of Liverpool (Sir L. Scott) showed that very clearly; but I am equally clear that there are other influences working in a contrary direction; and the real problem in the struggle which I think is going to take place, if I may say so with complete respect, amongst Members opposite is whether the social reformers are going to win the day or whether it is to be won by those who take the narrower outlook. It is our business, seeing that we are in a minority, to work to help to get through legislation which we think necessary, to support those who we think are working in the right direction. But the two parties are there, it is evident there are two parties, and I have heard from the same party expressions of opinion some of which were indistinguishable from those of my colleagues on these benches, and others which have horrified me by their inhumanity and want of recognition of the development of the world.

I do not know how far I am in order in analysing the principles of the party opposite as they express themselves in the King's Speech. A great deal of what is now called the Conservative party is really the old Whig Liberal party. The sentiment of extraordinary veneration for commerce at the expense of everything else was a thing which old Conservatives would have denounced as coming from Manchester, and the sort of thing you heard from that school of thought. What has happened is that the old Conservative party, which stood primarily, as it seems to me, for the interest in land, and had this in common with us, that they regarded the community as an estate and not merely as a collection of warring individuals, has gradually been eaten up by the party which—with every courtesy I use the word—I can only call the plutocratic party. My sympathy is with the older Conservative party.

I will give you an example of what I mean. There is another ancient institution quite as ancient and far more sacred than the institution of property; I mean the institution of marriage. Yet although hon. Members call themselves Conservatives I know there are many persons in the Conservative party who wish, by extending the divorce laws and in other ways, to break down that ancient institution, or at any rate to make it rather lighter than it is to-day. I can understand a Conservative who stands for the protection of all these ancient institutions, but the vice or the tendency of the modern Conservative party is that the only thing which it is concerned with now is cash. We can meet on common ground, I think, with those who are really concerned to make this country a beautiful social State, but we have nothing in common with those who think that this country is to be used by the avaricious for the purpose of creating more wealth for the individual.

We read in the King's Speech the desire for unity and the desire for many things which we appreciate. But the opposite is present too. It is present in the insistence on what they call economy, which means relieving the taxation on certain people and failure to use the money which ought to have been derived from that taxation for social purposes. That ideal we entirely denounce. We use the word "economy" in the Greek sense—we are all economists, but if by economy it is meant that my constituents are to continue to live in the houses in which they live to-day, are to continue to have the medical treatment which they receive to-day, and the absence of proper educational facilities which they lack—if they are to receive that treatment in order that some wealthy gentleman may pay 6d. less on Super-tax—if that is the Conservative programme, we are inexorably opposed to anything of that sort. That is the issue. The issue does not lie with us at all. It lies with you, as to which side of your party is going to triumph in this particular matter; and in this great Titanic contest we of the Labour party will be interested and sympathetic spectators.

May I first congratulate the hon. and learned Member who has just spoken on his very interesting and able speech. His reputation was so well known to us during the last Parliament that it is difficult to realise that this is the first opportunity he has had of addressing the House. I feel I may assure him that his contributions to our further Debates will always be welcomed. I must apologise for altering the course of the Debate from the subjects which have been dealt with in the last few speeches. I wish to say a word or two about the problems affecting ex-service men. I think it is unnecessary to remind the House of what ex-service men have done, but I would like to make the point that the ex-service man was not always an ex-service man, that not very long ago the "ex" was not before his name, and that he was then a man on very active service, and in those days nothing was considered to be too good for him. He may have been spoiled by the promises given to him then—I do not admit that he was—but, in any event, if parents spoil a child by promises, they are none the less responsible for looking after him. I do not want to go into the general question, but there are two particular points which I wish to raise concerning the Ministry of Pensions, and I would like to say in passing how very glad we are to see the Member for Brighton (Major Tryon) back in his old position. He always treated the ex-service men with great sympathy and understanding during the Administration before the last one, and I am quite sure he will continue to do so.

There are two specific points I wish to raise, one about the final awards, and the other about the time limit for pensions. The final awards came into force on 1st January, 1922, and between that date and the end of September, 1924, well under two years, 434,907 final awards were made. Out of this number only 182,000 resulted in the granting of permanent pensions. That means that in the remainder, 253,000 cases, men have all been awarded pensions which are under 20 per cent. They have all, therefore, been given allowances for a certain limited number of weeks, after which they have been wiped off the Ministry of Pensions' books. They are no longer in receipt of pensions, and they no longer have any claim on the country. I do not think that is a satisfactory state of things, and I would like to explain why. Men in receipt of final awards, both under 20 per cent, and over 20 per cent., are entitled under present Regulations to put in an appeal, but the value of being allowed to put in an appeal is not really very great. In the first place, when these Regulations came into force in January, 1922, every man who had received a final award before the previous August—August, 1921—was automatically adjudged to have had a, final award. He was allowed to appeal within 12 months from that January, but he was never notified of the fact. Notices may have been put into the newspapers and notices may have been stuck up in post offices—I do not know if that is so—but I do know that the individual man was never notified. We all know what our ex-service men are. We know that unless they are definitely told they can do such-and-such a thing they are very unlikely to know anything about it. Another reason why the permission to appeal is not worth very much is this. When men are given a final award, they are "boarded" by the Ministry of Pensions' doctors, who after a certain amount of consideration, very careful consideration, I am quite sure, decide that a man is not likely to get worse, and they make their award on the assumption that he is likely to remain the same for the whole of his life. At first the pensioner is quite likely to be satisfied. After all, if the Ministry of Pensions' Board think he is likely to remain in that condition for the rest of his life it is not likely they are so wrong that he will get worse within the first 12 months, and the appeal has got to be put in in the first 12 months. It is afterwards that the man gets worse, and, therefore, the right to appeal is not worth very much.

Some time ago in Swansea the chief medical men of the town, co-operating with the British Legion, discussed the eligibility of these men to put in another appeal. These medical men, the most eminent in Swansea, were astounded by the fact that so many men came before them who were obviously suffering either from wounds or disease contracted during the War, directly traceable to the War, and who yet were not in receipt of pension. They decided to go further into the question. An independent committee of medical men in Swansea was formed to consider that question, and they came to the conclusion, which I think will be backed up by medical men in this House, that there are certain disabilities which it is impossible for any medical man to say definitely will not alter. They specified the following: organic diseases of the heart, chronic pulmonary diseases, rheumatism, gunshot wounds and diseases of the joints. They gave it definitely as their opinion that men suffering from these particular diseases were more likely to get worse than better. Therefore, to say definitely that those men should be in receipt of a fixed pension would be unfair and unjust, and not really what the country desired.

6.0 P.M.

I would just like to give one illustration. It is the case of the man suffering disability from tuberculosis of rib attributable to service. An assessment of 75 per cent, was granted in 1916, and this was reduced to 20 per cent, in 1917, and remained at that rate until 1922. In 1922 a final award was granted of 6 to 14 per cent, indeterminate duration, carrying with it an allowance of 7s. 6d. per week for 104 weeks plus a terminal gratuity of £20. In February, 1924, two independent doctors examined this man, and both gave certificates testifying to his debilitated condition, and the presence of pain and permanent disablement. They emphasised the fact that the man was in the same condition that he was in four years ago requiring constant medical advice and attention, frequent periods of rest and unable to perform heavy work. It will be seen that in this particular case the Ministry medical officers are of opinion that the disability is of indeterminate duration.

I have other cases here, but I will not trouble the House with them. There is Circular No. 30, issued in May, 1924, which attempts to deal with this problem, and on reading it through in the first instance it seems quite fair, but in reality it is not, and it does not work out in practice as it ought to do and as I am sure the Minister of Pensions would like it. The men who complain that their final awards were erroneously made may apply to a War Pensions Committee for treatment. If whilst under treatment the Ministry and others approve they may apply to a special board sitting in London. That board is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Pensions, and it may revoke a former decision and say that an award is not final. Therefore, that award is definitely under the Ministry of Pensions. I claim that all final decisions ought to be under the jurisdiction of an independent tribunal. There are such tribunals in existence, and they have always worked very well, but when they come under the Ministry of Pensions for a final decision and the matter is placed in the hands of the Ministry, then the ex-service man may suffer. I am not making any reflections upon the Minister, but obviously Ministers of Pensions are biased by the rules and regulations which they draw up themselves. Therefore, I think the final decisions ought to be in the bands of an independent tribunal.

Final awards may be divided into two classes, those which are over 20 per cent, and those which are under 20 per cent. We are pressing for a complete revision of these final awards which have been given at under 20 per cent. by which a man is given a lump sum. The Ministry may tell me that we are acting illogically, and say that if men who have been awarded a pension under 20 per cent, get worse, why should not men of over 20 per cent, get worse in the same way. My answer is that in many cases they do get worse, but it would obviously be a tremendous undertaking to revise the whole of the Pensions' Regulations, and a man in receipt of a pension of over 20 per cent, will at any rate get something from the State for the rest of his life and his name will always remain in the Pensions Ministry books. Therefore, he cannot feel so dissatisfied as the man who is getting nothing whatsoever.

That is all I want to say on this particular question, but I would like to add something about the seven years' limit. It affects two classes of people, the actual pensioner and his widow. It used to be the case that if a man did not claim his pension within seven years of his discharge from hospital he was not eligible for a pension, and unless he died within seven years of being discharged his widow was not entitled to claim a pension. It is very difficult for a man to prove that he is suffering from a disability contracted during the War, and that ought not to be any reason for not granting him an allowance. These cases do not amount to much, but if they were dealt with it would remove a very great grievance, and these men are now being penalised.

With regard to the case of the widows, some concessions have been granted. I raised this question on the 5th June, 1923, in the House, and, as a result, a new warrant was issued in January, 1924, which gave certain concessions which were satisfactory so far as they went, but they did not go far enough. Two specific points were laid down. First of all, the man himself must be in receipt of a pension at the time of his death; otherwise, his widow cannot claim. The other point laid down is that his death must be wholly due to the nature or condition of the disability in respect of which the pension was awarded, such nature or condition having resulted directly from his war service.

I would like to give an illustration of each case to show how unfairly they operate. In one case a man was pensioned for chronic bronchitis aggravated by service, and he died seven years and three months after discharge from tuberculosis of the lungs. No pension was granted to the widow, because the man's pension ceased two months before he died. It is admitted in this case that the cause of death was directly due to the invaliding disability, but the widow has no appeal because the husband was not receiving a pension. The other case was that of a man receiving a 100 per cent, pension for pulmonary tuberculosis which was aggravated by service. He died over seven years from the time he was discharged from pulmonary tuberculosis and exhaustion. Likewise his widow gets no pension, and her claim was turned down under Article 17B. She made an application for a modified pension under Article 17A which gives the Minister a certain amount of latitude, but it was refused. Those are two anomalies and wrongs which every ex-service man wants to see put right. During the Election a great many societies and association sent questionnaires to the candidates for Parliament, and they received overwhelming support on these points. The Prime Minister himself said that:

I quite realise, in rising so early to address this House, that I am not qualifying as a budding statesman under your definition, Mr. Speaker, when you spoke to us upon your election, but I feel that as the only woman Member in Opposition I have a duty to raise certain matters on the King's Speech. I therefore throw myself upon the well-known courtesy of this House, which I am told is always extended to beginners who seek its favour. Women as a whole are very disappointed that there is no mention in the King's Speech of any alteration of the present franchise by extending it to women between the ages of 21 and 30. This is a more important matter than it might appear on the surface. I can understand that there might be a general feeling that as such a large number of women now have the vote it is not such a serious matter whether women are of a certain age or not.

In actual practice, however, it works out like this. The present franchise law, by disfranchising women between 21 and 30 years of age, definitely cuts out a very important class of women who badly need the protection of this House. It is a fact that most women engaged in industry by the time they are 30 are married, but the period between 21 to 30 years of age is the period when working-class women are engaged in industry. There is a definitely indirect effect that comes from their disfranchisement, and, if the House will bear with me, I want to give just one or two examples of how, indirectly, women who are not voters suffer by that fact. Take, for example, the Unemployment Insurance Act. Under the Government previous to the last one, instructions were issued to the rota committees that women under 30 who were living with their parents, or who could be discovered to have any relatives with whom they might live, were not to be granted, except on very special conditions, what is known as uncovenanted benefit. No such disability was imposed on men of that age, and I venture to suggest that this fact that a woman under 30, though she may have earned her living since she was 14, must be deemed, if possible, to have some relative with whom she could live, was a result of the way in which the class of non-voters are dealt with. I suggest that had these women been voters they could not so easily have been deprived of their rights.

Then take the question of relief work for unemployed women. The woman worker pays her extra 2d. levy every week, just as the man does, to provide funds for dependants of the unemployed; but how few women, as a matter of fact, ever get any benefit from that fund, to which they contribute equally with the men. Since the unemployment crisis became so acute, millions have been spent on relief work, but, with the exception of a very few training schools, not one penny has been spent on relief work for women. It is usually said that there is no possibility of relief work for women. I know that, even in the present stage of their emancipation, they are hardly yet claiming to dig reservoirs or make roads, but none the less there has not been an inquiry into the possibility of finding, say in the public health services, new outlets for women's work. I venture to suggest to the House that, had the women been voters, their claim would have received more attention from the Government. Then take the question of trade boards Here you have a piece of legislation where the vast majority of the people affected by that legislation are women under 30. There is, as everyone knows who has anything to do with the administration of the Trade Boards Act, wholesale evasion of this Act going on in the country. We have repeatedly pressed for an extension of the inspectorate. We are told that it would cost too much money, that it cannot be done, and all the rest of it; but I venture to suggest to this House that if the employers concerned, instead of avoiding payment due to women—and, of course, men too— whom they employ, had been avoiding the payment of Income Tax, there would soon have been a means to bring them to book. I am not, of course, suggesting that it is merely because the women have not got votes that inspectors are not appointed; that would be absurd; but, in these illustrations which I have given, I am merely suggesting that the whole tendency has been—as it is bound to be in a House where we must all be concerned primarily with those who vote for us—to neglect the interests of those who have no votes.

I would urge the Government to take this matter into consideration. I agree that, as the Prime Minister said yesterday, everything could not be mentioned. The Prime Minister has written a pamphlet; if he had to mention everything he would have had to write a book. I would, however, ask the Government whether it is not possible, during this Session, to bring in this necessary rectification of the franchise law. I can assure the Members of this House that they need not be afraid of us. It was always said, before a few of us got into these sacred places, that women would always vote together, and that, as there were so many more of us than there are of men, it would be rather a bad lookout for the men; but that that has not happened is shown by the fact that there are only four women— orphans of the storm, as it were—who are left in this House. Leaving that for the moment, may I turn to the question of widows' pensions? I must say that every one of us feels extremely glad that this question of widows' pensions, for which many of us on these benches have fought for years, has been brought to the forefront of practical politics; but I must say that, while this is a reform that is desperately needed and long overdue, we are very concerned when we read in the Speech that it is proposed to combine widows' pensions with existing schemes of insurance. The widows who will benefit under any proposed scheme will obviously be largely the widows of men injured in industry, or of men who die prematurely as the result of modern conditions of industry; and, as I must impress upon this House, the conditions of industry, owing to speeding up and owing to the cutting of wages, are becoming more and more hard on the workmen every year. I suggest, therefore, that, at a time when the wages of the industrial workers are in many cases below the level of any decent subsistence, and women's wages in particular have been cut to a point at which it is almost impossible for many of these women to live without some other assistance, to place upon them directly a part—and a large part—of the burden of providing widows' pensions is not fair.

May I just pray the patience of Members while I give one instance of a large factory with which I have been concerned as a trade union organiser, and which is considered to be a factory under model conditions, where the employer is considered to be one of the best employers in the country? There, those girls get 27s. a week, and some Members here may be surprised to learn that that, as things go, is not a very low wage. Yet some of these girls have to pay 3s. a week and more for railway fares. If, in addition to the already heavy burden of insurance, they have to pay for widows' pensions also, although to some of those here it may only seem a matter of coppers, it does mean a very great deal to them. I do urge, therefore, that, under any scheme of widows' pensions, they ought to be non-contributory. I thought it was a very ominous remark that was made by the Mover of the Address—I do not know whether he was speaking officially for his party or not—when he urged the bringing of the insurance companies into the widows' pensions scheme. Surely, even in this House, private enterprise is not to be allowed to make a profit out of the necessities of the people. These women, after all, are performing a service to the State, for they are bringing up their children for the State. We are now recognising that they ought to be allowed to bring up their children in the best possible conditions, and these widows should have pensions as a right. I thank the House for its patience in listening to me.

I am sure I shall be voicing the views of the whole House in congratulating the hon. Member (Miss Wilkinson) who has just resumed her seat. She has had the very trying ordeal of making a maiden speech at the beginning of a Session, and I am sure she has passed through that ordeal with flying, in fact with flaming, colours. I am quite certain that the cause of the younger women, which I also have at heart, is perfectly safe in her hands. May I also say, without going over the ground that was so admirably covered by the hon. and gallant Member for Fairfield (Major Cohen), that I am sure he has the support of the great majority of the House in the two proposals which he made. We have just come from an election, and every hon. Member knows that the ex-service men are insistent on these two questions of the abolition of the seven years' limit in certain cases and the right of review where the final award was mistakenly given. I should like, however, particularly to draw the attention of the Minister to the very serious complaints that are being made about one appeal tribunal in particular, namely, the appeal tribunal of Leeds. As regards the Hull men, and, I believe, the East Riding ex-service men generally, they do complain of harsh treatment in very many cases at the hands of the Leeds Appeal Tribunal, and I invite the right hon. Gentleman to compare the statistics of cases turned down and refused revision by the Leeds Tribunal with those from other parts of the country. I believe he would find that for some reason or other the Leeds Tribunal is particularly harsh on ex-service men, and I think the matter should be taken up. I have collected some statistics, and the right hon. Gentleman shall have them.

I wish to follow the example of brevity which has been set by my hon. Friend who has just sat down, and which is always very desirable, especially at the beginning of a Session, and I only wish to touch on two matters, which I think are of extreme importance. The first was dealt with by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Sir J. Simon) earlier in the afternoon, but I think it is worth while to refer to it again from these benches. It is the question of Inter-Allied debts. When the present Prime Minister, during his former period of office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was sent to the United States of America, and, faced as he was with a very difficult problem, made a certain settlement, which we are now carrying out, I took it upon myself to approve of that settlement. It received a great deal of criticism from some of my friends and from some in the right hon. Gentleman's own party, but I took steps to find out the feeling of America on this matter, and sounded people who knew about the matter in this country, and I came to the conclusion that it was the only possible settlement that could have been made. [An HON. MEMBER: "Thank you!"] If the hon. Gentleman had been here before, he would know that I have been quite consistent for some years in that. But the situation has been changed by the reported conversations in Washington between the very able French gentleman representing the French Treasury and the American financial authorities; and if it be a fact that the French Government are going to begin paying the United States Government a portion of their debt, and also that the United States Government are going to excuse or forgive France a part of her debt to America, then the whole position is altered, and I think that very energetic action should be taken by this country in two directions: firstly, to see whether some payment could not be obtained from France and Italy for this country—it is stated that the same sort of negotiations are beginning between Italy and the United States—and, secondly, in the direction of asking, and asking with some insistence, that if these two dear Allies of ours are forgiven a portion of their debt by the United States, America, that we should be forgiven a portion of ours also.

Hon. Members opposite have been taking a firm attitude during the last few weeks about the debts owed to this country by Russia. In point of equity we are just as entitled to take a strong line about the debts owed to us by other Allies who have better means of paying than Russia. After all, in France taxation is very low indeed. My hon. Friend (Bethnal Green) gave the figures for 1922 of the whole of the French Income Tax, and they are astonishing. £44,000,000 is all that is raised by Income Tax from a wealthy country like France with an enormous rentier class which could well be taxed for this purpose. During the same period we were paying from £300,000,000 to £320,000,000 in Income Tax alone. Those figures show the extraordinary difference between direct taxation in the two countries. We are this year, I presume, going to pay between £200,000,000 and £250,000,000 in Income Tax alone. When you take with that the fact that France is spending enormous sums on a great air service and is building mighty ocean-going submarines, both of which have to be answered by expenditure in this country, it is clear that in view of the altered situation immediate and energetic diplomatic action is required, and when the Chancellor of the Exchequer returns to that bench, I hope he will find the means of giving some indication of the way the Government view this matter. It may be necessary for us to stiffen the French Government in the way of taxing its own citizens. I think that would also improve French credit, and in the long run it would be of benefit for the French nation to pay adequate taxation and to begin to pay their debts to us.

The other matter I wish to touch on is not irrelevant to this discussion. It is a point of view which has not been men- tioned. We have heard a great deal about the Zinovieff letter, and a demand has been made, quite rightly, by the Leader of the Opposition and by the hon. Member for Platting (Mr. Clynes) for an investigation into the circumstances of that letter, which, of course, I support to the full. May I say, in passing, that I hope we are not going to spend our time in this Parliament, on this side of the House, in sniping at each other. I and some of my Friends do not consider hon. Members above the Gangway as the common foe. We have a powerful foe, well entrenched, opposite—I say this in the most friendly way—and we have need, and the country has need, of all our artillery, all our sharp shooters, and they should be firing straight across the Table and not at the flanks, if I may put forward the suggestion with all humility and diffidence. I have sat in three parts of the House in the short time I have been in it, but I have always had the same principles. When I say I support their action in demanding this inquiry into the Zinovieff letter, I am quite sincere.

But there is another matter about this letter. It was not only signed by Zinovieff; it was also signed by a British subject, a not unknown man; in fact, he was considered important enough actually to contest your seat, Sir, some five years ago. I refer to Mr. McManus. He is in this country. I understood in the election that if hon. Members opposite were returned there was going to be no tampering with the loyalty of the forces. I quite agree with them. I am also against any tampering with the loyalty of the forces. If this letter was genuine it was a direct incitement to disaffection amongst the troops and the men of the Navy, a most cowardly offence, because the punishment is much less than that of the men whom they seduce from their duty. This man is a British subject. I am sorry the Home Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer are not on the bench. I believe the latter looks upon himself as the hammer of the Bolshevists. Why has this man McManus not been arrested? If this letter is genuine, as the Government say they believe it is—I suppose hon. Members really believe what they were saying in the Election—they must have believed the signatures were genuine and therefore this man McManus has committed a very terrible crime. We have heard that they are not going to have any nonsense from Communists, but are going to use the iron fist. I hope there is going to be an inquiry into the Campbell case. But here we have a clear case where this man, according to hon. Members opposite, ought to be laid by the heels. He ought to be brought to trial. Why is he not put on trial. If they have this evidence let them use it and make an example of this man who signs this terrible letter, which has had such splendid results for the party opposite. I should like hon. Members to examine their consciences and consider, if their strong protestations in the genuineness of the letter are correct, why do they not take action? They cannot hurt Russia. They cannot get hold of Zinovieff, but they can get hold of his partner in crime, McManus. Why do they not arrest him and bring him to trial? That is a simple question. I see the Noble Lord the Member for Battersea (Viscount Curzon) on the Front Bench. He has very strong views on this question of Bolshevism. May I request him, as an old colleague in the House, to represent these views to the Home Secretary and to his new leader the right hon. Gentleman for Epping (Mr. Churchill) and let us see that this matter is probed to the bottom in the Law Courts, even if the Government will not accept the Russian invitation to put it before a neutral tribunal.

I belong to the category which the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Spen Valley (Sir J. Simon) has described as the "new boys". My recollection of my school days is not so old that I forget the frigidity and the outer darkness into which one was cast in one's first term, nor have I forgotten my experience at Oxford when as a freshman I was denied access to the warmth of the common room fire—the same common room fire to which 10 years previously the right hon. and learned Gentleman himself had been denied access in the same way. I feel, therefore, that some word of explanation and apology is due for my apparent temerity. I have served a short apprenticeship in one of the overseas Parliaments, the youngest child of this ancient mother of Parliaments, the Indian Imperial Assembly, so that I do not come here quite as an unfledged new boy. I want to travel rather a long way from the ground which has been covered by recent speakers in this Debate. The topic an which I have some small authority to speak, if on any, is that of Indian affairs. I have spent a considerable portion of the latter part of my life in India, and I should like to say a few words in reference to the mention of India in the Gracious Speech from the Throne. First of all, may I make some sort of reply to the remarks of the hon. Baronet in regard to the attitude of the new members of the Conservative party to this problem of Imperial Preference? It appears to me, in view of my knowledge of the tea trade in India, and of the immense benefit conferred on it by the Imperial Preference which has been given since 1919, that his remarks on the subject were largely of the nature merely of forensic pleading. There still remain on the list of Customs Duties accepted by the late Chancellor of the Exchequer a large number of duties on foodstuffs which admit of a very valuable Imperial Preference, and it seems to me that without any additional taxation on food or any abandonment of the position we took up during the election the Government are perfectly capable of giving every encouragement to overseas industries, which is a most important plank in his platform. At present the tea coming from India and Ceylon has a preference of 1s. 6d. as compared with tea coming from Java or any foreign country. The Indian Government has made its public acknowledgment of the enormous benefits the Indian tobacco industry has derived from the preference given to it. So long as we have a Budget of a total of some £800,000,000, so long as the necessity remains to impose duties on foodstuffs, it is possible, within the latitude of the definite pledges given by the Prime Minister, to extend that encouragement to Imperial industries which we on this side of the House, I am certain, are all strongly in favour of.

I should like to say a word in regard to the Zinovieff letter, in connection similarly with my Indian experience and the light thrown on that document by the Cawnpore Bolshevist conspiracy trial last April. I should like to ask the Under-Secretary for India whether it will not be possible, now that he has rejected the appeal of those four men who were sentenced to five or six years' penal servitude, for the records of the case to be published in this country, because included in those records are five or six documents emanating from officials of the Third International which bear the closest possible family resemblance to the Zinovieff document. If those documents can be produced and dealt with on the lines of the historical criticism which Professor Pollard carried out on the documents of the Tudor period, if it is not possible to prove the authenticity of that copy on which the recent decision has been come to, it is at least possible to get similar documents from the records of that Cawnpore trial and to show that in terminology, in spirit, in aim, in everything, that letter shows a most extraordinary parallel to these documents.

My prinicipal object in intervening in the Debate was to call attention to the somewhat scanty notice given to India in the Gracious Speech from the Throne. There is a mention in the King's Speech of that tremendous Empire, for which this House still bears the main responsibility, but it appears to be almost wholly in connection with industrial matters and economic relationships between India and this country. If I am to observe the rules of this House, I must approach this main Indian topic through the channel of these economic relations. The last four or five years have been scarcely satisfactory as far as this country or India have been concerned, in regard to Anglo-Indian economic relations. We have had, since the Indian reforms were instituted, a considerable amount of legislation carried through the Imperial Assembly in India, nearly all of which has tended, or will ultimately tend, rather in the direction of restriction of trade between this country and India than in the direction of the improvement of that trade.

May I remind the House, as I reminded my constituents during the recent Election, that the total value of British goods going to India each year exceeds £90,000,000, which is nearly five times as great as the value of British goods going to Russia in the year before the War? Our trade with Russia excites so much interest and so much attention on the benches above the Gangway. If the ambition of the late Government in seeking an alliance with Russia, and making it a loan of from £30,000,000 to £40,000,000, was to improve our trade position, and diminish unemployment in this country, it seems to me absolutely incomprehensible why some great market of the British Empire, like India, was not chosen for this special attention, rather than an external country in a position of bankruptcy such as Russia is to-day.

It is an undoubted fact that at the present time the amount of British capital that could be expended beneficially in India, and that would produce wonderful results, is incalculable. Anyone who will study the Report on the position of the railways in India will realise the position of neglect and deterioration into which the Indian railways fell during the long period of the War, and the expenditure of railway profits on works other than the railways. In that sphere alone, following upon that inquiry and with a really energetic endeavour, a tremendous sum of money could be spent in that country, and the results that would accrue in favour of our trade and of Indian trade would be very great.

May I refer to another aspect of the economic tendencies in India which are interfering with the development of Anglo-Indian trade? I refer to the Act which passed through the Assembly last July which imposed very heavy duties on the steel products going from this country to India. The total value of our steel trade with India is £30,000,000. Duties were imposed in favour of the iron and steel industry in India, ranging from 15 per cent. to 27 per cent. or 28 per cent. ad valorem on every class of mild steel, and certain manufactured steel going from this country to India. The late Government were aware of the enormous significance of that duty for the trade of this country. They knew how much unemployment was likely to ensue from it, but, so far as I know, no serious endeavour was made to bring the seriousness of the position to the attention of the Indian Government. At any rate, there is no visible effect of their having done so.

If the promise given in the Gracious Speech is to be carried out, and if every step is to be taken to secure close co-operation with a view to industrial improvement and so forth in both countries, then, when any project of this kind is forthcoming from India, most careful inquiry should be made as to whether the Indian Government are in agreement with the Indian Assembly in regard to the matter. A main canon laid down by the Joint Committee of this House and the other House in regard to Indian affairs is that where the Indian Government and the Assembly are in agreement, particularly on economic matters, there should be no unnecessary or wilful interference an the part of the Secretary of State. I should like to know what was the real attitude of the Indian Government towards these heavy steel duties when that legislation was authorised from this country.

The cotton duties come in a similar category. I notice that in the Assembly there was a steady weakening on the part of the Indian Government in regard to the propaganda which is being pursued incessantly for what will ultimately mean very heavy preferences in favour of the Bombay cotton millowners as against the millowners in Lancashire. We know the condition of the Lancashire cotton trade. Some 90,000 to 100,000 operatives have been out of work for years past. True, they have just started longer hours of labour, but there is still very great distress in Lancashire. It seems to me that in this great Indian cotton trade, worth over £30,000,000 sterling to this country, we have a chance of co-operation between the British producing market and the Indian consuming markets which should be of incalculable benefit if the position is properly understood.

The masses of India are anxious to buy Lancashire cotton piece goods if they can get them at something like the old price. There are two difficulties. The main difficulty is the higher price of the Lancashire commodity. We have to remember that the consuming class in India is excessively poor. We have been told that the average taxation in this country is £17 and £18 per head. The average income in India, according to the most sanguine calculation, is not one quarter of that sum. If the Lancashire market is to recover, and if there is to be an understanding between these two countries, there must be a clear understanding of the position in India, and of the proper price that the Indian peasant can pay for his piece goods. There must be, also, a cessation—a very difficult thing to bring about—of the unceasing campaign directed in India against British imports into that country. This campaign is extending steadily and covering a larger and larger surface, and the result of the process is that our largest overseas market is in serious jeopardy. My desire is to draw attention to the influences which are operating in India, not merely against the principles of British rule there which have been established for so many years, but against the trade of this country and the recovery of the old understanding which we all wish to see.

It is without reserve that I congratulate the hon. Member (Mr. Pilcher) who has just spoken on his first contribution to our Debates. He has survived the most formidable experience that can befall mortal man, and, if I may say so without assumption, he has survived it with very great distinction. I am sure that I shall voice the general opinion of this House when I say that this House is wont to welcome with peculiar pleasure one who brings to its common counsels a good deal of experience of the legislative assemblies of our great Dominions overseas.

I feel very great interest in the words which fell from my hon. Friend upon the question of the credit of this country in India, because I have felt throughout this Debate that, time and again, the improvement of the credit of this country and the credit of other countries was cropping up as one of the most vital questions for our consideration at the present time. It may be, perhaps, not impertinent to make a few observations on this subject, particularly as I see that we have the advantage now of the attendance of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is almost with a sense of awe that I realise that I may be immediately preceding the re-emergence into our Debates of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the performance of the high responsibilities with which he is charged, and that my function may be, as it were, to serve as the doormat on which he wipes his feet as he enters the House. It would be so, if I had any controversial matters to deal with, but the greater part of my remarks will be of a non-controversial nature.

The question of credit was raised by the right hon. Member for Miles Platting (Mr. Clynes). I will not try to quote his words, but I do not think I shall misrepresent him when I say that he said that it was essential for the good of industrial Europe and the future prosperity of the Russian population that Russia should once more become a member of the credit system of Europe. I think he was quoting words of my own when he said so. That, of course, is a proposition with which we all agree, but I am surprised that it should not be more clearly stated or realised by the right hon. Gentleman that where we differ is as to the method by which Russia can once more be made a member of the credit system of Europe. Where we differ from him and from the policy of his party, is that in the course of their recent treaty with Russia they committed themselves to the policy that you can restore the credit of Russia by outside action. We believe, on the other hand, we who differ from the policy of the late Government, that there is only one thing that can restore Russian credit, and that is the action of Russia herself in acknowledging her just debts.

The right hon. Gentleman did me the honour to quote at some length from a speech which I made at the Conference at The Hague some years ago. I am impressed by the barrenness of the table spread for the Russian Treaty, if the right hon. Gentleman can derive any crumbs of comfort from that speech of mine. Not even the most adroit exercise of the gentle art of selecting quotations could enable him to get anything from my words in support of his views. If he would do me the great honour to read my speech through from the beginning to the end, he would find that the speech from which he was quoting is based upon this theme, and repeats it with almost tedious iteration—"We, the British Government desire to help you, the Russian Government, and the Russian people, but we can do nothing to help you until you go back home and restore the basis of your credit by acknowledging your debts."

7.0 P.M.

Let me turn to the subject on which I wish to speak, and which is another aspect of national credit, namely, the question of inter-Allied debts. I make no apology for raising this subject, or trying to bring it into prominence and suggesting to the Government that there is great urgency in it. The urgency is this, that at the present time negotiations are in progress between our creditors and our debtors at New York which must inevitably produce a new situation on this question, and very seriously prejudice our own interests if certain results accrue. Do not let us blink the reason, because it is a subject upon which plain speaking will be really useful in the international councils of the old world and the new. What is amiss in these negotiations that are going on in New York to our mind is this: We have been called upon to pay and are paying our debts. I have not one word to offer in criticism of that policy. I think it was the right thing to do. I should have liked perhaps a half per cent, more in our favour, but I should not have delayed the settlement for a half per cent. more. What we see, and see with a certain sense of curiosity—I avoid using the word resentment—is that the United States, by forcing a settlement upon our former Allies and our present debtors, are prejudicing our chances of ever recovering anything for ourselves. If a full settlement of their debt to the United States is made by our debtors on the Continent of Europe, that removes to a far greater extent, and removes almost altogether, any possibility of our making any substantial recovery in that respect.

We have a strong feeling on this matter. If we are to indulge in a feeling that there is a lack of equity in such an arrangement as that we must ourselves be satisfied that our own attitude is equitable. I believe we are in a stronger position as regards that than any nation in the world, because of the extraordinary freedom and generosity of the offer made to the world by us as a settlement of these debts in the Balfour Note. I have the Note at hand. I feel so much pride as an Englishman in the offer that we made at that time that I think it is worth while rehearsing it to the House. We offered then to abandon all further rights to German Reparation and all claims for repayment by the Allies provided this renunciation formed part of a general plan. I do not think it was possible that a fairer or more generous offer could have been made than that. But one is in progress now and is taking us at our word and going one better. It is leaving us in the position in which we are to be the only people to pay, and in which we are to be the only people not to be paid. I am con- fident this is not really a matter in which it is our interest against the world. Very far from it. If we are to settle down as nations in peace, quietness and prosperity and universal feelings of amity, it can only be in a sense that justice has been done all round. I cannot imagine anything worse for the future peace and harmony of Europe than that any single nation should be left with a sense of strong grievance. We know that in our settlement with America we came very near to having a sense of grievance, and we have only avoided it in the great and just pride we have felt in vindicating British credit in the world. What I feel is, having had personal contact with public opinion in the country, that if any further steps are made imposing on us a burden not shared by all nations, it will leave a strong sense of grievance on this nation and will be inimical to the peace of Europe in the future. There is, of course, a most natural and admirable desire on the part of all of us to exercise the quality of amiability as regards our recent Allies. In memory of high experiences held together, we desired not only to be just but generous.

Nobody can advocate arbitrary, harsh, violent enforcement of our debts upon any of those friendly nations. There is no question of that. I should hope there will be no question of approaching this nation or that and putting pressure on them and saying, "Pay up, or this or that serious consequence may follow." I should hope any settlement of this question would take the form of an international conference covering the whole subject in which this claim and that claim, this case and that case, can be made out as to ability to pay and finally equal justice done all round. But amiability can go too far. I think it would go too far if it left any single nation unduly oppressed by the burdens of the War. There was a strong public opinion in Europe over the case of Germany. It was felt, and, I believe, quite rightly felt, that it would be contrary to the true interests of Europe as a whole to leave the whole German nation hopelessly depressed, unprotected, impoverished, unable to buy or sell. All the resources, all the intellect of Europe and America were set to work to raise Germany from that position. It is no exaggeration to say, in view of the enormous burdens imposed upon this country which were disclosed so dramatically last night by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George), that with the gravity of those burdens upon our shoulders, with our one and a half millions of unemployed, there is the possibility of the accumulation of all the benefits of the war going elsewhere and the accumulation of liability being left on our shoulders so that in the long run it may be not Germany but the British Empire that is the depressed nation after the war. In the' interests of the whole world we must put amiability on one side and ask for justice to put that right.

There is, I believe, another and more important aspect of this question of inter-Allied debts. The whole civilised world, which is no exaggerated phrase, rests upon an arch which is the arch of credit. That arch is maintained by two things. By a just recognition of their debts by debtors, and that is a fact which we have fought and a lesson we have tried to draw the moral of in the recent campaign over the Russian Treaty. Besides that, that arch of credit has to be maintained by just and proper recognition of their obligations among creditors. If it is a bad thing for the system of credit which maintains the world that debtors should default, I think it is an almost equally bad thing that creditors should be slack, unreasonable, indifferent in the imposition of their rights. I honestly believe that it would be the worst thing we could do for our debtors among our former Allies that we should wipe all these debts off the slate or that we should allow them to be ignored, or go on from year to year without any effort to meet them. I believe in truth and veracity. For the sake of those countries themselves and their future, we have an obligation towards them and ourselves, and that is to see that they maintain their own credit and make a reasonable effort to pay their debts. That is the other side of the question We cannot view this as an entirely self-regarding matter. It is in the hope of having said one word to enforce on the Chancellor of the Exchequer the extreme gravity with which this matter is viewed throughout the country that I have ventured to intervene.

Inter-Allied Debts

Government Policy

No one can complain that the subject of inter-Allied debts should have been raised in this Debate, and still less would anyone complain of the tone and temper in which the speeches referring to it have been conceived. The speech which my right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich (Mr. Hilton Young) has just delivered is an example, a model of the manner in which this subject should be approached and handled in the House of Commons. The Government consider that in view of the wish which has been expressed by Members in various parts of the House that this subject should be dealt with to tome extent this afternoon, and the Government felt that a statement should be made from this Bench.

I would ask for consideration on two grounds. The first is that I am very new to the office which I hold. I cannot pretend to be versed—I cannot yet pretend at any rate to be versed—in the technical details of finance. Although I have followed continuously as far as I could for many years every chapter in this long story, yet the House will, I am sure, remember that, from circumstances over which I have no control, I did not find myself able to follow as closely as I could have wished the course of Parliamentary discussion upon this topic during the space of the whole of the last two Parliaments. So that is one ground on which I would ask for consideration. There is another. I am most anxious that in dealing with matters which every Member knows are extremely delicate matters, I should not use any phrase or expression which would cause offence to our friends and Allies on the Continent or across the Atlantic Ocean.

There is a meeting which I am to attend of the Allied Finance Ministers which is to be held in Paris in January of next year. I am sure it will be the wish of every one and of every party that that meeting should be animated by a spirit of comradeship, that it should not be characterised by haggling and bargaining or by recrimination or reproaches, but that it should be characterised throughout by a sincere and loyal desire to find a fair and practical path, consistent with the rights and interests of Great Britain and with respect for the rights of others, through the difficult and painful problems which through no fault of their own all the Allies in the Great War have now to face.

The British burdens in the War were not inferior to those borne by any other Allied nation. It is not right to use boasting words or to draw invidious comparisons, but when the duration of the effort, the loss of life and treasure, the influence exerted and I may add the achievements gained by land and sea—when the whole of these are computed, weighed and measured, and justly weighed and measured, we are, I think, entitled to respect from every quarter. But if this was our share in the struggle, our financial burdens since the War have been incomparably greater than those of any other victorious Power. We paid all our own expenses in the War. We have discharged and are discharging all our liabilities punctually. We have not hitherto pressed any Allied debtor to meet its obligations and this policy has imposed the greatest sacrifices upon the British taxpayer. No other victorious nation is making similar or equal sacrifices. The taxation of all classes is high, direct and indirect, but the rate of direct taxation in this country is higher than in any other country. And in this country we not only impose high taxes, but those taxes are paid by the taxpaying public. I shall have to say something later on in the Session, when we meet after Christmas, about the effect of the enormous direct taxation now weighing upon this country, about its effect on saving power and upon enterprise in every form of industry. I shall try to trace its unseen repercussions through every tier and stage of the structure of our economic life.

It is with this in our minds that this Debate has been originated to-day, and it is as a nation sacrificing, paying, suffering, that we are bound to approach the grave and intricate issues connected with inter-Allied debts and reparations. But we do not need to over-state the case. There is one point upon which I might be permitted to correct the right hon. Member for Spen Valley (Sir J. Simon). He spoke as if we had lent £2,000,000,000, in round figures, to the Allies, and had, in addition, borrowed another £1,000,000,000 from the United States on their behalf. That is not the case. The total loans of Great Britain to the European Allies may be stated, approximately, at £2,000,000,000. Of this. we produced, roughly speaking, half from our own resources, and we contracted a debt equal to the other half, £1,000,000,000 roughly speaking, in the United States. But this latter £1,000,000,000 is not additional to the £2,000,000,000; it is comprised within that total. If we had not lent to the Allies £2,000,000,000, we should not have had to incur, in all human probability, £1,000,000,000 of debt to the United States. But we must not count that £1,000,000,000 twice over.

The first main point in this matter, on which the mind should rest, is, of course, the Anglo-American debt settlement. Opinions have differed about that settlement. It is a settlement which commanded the support of the leading financial authorities in the City of London. It is a settlement which was advocated by the experts at the Treasury. It is a settlement which has been ratified by Parliament and accepted by the country. There have been different views about it. I have been myself quoted as having expressed different views. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister is the last man in the world to resent a divergence of opinion, a sincere divergence of opinion, between persons perfectly free at the time, upon a matter admittedly highly complicated and in regard to which there have been the broadest differences of opinion between experts of unquestionable and unimpeachable authority. But whatever views may have been taken about the settlement or expressed about it, there can be no dispute in regard to two facts. First of all, the settlement has been made; it is done, and it must be made good. It forms the starting point for all future discussions in the field of inter-Allied debts. That is the first point. The second point is this: It has placed us in an extraordinarily strong position. We take our seats at the Council Board of Allied and Associated Powers under financial obligations to no one. We have no need to seek indulgence in any quarter. Having met all our liabilities as prescribed, having rigorously discharged every contract into which we have entered, we are entitled to rest ourselves with confidence upon the position of freedom and independence which we have regained. We have regained it not with- out great sacrifice, but it is ours and it is ours for ever. We can look everyone in the face.

This debt settlement was unquestionably the forerunner, the indispensable forerunner, of that consolidation and increasing establishment of our credit throughout the world on which our world-wide trade depends, and it is an essential foundation in all that improvement in the exchange between this country and the United States, and the maintenance of that exchange, which is a vital factor in the whole of our national and international finance. So much for the American debt settlement, which, I submit, should form the starting point in the future treatment of the question of inter-Allied debts.

What is the second great factor in the problem, so far as we in this country are concerned? My right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich referred to it in terms with which I am in full accord. It is the Balfour Note. That Note, drawn up nearly three years ago, associated as it is with the name of a statesman revered throughout Europe, must in British eyes play a most important part in our future discussions on this subject. The Balfour Note was published before the settlement of the American debt was effected, but we had already been invited by the United States to enter into negotiations for the funding of the debt. What was the principle of the Balfour Note? It was that we would obliterate and delete all war debts owing to us if we were similarly treated by others in respect of similar debts owing to them. But it also said that if that was impossible, we should ask as much and no more from Europe than the United States might find it necessary to require from us. That was the principle expressed in the Balfour Note at that date. Three years have passed, and I think it may be broadly said, speaking on behalf of the Government, that it still forms the foundation of our policy in this matter. No one can say that it is a selfish or grasping policy. We paid our way in the War, and if we contracted these debts it has not been because of our own needs but because of the needs of Allies fighting on a common front. And now the War is over and the victory has been won—[ Interruption ]—and the victory has been won—[ Interruption ]—we have not ceased to be proud of that fact—now that all is over and the victory has been won, we seek no more from Allies and enemies together than will enable us to recover the charges we are forced to pay on their account, and pay externally to the United States—I repeat externally, because this involves prodigious effort, the effort of annual exportation, across a frontier, across an ocean, of an immense sum of money such as we are now regularly and continually discharging to the United States.

In our desire to help Europe we have taken no account of our financial losses in the past. The £800,000,000 worth of dollar securities which we realised and sold in the War, before the United States entered into the War, to provide credits for ourselves and our Allies, we are not dwelling upon; our concern is solely with the external payments which we have to make. And in regard to these the Balfour Note, relating, of course, to the circumstances of the date of its publication—we have been discharging our liabilities for two and a half years since then—in regard to these the Balfour Note remains the settled policy of the Government, and is now affirmed for the third time—in three successive Administrations.

I must add a word of caution and of definition in this matter. Since the Balfour Note was published German reparations have become more real and prospectively more valuable. There is the 26 per cent. duty which the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs, when Prime Minister, had the ingenuity to devise, and which the late Chancellor of the Exchequer not only reduced to 5 per cent., but had the courage, reversing his opinions on later and fuller knowledge, to raise again. [ Interruption. ] Was it not fuller information? [ Laughter. ] Well, I am quite ready to withdraw the compliment and I base myself wholly on the fact that the duty was subsequently restored to the 26 per cent. level. Under this we may perhaps receive the equivalent of £10,000,000 this year and under the Dawes reparation scheme and the Spa percentages, if the revival of Germany and of Europe continues through years of peace, if peace is maintained—[HON. MEMBERS: "If!"]—yes, if peace is main- tained—then we might eventually, as the House knows, receive some 25 millions a year in reparations from Germany. But no one can say how far these hopes will be realised or how soon they will be realised. The recovery of Germany may be delayed. The Dawes hopes may not be wholly fulfilled for many years, and I must say, dealing with the application of the principles of the Balfour note to the existing European situation, that we do not feel able to make our efforts to attain the position aimed at in the Balfour Note, that is to say parity in payments from Europe to Great Britain with payments from Great Britain to the United States—we do not feel able to make our effort to attain that position depend upon the fruition of German reparations. The arrangements which we seek to make with our European Allies must be on such a basis as to safeguard us, within the limits of the Balfour Note, from the consequences of German default or failure. That I feel it necessary to say and that is all I have to say on the general question.

There is one new aspect which has been brought into prominence lately and which was mentioned by both the right hon. Gentlemen who have spoken from the Liberal Benches on this subject. I mean the negotiations which we read in the newspapers have been taking place between France and the United States for an adjustment of Franco-American debts. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Sir J. Simon) asked whether there were negotiations in progress, and if so what was their character. As far as His Majesty's Government understands there are no formal negotiations in progress, but there have been tentative inquiries and conversations. The matter has not advanced further than that at the present time so far as we are aware. There is not, therefore, any necessity for a formal declaration on our part in regard to this matter at this moment. Speaking generally, I would venture to say we do not wish to hinder any arrangement for mutual benefit which may be entered into between two friendly nations, Allied or Associated with us in the Great War. We consider it essential, however, that any payments made by our debtors in Europe to their creditors in the United States should be accompanied simultaneously pari passu by proportionate payments to Great Britain. That indicates the general scope and outline of the policy which His Majesty's Government will endeavour to pursue regarding Inter-Allied debts in the months, and, I trust, in the years, which lie immediately before us, and I will also say that in pursuing this policy we shall be animated by a spirit of the warmest comradeship towards our friends and Allies in the War, and we will sedulously avoid the use of any language or the indulgence in any mood which could possibly be a cause of offence and lead to a disturbance of the harmony which should exist.

I do not intend to say more than a few sentences, nor to discuss the general problem of inter-Allied debts. It is most important that nothing should be said in any way to hamper or hinder the very delicate and difficult negotiations upon which the right hon. Gentleman is about to enter. May I be allowed to congratulate him upon his accession to his high office and to hope that this is but the first of many very interesting contributions which he will make to our Debates. I am especially interested in the promise which the right hon. Gentleman has given to the House of the very elaborate dissertation upon the incidence of direct taxation which he proposes to submit to the House at no distant date. May I venture to say that it will be of merely academic interest if the right hon. Gentleman confines himself to showing the very grave burdens which the present rate of taxation places upon the industry of the country and I hope he will then be in a position to give practical effect to his theory by proposing a very substantial reduction of taxation. May I also suggest that the satisfactory settlement of the question of inter-Allied debts is, perhaps, the most promising way in which the right hon. Gentleman can secure the funds necessary for a substantial reduction of taxation. I am gratified by the interest which the question of inter-Allied debts has aroused in this new Parliament, and I congratulate especially the hon. Members who sit upon the back benches below the Gangway on the very great interest they are taking in this question. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George) has criticised recent Governments somewhat severely for their neglect to bring this matter to an issue, but the right hon. Gentleman himself was in office for four years succeeding the War and I am not aware that during those years he took any steps whatever to bring about a settlement of these inter-Allied debts, and every year of neglect has made the settlement of the question more difficult. I am afraid the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs is not very well informed upon the details of this great question. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has drawn attention to one remarkable statement made by the right hon. Gentleman yesterday. The right hon. Gentleman made these loans to our Allies, and yet he did not know to a £1,000,000,000 how much he had lent. Not only did the right hon. Gentleman raise the amount of the debt to £3,000,000,000 by adding £2,000,000,000 of debt due from our late European Allies and £1,000,000,000 of debt which we owe to the United States, but he calculated the interest upon it as £130,000,000 a year, a sum which he said the Chancellor of the Exchequer would have to provide in next year's Budget.

Hear, hear!

I do not think the House of Commons can complain of the lack of greater detail in the statement which the Chancellor of the Exchequer has just made. The value and importance of this Debate is that it will strengthen the hands of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the conference which he is shortly to attend and in making some settlement of this question. I am rather sorry that the Chancellor of the Exchequer committed himself so completely to approval of the policy of the Balfour Note. As the right hon. Gentleman himself said, circumstances have changed very much since that generous—I might almost say too generous—offer was made. That was before the settlement of the American debt and before the settlement of the German reparation question, and I think it would have been much better had the right hon. Gentleman regarded the Balfour Note as a dead letter and gone into the conference with his hands completely free. I was not altogether satisfied with the way in which the right hon. Gentleman linked up and associated prospective receipts from German reparations with the question of inter-Allied debts. When the late Government had the question of the Dawes Report under consideration we resolutely refused to mix up these two questions. Our late Allies made representations to us to regard the two things as being inseparable, and I hope the right hon. Gentleman is not going to do what we declined to do upon that occasion. If I rightly understood the right hon. Gentleman—although in one part of his speech he appeared to put a somewhat different construction upon a statement he had made in the earlier part of his speech—and if the right hon. Gentleman thinks that he is likely to get, in the form of German reparations, sufficient to compensate for the sacrifice of interest in inter-Allied debts, then I think he will be woefully disappointed. The maximum sum which may be ultimately paid under the German reparation scheme is about £120,000,000 a year. He would be a sanguine man indeed who expected that Germany would ever be able to pay and to keep paying such a colossal sum as that. It could not be done, I believe, without completely breaking the exchanges and causing complete chaos.

Hear, hear!

I am gratified to find that such an expert authority on this question as the hon. Member for Ilford (Sir F. Wise) agrees on that point. We shall be lucky indeed if we obtain in the aggregate a payment of £50,000,000 a year from Germany under the Dawes scheme, and if you take the proportionate percentages, France will be entitled to 52 per cent, of that, which is £26,000,000 a year, and our share will be probably about £10,000,000 a year. Surely the Chancellor of the Exchequer would not be satisfied, as a payment of the interest on the Allied debts, to receive the comparatively paltry sum of £10,000,000 a year.

No.

I am glad to hear that the Chancellor of the Exchequer agrees with that. May I, in passing, refer to the interrupted compliment by the right hon. Gentleman to me in regard to the 26 per cent. Reparation Duty? The situation, I may explain to the right hon. Gentleman—and his lack of knowledge, of course, is due to the fact that, as he himself stated, he has been absent from the Debates in this House for the last two or three years, through no fault of his own. If I may pay a compliment to the right hon. Gentleman, it is through no fault of his own, and he certainly did not lack courage in trying to get back to the House of Commons during that period of enforced retirement. However, the facts in regard to my connection with the 26 per cent. Reparation Duty are these, that when I took office the duty was not being paid at all. That is to say, it was not being paid by the Germans. It was being paid by the British trader, and we made an arrangement with the German Government, who maintained that they were not in a position to pay such a high duty as 26 per cent., that it should be reduced temporarily to 5 per cent. That 5 per cent. continued to be paid until the Dawes scheme came into operation, and then, the financial position of Germany having been somewhat improved, we re-established the 26 per cent. duty. I do not claim to have been in any way courageous in the action which I took.

I think it would be a pity that we should have an acrimonious debate on this question. It will serve a useful purpose if it gives to the Chancellor of the Exchequer the unanimous support of the House of Commons in the Conference he is about to enter, that he has to try to find some settlement of this question, and some settlement which will give to the British Exchequer a fairly considerable part of those payments the benefit of which, I think, has been far too long delayed. May I just say this, that if I had any regrets at all at leaving office, the chief of those regrets was that my intentions in regard to this question of the inter-Allied debts I was not able to carry through. If I had remained in office, it is very likely that the Conference which the right hon. Gentleman is going to attend in January would have been held some time about this date. I will only add that I know that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has an extremely difficult task to undertake, and I am quite sure that he will find that some of our Continental friends are the easiest people in the world to negotiate with, provided that you always let them have their own way. I repeat that I wish the right hon. Gentleman every success in the very difficult and delicate task that he is about to undertake.

May I be allowed, in a few sentences, to say that the announcement, as we understand it, which has been made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to-night, gives satisfaction to my colleagues and those of us who sit on these Benches, and, if we understand aright what he has undertaken to do, it is to attend the Conference in Paris in January and to adopt the Balfour Note as the basis of his negotiations at that Conference. I think, if we heard him aright, he said that he would go there guided by the principles which were set out in a single sentence by Mr. Balfour, now Lord Balfour:

"In no circumstances, he would say, do we propose to ask more from our debtors than is necessary to pay our creditors."

May I interrupt my right hon. Friend for a moment? Of course, the Conference in January is a Conference to deal with various questions arising in connection with reparations under the Dawes Report, and it is not officially summoned for the purpose of dealing with the question of inter-Allied debts, but I have been unfolding in a general way the policy of the Government, because it must be obvious that these matters must be in the minds of all parties who are gathered together for the purposes of this other subject.

What we wish to know is whether the right hon. Gentleman is going to press for a settlement of these subjects, as delicately and diplomatically, of course, as he can, at the Conference in January. If the Conference in January is to be restricted purely to a discussion of the Dawes Report, he may find it a little difficult to deal with these larger questions, which concern us just as directly and will affect the finance over which he will have control in the next 12 months just as acutely as will any findings on the details which control the Dawes Report. As I understood him, he had ventilated the subject already, and he would use that opportunity for reopening it with his financial colleagues at the Paris Conference. If he does that, I think we have every reason to thank him for having given us the first fruits of discussion in this House, and having provided that the inquiries which have been made here, which have been made on all hands, and which are supported by all parties, although initiated by us— we may as well take what credit we can, for we need all we can get—and the result, I have mo doubt, of this Conference will be to keep the subject alive. I hope it may be something more than that. I do not hold the view, and I never have held the view, that this is an entirely one-sided question. The aright hon. Gentleman truly described our attitude towards the payment of debts as being one of honest pride, but we are not the only country in Europe that is proud of its financial probity. France is equally proud of the fact that she pays her debts, and she is equally proud of the maintenance of her credit. I do not think it would be undiplomatic of the right hon. Gentleman to suggest to the French that the Americans are not her only creditors. I am sure he can do it with skill and without any offence, but it is one aspect of this problem which ought not to be overlooked.

May I make one further observation with regard to the American debt? I have never held the view that the bargain made by the Prime Minister was a bad one. On the contrary, on many platforms and in many business assemblies, I have always stated that I believed that, owing largely to one condition which he inserted into that contract, the bargain was a good one for this country. In the first place, it maintains our reputation for the payment of our debts, and that has had a most potent influence in bringing back to London the centre of the world's financial transactions. There was a danger at one time that the London money market might have been superseded by New York. That danger is now past, and it is past largely owing to the settlement of the British-American debt. The one clause in the agreement which has saved us has been that which provides for the payment of our debt in gold, and it showed the shrewdness of the Prime Minister, if I may say so with respect, that he should have inserted that clause and made it an essential part of the contract. The fact is that the flow of gold through this country into America has now given America just about as much gold as she wants. I have no doubt she will make alternative suggestions before long, but the glut of gold in America; s likely to teach the Americans what a great many economists have pointed out to her in the past, and that is that the payment of these gigantic debts from one country to another can sometimes do almost as much harm to him who receives as to him who pays.

When the Chancellor of the Exchequer is dealing with this subject in Paris and elsewhere, I have no doubt he will have in mind the fact that these great payments are one of the most disturbing factors in finance and commerce at the present time, and if he can arrange for anything like an equivalent flow into this country of the credit which passes out of this country, even in terms of gold, he will do something to stabilise the conditions under which future contracts in commerce and finance alone can be made. It was with this object in our minds that we raised the subject on the first possible occasion at the beginning of this Session, and it is with the assurance which he has given this afternoon that he intends at the earliest possible moment to deal with it, and to deal with it in accordance mainly with the principles of the Balfour Note, that we thank him for his response to our request.

8.0 P.M.

The world regards this House as a wonderful institution, and I think it must be, since I find myself following the Chancellor of the Exchequer, an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I am not quite certain that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Swansea (Mr. Runciman), who has just sat down, was not President of the Board of Trade or did not hold some other high office. The courtesies between these right hon. Gentlemen give one a lead, and, as a humble back-bencher, I propose to follow the methods adopted by one political opponent to another. It is wonderful that out of this small paper so much could have been said and introduced. Apparently one can talk about almost everything, and there can be few things in the "Encyclopædia Britannica" which one cannot introduce. I do not propose to dwell at any length upon the King's Speech, but if I may take it paragraph by paragraph, eliminating those to which I desire to make no reference, may I congratulate the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary on the firmness and vigour shown in the beginning of the Speech against those who are engaged in a campaign of hostility to British rights in Egypt and the Sudan. I hope that equal vigour will be shown against those who are engaged in hostilities, mostly by word of mouth, indulging in seditious and treasonous talk, and that every effort will be made to preserve the right of free speech in this country so long as that free speech is loyal. We are entitled to protection against the disorders which occurred during the recent elections. I rather regret some reference was not made to this in the King's Speech, because I think the time has come when, with other Members on this and the other side of the House, we have all declared that we do not want interference by our friends during an election. It does seem intolerable that these riotous proceedings take place. I hope that if the law is not sufficiently strong to suppress these disorders in the future, action will be taken by His Majesty's Government to make sure that free speech is a thing which may be enjoyed.

I turn to the policy enunciated in the paragraph in reference to co-operation with the Governments of the Dominions. This is a policy which will remove the reproach which is hurled at us when we visit those Dominions beyond the seas. I would express a hope that it may be the dawn of free trade within the Empire. It occurs to me that if there can be such a thing as the United States of America, it ought to be possible for such a thing to obtain within our own Empire.

Speaking as an employer, and one who has been engaged in business for 40 years, I would like to point out to the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer that the crushing burden of taxation, so far as professional men are concerned, is almost a capital levy every year. This expenditure of public money makes the business man ask whether we are getting our money's worth. We feel that a huge bureaucratic element is in the country, and while they have their duties to perform we, the workers and producers, do feel that, however essential they may be, they are non-producers, and if there can be any reduction in the expenditure incurred, particularly in municipal life, it will cause a welcome relief to the ratepayers of this country. At the present moment a large portion of our lives is devoted to the preparation and filling up of forms. There is a certain amount of redundancy in the in- formation, which we feel that we ought not to be called upon to give. The keynote of the whole of the King's Speech lies in the expression of hope that there will be increased goodwill, frankness and mutual confidence. As an employer of labour, I hope that on both sides of the House we are all of one mind. May I give my experience? It is, apparently, new to the right hon Gentleman who occupied some legal office in the last Administration outside the House. He spoke about co-operation between employer and employé. It is nothing new. For the last 30 years I have endeavoured to make everyone that I employed my friend. I hope I have been his friend. In fact, I go further than that. I avow that if any of my employés are not my friends, then we cannot be comfortable. The result of that policy has been that for 32 years I have had to discharge only two men.

I want to throw out a suggestion, and it might perhaps come with greater weight from a member of this party, and it is this. If an employer of labour forms himself into a limited liability company, his profits and losses are disclosed, but apparently no harm is done. The whole public, including the employé, is at liberty to see what profits he made as a company during a given period. I suggest that a gesture either from labour or from capital—and I would prefer it to come from the employers—should be made by the employer towards the employé, that selecting their representatives the workers should go through the chartered accountants' statement which we have to prepare every year for Inland Revenue purposes. I believe that would disabuse the workman's mind from the erroneous idea which he possesses as to the enormous profits enjoyed by those who employ him. In many trades this idea is very fallacious and I think might be cleared away if there were a little more confidence shown between the one side and the other. I am not suggesting that anyone should adopt anything I have not adopted during 30 years. I think it is on those lines that, if we co-operate together, confidence will be restored, and I believe that if we can only induce men to do a good day's work for a good day's pay, whatever the standard of wages may be, it shall not be regarded as an irreducible minimum, but these men shall be enabled to earn much more than the trade union rate of wages, Then I think that we shall come to a happier time. I do not think really at heart there is so much difference between one side of this Chamber and the other. It is more a difference of method of arriving at the same goal. I believe hon. Gentlemen opposite will not seek to intimidate the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister. Their facetious remarks will be understood on this side of the House, but I hope that we may go forward with courage, determined to do the very best we can for our country, whatever side we may sit on. May I thank hon. Members for the courtesy they have extended towards me in getting up and speaking for the first time. If I have broken any Rule, I have done it inadvertently.

I rise for the first time in this House, and after the advice you, Mr. Speaker, gave to us when you spoke from these benches a few days ago, I at any rate feel quite sure by the way you spoke to us on that occasion that you will lead one over any difficult points in procedure or in connection with the traditions or Rules of the House. I wish to refer to the same paragraph in the King's Speech as the hon. Member who has just spoken. I want to refer to it probably from a different point of view. He asked that there should be frankness, confidence and goodwill. We agree with each of those terms. We agree there should be frankness, confidence and goodwill, but I ask the House whether there can be confidence between employer and employed when we realise what is going on in the various workshops and factories of the country. Can you expect the best of goodwill from the man who has to exist or try to exist on a wage such has that which is given in most of the industries of this country, the great engineering trade paying thousands of its men a wage of 37s. a week, and even the works of the Prime Minister of this House, situated as they are in London, paying but 43s. per week to the men in its employ. It is impossible for men to live on such a wage. I say it means semi-starvation for them and for their wives and children week by week endeavouring to carry on on such a wage as that. But yet we are asked in the King's Speech for the confidence, goodwill and frankness that will enable industry to carry along. If goodwill is needed, then the first essential must be that those who are engaged in the manufactures of this country shall have a sufficient return for their labour to enable them to bring up their families in a way that tends to health and comfort. That does not operate in industries of this country.

I notice that the hon. Gentleman the Mover of the Address referred to the wage-earners, and to the sheltered industries of the country, and one wondered what knowledge he had of those industries, and what he meant by sheltered industries. Did he refer to Government service? I have heard people talk of Government employment as being one of the sheltered trades of the country. Surely he could not mean that, because I find His Majesty's Government paying wages to tens of thousands of its employés that do not enable them to live in decency and in comfort. In the great dockyards of this country men are paid wages of 45s. per week. That is the total for a full week's work of an able-bodied man, and he is asked to realise the greatness of the dockyards, of those engines of war, and to maintain a family. I say he cannot do it; it is impossible. If that was what the hon. Gentleman meant by a sheltered industry, which must have its conditions worsened, then on these benches there is going to be something of a contest throughout this Parliament. The same applies to the War Department, and to all the other great Departments of State. This talk of sheltered industries, in order to work up one section of people against another, is that of people without knowledge of the real position, and was even indicated by the hon. Gentleman who has just spoken.

It may be that one may be asked to prove that statement. It so happened this morning I had to deal with a wages question. It was the case of a man who had 50s. a week, and I had a surprise when he presented the budget of his family composed of himself, his wife and two children. It showed that he has to live in a state of semi-starvation. I am not going to take up the time of the House by going through the whole of the details, though I am quite prepared to do that. This man did not exaggerate. He allows but one pint of milk per day for himself, his wife and two children. I am sure every Member of this House will agree that it is semi-starvation for a family to be carrying on with such a small quantity of food of that description. He only allows 7s. a week for rent, and the whole of his 50s. is taken up in providing the cheapest of food, the poorest quality, the smallest quantity. Yet His Majesty's Government pay thousands of men in their employ a less wage than 50s. per week, and even that less wage they pay is not paid to the men for the whole 52 weeks in the year.

May I remind the hon. Gentleman that I made no reference to sheltered industries?

I was not referring to the hon. Member who has just spoken, but to the hon. Member who moved the Address. He told us of the sheltered industries in this country, and he indicated quite clearly to us on these benches that the wages in these sheltered industries should be brought down, because the wages in other industries were so low. The hon. Member for Bridgeton (Mr. Maxton) said last night quite truly that all that has been suggested from the benches opposite in this discussion with regard to international trade is something amounting to international starvation, in order to have the opportunity of providing work for the people of this country. We were told by an hon. Member opposite last night that we are responsible in the workshops of this country for what he referred to as ca'canny, and for the absence of production. He left us with that general statement, and gave us no details as to what industry, and what part of the country he was referring. It is most unfair to charge those of us who are engaged in industry, and have spent as many years in industry as the hon. Gentleman who has just spoken, with ca'canny and the absence of production. We are ready to produce everything the world is demanding, but they cannot find those markets with an effective demand. They ask that we should produce more and more, while they know they have no market with an effective demand.

There is another part of the King's Speech to which I wish to make a brief reference, and that is the portion about unemployment, particularly juvenile unemployment. As one who has spent a number of years in endeavouring to place young people into employment that would be of advantage to them when they grew to adult age, I hope the Government are going to indicate somewhat clearly in their reply what are their intentions with regard to this particular tragedy, this particular problem. We have to-day in London, and in other parts of the country, young people who have been turned adrift from our schools, and who for one or two years, and, in some cases, three years, have been unable to find employment in any of our industries or the commerce of this country. It is not good for them. It is bad for them, and, as has been pointed out earlier in this discussion, it has taken away whatever advantage they have gained from the training in the elementary schools, and is giving us a type that is not going to be for the good of this country when they grow to adult age. The problem is one that I hope the Government will take up. Those of us who have given service to it require, so far as it can help, the combination of the Education Department and the Ministry of Labour, and the cessation of warfare between those two Departments as to who shall have control of these young people while they are being placed in employment. I hope the Government will state quite clearly what are their intentions.

With regard to insurance, I want to join with the hon. Member for East Middlesbrough (Miss Wilkinson) in stating that we are very much concerned with the statements in the Press which seem to suggest, that while the Government intend to bring in an insurance scheme, they intend to make it a contributory scheme with a greater imposition on the wages of our people. If that be so, I can say for myself, and I hope for those on these benches, that it will meet with opposition. Already too much is taken out of our wages. As much as 1s. 2d. per week is taken out of 37s., or even 40s. and 45s. If the whole amount were handed to the worker it would not be adequate, and it is rendered the more inadequate by the deduction for insurance contributions at the present time. If you are going to impose more by reason of this all-in insurance which has been spoken of then you are going to raise up feelings that you will find it more difficult to contend against than those you have had so far. I notice that those on the Liberal Benches are quite in agreement with that all-in insurance scheme. From these benches you will meet with opposition.

I hope the Government will hesitate before attempting to make any further deduction from wages for insurance in the form that has been indicated. So far as the women and old age pensioners are concerned, surely there can be no waiting for pensions until there is an accumulation of funds by the raising of contributions deducted from wages! I hope the Government will say that it is not going to make it a contributory scheme. As to juvenile unemployment I hope they will be strong. In regard to wages I hope, not only will they help us to get that confidence and frankness that is necessary, but that they will be model employers themselves, pay reasonable wages to those in their employ, and help other employers to follow their example.

I am sorry that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is not now sitting on the opposite bench because I wanted to compliment him upon the success that has attended his failure to be present in this House for the last couple of years. Had he been present he would have been returned with Members now sitting below the Gangway and might not have occupied the seat he does now.

I have been interested in the Debate in regard to the question of inter-Allied debts. If one takes notice of the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Swansea (Mr. Runciman) who spoke a while ago, it would appear that it is as bad to receive—or worse—than to pay. America has discovered that it is not an easy thing even to take back the debts owing to her. America is now cursed, we are told, or likely to be, with a period of unemployment, in spite of the receipt of the debt from us. It would appear as though our payment was a complete drug in the market. Hence it is that she dare not use the gold she receives from us. As an hon. Member stated in the course of the last Parliament, we appear as though we were engaged in digging up gold in one part of the world for the purpose of burying it in another. If it is a burden for America to receive the debt from us, I should like to know from some person who can speak with authority in this House what would be the position of this country if we were suddenly to receive the payments that our Allies owe to us? If, say, we were suddenly to receive a matter of double the amount which we are paying America; roughly in the neighbourhood of £80,000,000?

We already have a million and a half unemployed persons. What would become of our markets here, and of our workpeople, if we were suddenly to be flooded out with another £80,000,000 of commodities in payment of the debt that is owing to ourselves? That is a question that requires to be very carefully borne in mind. I do not suppose that we should receive that £80,000,000 per annum in gold apportioned as the annual payment of a debt of £2,000,000,000. Therefore, I presume it would be paid in goods. I cannot see that the receipt by this country of £80,000,000 of manufactured goods, or even of raw materials, would do anything at all to help us so far as the great problem of unemployment is concerned.

I do not take the point of view that has been expressed in this House more than once that we have made a really bad bargain with America. It has always struck me that the criticism made of the settlement of the American Debt was somewhat unfortunate. If I understand it aright, the American financiers have agreed to fund the debt at the lower rate of interest than the one originally fixed. If I understand aright, the burr den which the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George) spoke of yesterday, the payment of interest on our own National Debt is at the rate of about 5 per cent. per annum. So it would appear that the American financiers have been rather more merciful than our own, seeing that the rate of interest on the American debt is less than 5 per cent. Our own burden will be considerably decreased the moment our own financial bigwigs in Threadneedle Street will consent to take rather less than 5 per cent. at present in the bond. One per cent, less would decrease our indebtedness by about £85,000,000 per annum, and to that extent would reduce the taxation of which bitter complaint has been made. We have to remember, too, still further, that the question of debt repayment is a pretty considerable item in more ways than one. If it is true, as has been stated, that the Battle of Waterloo has not yet been paid for—and I believe that is correct—Heaven above knows when we shall pay for the last War. I hold the hope that a wiser generation will rise up and will ultimately say that they have pretty well paid enough of the debt up to the time that they take the thing in hand.

I want to mention one or two points mentioned in the Speech from the Throne. The Conservative mind is not of a particularly speculative character, otherwise, I think, it would be well to ask those concerned critically to examine and to speculate upon the terms of the King's Speech. It is fairly verbose. It is fairly vague as well. It is interesting to note that every item relating to one part of the King's Speech refers to-day to what, almost a hundred years ago, Carlyle described as the "Condition of the people question." Members on this side of the House are continually raising that question, and I think they are perfectly right in doing so. There is the question of the widow and her children, the question of unemployment, the question of the housing of the working classes, the question of old age pensions for the poor—every single item deals to-day with the "Condition of the people question." We are living now in 1924, and are constantly boasting of the marvellous progress we have made in inventions and science. Our manufacturers boast that in this country we have more machinery than we know how to use, more mechanical power than we can use, more labour than we can use, and that there is raw material we dare not touch, and yet the previous speaker, in his maiden speech, talked of people receiving wages of 32s. 6d. per week. Recently we have been told by a learned professor that a living wage ought to be not less than £3 2s. 6d. per week. I am compelled to admit that the hope expressed in His Majesty's Speech for co-operation and unity is not likely to be fulfilled unless there is a greater realisation of the problems confronting our people than is expressed by hon. Gentlemen on the opposite side of the House.

I do not understand the talk in the King's Speech about the necessity for economy. What we have to do is to consider how we can put into the hands of the people the means of spending and consuming more of the totality of wealth produced. The economy practised up to the present has been of a character rather to damn than to bless. We have had economy in education. I want to know whether it is proposed to pursue economy in education still further. Members on these benches have on more than one occasion raised the question of the adolescent boy and girl, and it is well to note that in this country we are not keeping pace with what is being done in the training of youth in competitive countries on the Continent. A little while ago I was privileged to be in Vienna, and I went over a huge establishment there in the nature of a technical school. The chief director told me that school was State-aided and State-run, and was for the purpose of training effective workmen and craftsmen. Every apprentice, boy or girl, no matter what the occupation might be, was compelled to put in one day a week at such a school. The employer was compelled by law to allow them to go and to pay them for the time put in at the school. He told me that 22,000 boys and girls attended every week. I saw some of the work being done, and it was evidently tending to produce a very high state of craftsmanship. The work of the advanced pupils in its finished stages was of an exceptionally high character. The pupil had to pass a test before he could call himself a qualified workman. He was compelled to pass a school test, and the committee imposing the test consisted of expert workmen at each particular job. That school, I was told, was only one of many in Austria, and they told me that as a result of those schools they expected to be able to hold their own in the markets of the world where they came into competition with goods produced in other countries. In this country we want something of the same sort if we are to hold our own, and to find our youths something like employment profitable from every point of view. I am not speaking of profit from the pecuniary point of view, but speaking of profit to themselves in the building up of character and the building up of a sense of citizenship and responsibility in every sense of that term. If there is any talk of cutting down still further the existing educational advantages here, it seems to me that will be economy in a particularly bad sense.

I regret there is not any indication, though one does not expect much indication from the present Government, of any proposal for dealing in a large way with the question of electric power and power supply generally, and the conservation of the coal resources of the nation. Unless that is done, it would appear that our ability to compete with competitors on the Continent will be considerably retarded. All the talk that goes on about the condition of people in our country and their general attitude towards the question of production is, to my mind, entirely fallacious so far as the wealthy class of our country is concerned. I represent a constituency in which to-night there are probably 8,000 men unemployed. Pits are closing down, and men are told there is no work for them to do. Recently I have been reading the story of a case that is coming on in the Courts, and had a conversation with the counsel engaged, in which I was told that certain companies who were sub-letting leases for coal-getting are making a profit of 1s. 3½d. per ton on the royalty of coal alone. The original leaseholder had to pay 3½d.; another company re-leases it at 1s. 3½d. The lessor then must make a profit. If much of the wealth that is drained away in that manner were paid to the workman he would be able to get something like a decent wage for the work he does, and could consume more commodities, and thus increase the wealth producing output of the country. These are questions which we on these benches will continue to press forward with all the power and vigour we can command. The questions raised in the Speech from the Throne will, I am sure, receive every help we can give to them, but we are not satisfied with what has been promised. There is too little promised to meet the demands that we shall make, and whatever be the result of our action, at least we shall attempt to improve matters by continually asking for more than has been promised us at the present time.

I want to touch upon a question which was referred to by the Prime Minister, and that is the coal industry. The right hon. Gentleman said that he intended to pay close attention to it. I want to touch briefly on the miners' situation as we know it, I am afraid that unless this matter is taken seriously in hand it will lead to a crisis very quickly. Just before May last I remember there was some talk in this House about hon. Members not having a knowledge of what happens in the mining industry until a crisis arises, and I felt then that it was our duty to let the House know exactly where we stood. Now another crisis is threatened. We are nearing that point, because under our present agreement with the coal owners—I am referring to Lancashire, Cheshire and North Staffordshire—we have had seven months working under the agreement, and we are now in debt to the coal owners to the extent of £4,000,000, which represents 12 weeks' wages. The average pay of the miners is about £2 a week, and under our present agreement we are indebted to the coal owners to the extent of £4,000,000 or 12 weeks' wages. Under these circumstances one can realise what is likely to happen at the termination of the agreement. The coal owners will contend that they cannot carry on, and they are bound to break the agreement. On the other hand, we are determined not to accept present conditions, which only represent roughly 33⅓ on the 1914 basis. If you get a state of things under which the mine owners want to break the agreement, and the miners are not satisfied with what they are getting, then a serious state of things may arise, and there may be trouble. Therefore I want hon. Members opposite to realise the position. This matter can be remedied if hon. Members opposite will only take into consideration the recommendations of some of the Commissions which have sat upon this very question. First of all, we had the Sankey Commission, which demonstrated quite clearly that the present system of working coal mines was not effective, and that there ought to be either unification of the mining industry or nationalisation. I know hon. Members opposite are not sent here to bring about nationalisation, but I think they ought to consider unification.

Here you have 135,000 men owing 12 weeks' wages to their employers, and I think it is time something was done in the matter. There is money in the coal industry if that industry is treated properly, and if some system could be devised to get the by-products out of the coal which would be useful to the community, it would not only confer benefit on the miners, but also a benefit upon the community. I know the previous Government have had this matter under consideration. In 1915 the question of coal conservation was considered by a Committee and eventually a Fuel Research Committee was set up to deal with these matters. The Government caused an investigation to be made, and we now urge that this matter should be taken up more seriously. If something effective can he done for the mining industry, in Heaven's name let us do it! Do not wait until the time comes when we shall be out fighting again for better conditions and better wages. Immediate consideration ought to be given to the whole question.

There is another point which is not mentioned in the King's Speech, and it is the Workmen's Compensation Act. I have mentioned this matter before, and as we have had some 12 months' experience of working under our present Act of Parliament, I expected that some modification would be announced in the King's Speech. It is agreed on all hands that something ought to be done in that direction. At the present time the workman is not paid for the first three days after an accident unless he plays one month. No less than 50 per cent, of the people injured play less than one month, which means that they are done out of three days' compensation. The full compensation is only 30s. per week, and if a man loses half a week, if he plays less than one month, that is a great drag on the workman and his family. On this point I appeal to the Home Secretary, because I think it would be quite easy for him to make some modification in the Act of Parliament. The amount per week might be increased. I have had a letter from the Leigh Board of Guardians asking me to try and get a higher compensation paid to injured workmen. They tell me that there are scores of these injured workmen applying for Poor Law relief in order to help out the amount paid in compensation. Is that a state of things which anybody wishes to continue amongst the working-men of our country? The last speaker spoke about the way he treated his own workmen and how well they got on, but that state of things cannot exist where workmen find it necessary to apply for Poor Law relief. If the Government intend to do anything like justice to the workmen they will have to take up this question seriously. I know that while the present Government is in office we cannot bring about the reforms that we want.

The present system is all wrong and the time will come when we shall alter it. At the present moment we are here to get the best we can for the people. All we can do on these benches is to point out the evils and ask that the solid majority of the Government should do all they can to remedy those evils. The speeches I have listened to since the opening of Parliament lead me to believe that we all ought to meet together upon matters like these in order to help working men out of their difficulties. First of all we should deal with the coal mining industry, and secondly we ought to give better compensation to injured workmen. If the Government attempt to deal with these matters in the manner I have indicated, I can assure them that from these benches, although we do not agree with your policy, you will get all the help possible from us in carrying out such reforms as I have mentioned.

An hon. Member on the other side, during the course of this Debate, expressed the view that it was the business of this House, irrespective of party, to endeavour to find means of alleviating the serious conditions that affect large numbers of our population. That is a very amiable sentiment, and one that I fully appreciate; but I want to base what I propose to contribute to this Debate upon the particular point that our friends, as it seems to me, do not understand the real nature of the problem with which we as a nation are faced. The trouble with the people of this country whose conditions require alleviating is a fundamental trouble. Their trouble is their poverty, and, unless you are prepared to deal with the problem of poverty as a problem, no amount of tinkering with the facts of these fundamental oases will really seriously alleviate the conditions of the people. The people of this country, in a large measure, live under conditions of poverty which do not give them the opportunity of a decent and well-rounded life, and, apart altogether from the suggestions that have been made with regard to social reform, you would not have any of these problems about which you have been talking but for the existence of the fundamental problem of poverty. To illustrate what I mean, you would not have a housing problem but for the poverty conditions of the people. Those who are not poor in this country have no housing problem to face, and what applies to housing applies to practically all the social problems with which Members in all quarters of the House profess their extreme sympathy.

I want to get down to fundamentals, although there is a danger of getting rather too abstract in doing so. The problem of poverty can be remedied in one way only, and that is the way supported by the vast majority of believers in the principles of the Labour movement. It is to substitute, for production for profit, production for use. I want to draw the attention of the House to one or two important facts. We have had discussions on the subject of reparations, on the question of inter-Allied debts, and the payment of debts from one nation to another. Does it not strike hon. Members that it is an extraordinarily remarkable fact that to get something for nothing is going to injure us—that gifts given or payments made from one country to another injure not only those who pay, but also those who are paid? That is because the system of society, the system of production, the system of finance which governs the whole of international capitalism, is based, not upon the production of commodities for the use of those who require those commodities, but is based solely upon considerations as to whether private individuals can make profit out of their production and sale. I should like, without burdening the House, to quote a very remarkable statement made by Professor Soddy recently in a publication upon economic questions. He says:

We have no problem of production to deal with. We can in this country—other civilised countries can do the same, and because they do the same we suffer—we can produce wealth in untold quantities. It has been estimated by several leading economic thinkers since the War that it is possible to produce at least a hundred times as much wealth per head of the population as we could produce in the middle of the 17th century. Consider the question from the point of view of rather more remote history; go back to the old Empires of Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, and so forth. Thousands upon thousands of years ago industry was based upon slave labour. The slaves were not all engaged in productive industry for consumption, because those Empires were constantly at war one with another. Many of the slaves were soldiers; many of them were engaged in making the primitive weapons of war that were used. But those slaves, however badly they were treated, however much they may have lacked the amenities of modern civilisation, were at least well fed; and they worked practically without tools in the modern sense, certainly without machinery as we understand it to-day, or the power of electricity, steam and so forth. They were well fed, and upon their slavery was built wonderful culture, splendour and luxury, the crumbling remnants of which are an inspiration to thinkers and idealists at the present time. In the middle of the fifteenth century the average wage, according to Professor Thorold Rogers, of the craftsmen in the towns, was equivalent to £3 a week pre-War wages. There was no unemployment except the unemployment of the wasteland ne'er-do-well. There were none of these modern industrial problems. At the same time there was nothing of the modern industrial machinery and productive power. For 500 years we have been adding discovery to invention, and invention to discovery, until we are suffering to-day from the consequences of poverty that is the direct result of our extraordinary productive power.

We can produce untold wealth to satisfy the needs of the community, and because we can do that many hundreds of thousands of our people are not living the kind of life that civilisation requires. What is wrong with the system is this: You have possibilities of production, potential wealth-producing power, but you have not markets. You are able to produce untold wealth, but you are not able to sell that untold wealth. To give a practical illustration of what I mean, I know a big firm connected with the, confectionery trade which to-day, by the use of wonderful, miraculous machinery, can produce—they do not do it, but they could—10 times as much of their particular product with 25 per cent of the labour that they employed less than 20 years ago. That is a direct and immediate cause of unemployment. Those workers, men and women, are thrown out of employment because of the introduction of that machinery, while the machines themselves, because of the miracle of their production, can turn out the goods to an enormously greater degree than was previously possible by hand labour. You create unemployment, you create a reduced purchasing power on the part of those who are unemployed, and generally on the part of the consuming workers of the nation, and yet side by side with that relatively reduced purchasing power you are unable to get rid of the goods the potential power of producing which is the characteristic feature of the development of modern industry. That is the thing you have to tackle. You have to deal with that problem. You have to realise that in order to solve the problems that you all feel the urgency of, you have to get down to the problem of production and consumption—to get a balance between production and consumption. In the past you had the old Liberal policy of finding and developing foreign markets. That policy was very well in the comparative infancy of the modern industrial system, but it will not do at present, because the Colonies, or the Dependencies, or the tropical lands, or the foreign countries that you were able to develop in the heyday of that industrial system are to-day producing for themselves, and, as in the case of India, producing not only with machinery which has been exported from this country and from Europe, but actually producing the machinery which they are beginning to make themselves, and as the days go on, as the industry develops, as the system goes on, you will find yourselves face to face with that problem right the way through. Either you have to face the problem effectively or else there must come an end to the present system. There must come an end to civilisation as we understand it at present.

In agriculture you find the same characteristics as you find in industry of other kinds, the capacity to produce but the ineffectiveness of that production because of the impossibility of selling the surplus. So long as you produce for profit, so long will you find that difficulty. The only way to solve the difficulty is to produce for use instead of for profit. Take, for instance, these facts. Professor Popoff, of Sophia University, is making corn, rice, cotton and tobacco yield from 25 to 50 per cent, more than usual. He claims that every plant useful to man can be made twice as useful. Food plants are being made to grow night and day, which would mean double harvests. In California a scientist has corn growing 17 feet high. There are 69 sites in Britain where we can harness tidal power and at present we leave 4,000,000 horse-power to run to waste. If we dealt scientifically with the problem of agriculture and, side by side with that scientific development, also organised distribution so as to bring the products of our wonderfully fertile land compared with many others on to the tables of the people of the country, we should go a long way not only towards dealing effectively with the question of agriculture but with the question of foreign trade and the difficulties we are faced with with regard to international competition. This question of agriculture is to my mind an exceedingly important one and, although agriculture is in a bad way, it remains a fact that the agricultural worker can produce his own wages, his share of the rent, the profit and so forth of the farmer by a third of his year's work, and it does not cost another two-thirds to distribute effectively the products of the land as they should be distributed. There is waste and leakage and inefficiency, and here again you have to deal not from the standard of private enterprise. Private enterprise has landed you where you are. Private enterprise has created the problems that you realise are so urgent. It is not true that public enterprise has been a failure. That is one of the most absurd and untrue statements that are made in opposition to the contentions of the Socialists. But certainly, whatever may be said for public enterprise, private enterprise has been a failure.

What kind of public enterprise?

Your doles.

I hope hon. Members will not make speeches when they are sitting, down.

Public enterprise, which I am challenged to refer to, is an exceedingly wide question. The subject of housing has been discussed in this Debate. In all parts of the country there are evidences of direct labour and public enterprise as applied to housing. During the course of last Session there were a number of replies to questions put to the Government as to public enterprise in housing as conducted by the Office of Works. They are very interesting reading. We find that in Kent something like £200 per house was saved by public enterprise, upon the same specification, for buildings side by side with buildings put up by private enterprise. In housing alone the Office of Works fully justified public enterprise. If we take the question of electricity, the reports published by the London County Council within the last year or two are available as to the advantage of public over private enterprise in the production and distribution of electrical power. What applies to London applies to the whole country. I took the trouble some time ago to analyse the figures given in the Municipal Year Book, and I have found that, apart from the question of loan repayment, which, after all, is capital, from the bare, gross position of the difference between income and expenditure there were only two cases, ranging over markets, electricity, gas, waterworks, tramways and so forth, where the expenditure exceeded the income.

This stunt—excuse me using words of this kind—this campaign which is undertaken for the purpose of discrediting Socialism and public enterprise, is based upon the most complete mis-statements as to the actual position. In this country and throughout the world it is not true that public enterprise has failed. Whether public enterprise has failed or not, I am quite sure anyone giving intelligent, practical attention to the problems we are dealing with in this Debate will realise that private enterprise has been a complete failure. It has been a failure in housing. Private enterprise has produced the slums. The question of the price of bread and of meat is to be made the subject of a Royal Commission. The operations of the trusts are the result of private enterprise. The question of the food supply and the price of food is a question of private and not of public enterprise. Right the way throughout the whole experience of the War the country was saved by public enterprise fighting private enterprise. London was saved 3½d. per 1b. upon meat as the result of the public control of Smithfield Market. The facts surely are well known as to the cost of munitions of war and commodities required by the troops abroad. The public organisation of production for use instead of for profit, so far as it went, during the War was the salvation of this country. Only production for use instead of for profit will save this country from economic ruin or from the Bolshevist revolutionary idea, to which hon. Members object so much. That is the only salvation that we have in front of us.

Upon the question of control of prices, I am not so much concerned as perhaps some hon. Members opposite may think a Labour Member ought to be about the question of prices, because I realise that there is a contest between two sections of the employing classes, one section which gets its living from what our triend Carl Marx used to call circulating capital—the section that gets its living through the distributive side, where monopoly and trustification is possible, and the section which gets its living and makes its profit out of the staple industries of the county. A Conservative newspaper—the newspaper which calls itself the Conservative newspaper—stated that upon the food supplies of this country the consumer is taxed to the extent of at least £175,000,000 a year, and called for action in order to do away with that kind of exploitation. In the same issue in which it advocated the control of prices it also published an article demanding that wages should be brought down to a lower level in order that we might be able to fight foreign competition.

The price of labour is as important to me as the price of currants, and if the regulation of prices, the bringing down of the cost of living, is only to be done in order that there may be an excuse for depressing the wages of labour still further, we of the Labour party want nothing with it. We are not concerned about it. What we are concerned about is the real status, the real conditions of the workers of this country. I know that there is the problem of foreign competition, but we certainly are not going to accept the position that in order that we may have some kind of stable employment we must reduce the status of labour to the level of the coolie in tropical countries. That is practically what it means.

We say that the forces of scientific production ought to be mobilised against the forces of the mere human mass production possessed by those who are exploited in far-off climes in the interests of European capital. I realise that we have to meet foreign competition, and that we have to sell our manufactured articles abroad in order to get our food, or a large portion of our food, but we are not going to retrieve the position, and we are not going to advance the interests of this nation in any real sense, by lowering and reducing the status of the people in order that we may more effectively fight the competition of foreign countries. There is a better way, and that better way is to shake off the limpets upon industry, to organise our production scientifically, and that can only be done by that measure of co-ordination and that measure of scientific application which represents the co-operative and collectivist ideals of the Labour party.

I do not propose to follow the hon. Member who has just spoken into a debate on the relative merits of production for use or profit. That would involve many of the time-worn arguments which we addressed to our electors ad nauseam during the Election, when a great majority was returned against the theories advanced by the hon. Member. I wish to refer to the speech made by the hon. and gallant Member for the Fairfield Division of Liverpool (Major Cohen), who referred to the absence from the Gracious Speech of any mention of the ex-service men. I would like to reinforce one or two things that he said so admirably with regard to the two questions which are undoubtedly influencing, in the direction of great hardship, certain cases, namely, the question of the final award and the time limit. If my words can reach the Minister of Pensions, I would ask that he should look at this question from a very wide point of view. We have had frequent changes of Government recently, and meanwhile the case of the pensioner has had nothing done for it either from one side or the other with respect to these questions which are operating so hardly.

I would ask the Minister of Pensions to remember that the Pensions Bill of the nation is a rapidly diminishing obligation, and that there is every reason for dealing with these cases liberally. I would ask him also to remember that when we are dealing with the possibility of employment and the earning of a living by these partially disabled ex-service men, with over 1,000,000 unemployed, partial disablement means in existing industrial conditions the impossibility of earning anything at all in the vast majority of cases. When the Royal Warrant was issued, that condition of affairs was not considered, because there was a great movement for the employment of all ex-service men. We were then much nearer to the War, and the feeling was that whoever else was employed the ex-service men were to be given a chance. It has not worked out so, and we have lots of these 20 per cent, disablement cases who have been settled by final award, and who are getting nothing at all and have to go to the Poor Law.

I want the Minister of Pensions to recollect that the nation has only one pocket. The question is, whether the Ministry of Pensions should keep these men and their families from starvation, which was the undertaking given during the War on the part of the nation, or whether we are going to leave them to the precarious Chance of charity, through the funds that are raised under Earl Haig's great efforts and in various other ways. Are we going to fulfil our national obligation to the men who saved the country? I want the Minister of Pensions not to look at this question from the Departmental point of view, but to realise that we have only one pocket, and that if we have to pay we might as well pay and meet the obligation which the nation undertook in regard to these people. Therefore, we want a very liberal interpretation, and a very full reconsideration of the whole matter.

When the hon. and gallant Member for Fairfield asked for a Committee of this House to consider the question, he was asking for the very minimum and for something which the Minister of Pensions will find it very useful to have when he starts to deal with this very difficult subject of the extension or abolition of the time limit, and the question of the final award. Following on that, we have had a most interesting Debate on inter-Allied debts and reparations, and certainly it was news to me to hear from the Chancellor of the Exchequer the interpretation that I understood the Government were going to place on the Balfour Note, namely, that if in reparations from our late enemies or any payments we received in virtue of the debts owed to us by our Allies, we got an aggregate sufficient to meet our annual charge in paying interest and sinking fund on our debt to America, we shall make no further claim. I always understood that the Balfour Note dealt with inter-Allied debts. I never understood until to-day that this question of reparation from Germany was to be brought into the matter at all. I want to know what the position is with regard to these War losses reparation claims. We have always heard—at least I have always heard—that these claims of those who lost through the sinkings by the German submarines and things of that sort, the claims of the widows of the seamen who lost their lives, and the claims of seamen who lost their effects, claims such as I have in my constituency of people whose sole wealth in the world was one little ship which was sunk—that those claims were the first charge on anything we were going to get in the way of reparations from Germany. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George) proposed in 1921 to make a special grant from the Treasury of £5,000,000, and set up a Commission under Lord Sumner. That Commission, which has considered all those War loss claims, first of all worked down the claim to what they thought was right and justified, and then they went into it from another point of view to see how far it could he met within the limits of the £5,000,000, which was all the money it had to spend. Not a penny of it was found by Germany, but all of it had been found by the Treasury, that is, the taxpayer here. I know a case of a £500 claim adjudicated by the Sumner Commission that it ought to be about £450—because nobody ever understates their claims—and settled—and I am now told this is a final settlement—£157!

He is one of the lucky ones.

He may be. I want to know on that word "final" are we to understand that if we can get a total of reparations and anything the Allies may be pleased to pay us in respect of the money we loaned them—if we can get as much as we have to pay to the United States we are to have no funds from reparations from which anything can be paid to our fellow-countrymen who lost what to many of them was everything through the German submarines during the War, I think that will create a shock in the minds of those people and of many people who are not themselves losers but to whom these oases have been constantly brought. It is not confined to any part. We have all had those oases. We have all hoped that when this Dawes Report came to be operated and we really got something, then it was fellow-countrymen who lost their all during the War who were going to be regarded as a first claim on these, reparations which we are now told by the Chancellor of the Exchequer are going to be regarded from a wholly different point of view and pooled with anything we are paid by our Allies and everything is going to be all right provided there is enough to pay our war associates, the United States of America. I hope we shall hear something about that.

I want to ask now with regard to one other passage in the Gracious Speech which deals with Imperial Preference and also the passage in the Speech that we have concluded a treaty of commerce and navigation with the President of the German Reich. Hon. Members know that that Treaty includes a provision by which German subjects are once more to be admitted to the rights which other foreigners possess of serving in our British Mercantile Marine. I daresay that is inevitable. I want to put this view before the House. Undoubtedly every German steward and seaman who is employed upon a British ship will mean one more unemployed British seaman unless we are to believe the claim of the shipowning community that these German stewards and German seamen are so essential that they will enable them to undertake trade which they could not possibly otherwise do without those German people on board. The argument is that it will enable them to undertake voyages which they would not otherwise carry out, and that therefore, on the whole, there would be more British seamen and stewards employed than there otherwise would be. We all know that line of argument. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it does not. What we see in front of us is that if a ship has British stewards and we admit German stewards again the probability of the immediate effect will be that there will be so many fewer English stewards. I want to make a suggestion which I hope the President of the Board of Trade will study. During the last Parliament I was not here. [An HON. MEMBER: "Shame!"] I do not know whether the shame is mine or not. That does not matter, I am here now. I watched with a good deal of interest the debates in the House to see what was being said and what sort of a case was being made for the Mercantile Marine. Unemployment was always being brought forward and all the time there was no trade or industry in the country where unemployment was worse than among the officers and seamen of the British Merchant Service. That being so I want the President of the Board of Trade to consider whether we cannot bring the British Mercantile Marine, the carrying trade of this country on which so much depends, into this question of Imperial Preference. Before the war trade on the East Coast of Africa was practically entirely in German hands. German ships, subsidised by the German Government, drove British ships off that trade altogether, and since the War I am told that the timber-carrying trade with the Baltic is practically entirely in the hands of German ships, for another reason that they can work cheaper and claim less in wages. I want to suggest to the President of the Board of Trade that when we come to consider and ratify those agreements with regard to Imperial Preference, it would be a very reasonable proposal that cargoes which claim preferential Customs Duty should come to this country from our Dominions and Colonies in British bottoms. I cannot see why we should not. I do not think that it interferes with any treaty, or that it is the business of any foreign country what arrangements we make with our own Dominions, as to how the goods that we want from them are to be carried to this country. I, therefore, ask hon. Members to look at the three questions I have raised from the point of view of the nation as a whole. I ask the Minister of Pensions, who has been good enough to come into the House, to look at all these pensions questions from a fresh point of view, and with a fresh mind; and I beg the President of the Board of Trade to consider very seriously whether he cannot do something to neutralise, and more than neutralise, the effect which this Treaty with Germany will have on employment in our own merchant marine, by arranging that our own merchant seamen have a better chance of earning wages by carrying the foodstuffs that we want and in exchange taking goods to the Dominions which want them.

I wish to say something with regard to this King's Speech. I have listened very attentively, both yesterday and to-day, to speeches from the Government side of the House and by Liberal Members. One and all have designated it, in the usual Parliamentary phraseology, "a Gracious Speech." I want to say here as a Socialist that it is not a gracious Speech; there is nothing gracious about it. I want to say to the Prime Minister of Great Britain that I am disappointed with it, that he had a glorious opportunity here, when he was assisting to frame this King's Speech, which is really the programme for the Session of Parliament, to put into it something that might have tended to ameliorate the hellish conditions of the people whom we on these benches are supposed to represent from the Socialist point of view. That brings me to something which I at least expected that the King would have taken cognisance of. Time and again in this House we Socialists from the Clyde, in season and out of season, have raised the question of evictions, not evictions on the Clyde only but evictions all over the country. We have appealed in every possible fashion; we have tried to persuade the House. There is no doubt that we have been aggressive. Members of the Government appealed to those for whom I can speak, my immediate colleagues and myself, that if we would just wait a little, once the King's Speech appeared we would see that a Tory Government would assist us, and that there would be no need for us to be as aggressive as we had been in the past. I am sorry to say that they have let us down badly. It is another piece of education for the classes that we represent, "Never put your trust in princes," whether they be merchant princes or any other type of princes. Again I have to intimate to my class, never trust the princes.

Seeing that we have made ourselves conspicuous on the Floor of the House in defence of our people, I had expected that something would have been done that would have made it impossible for evictions to take place in this country. Think what it means! I can hear speeches from all sides of the House deploring the fate of people in Germany—the Ruhr used to be quite fashionable—in Vienna, in Russia, anywhere but home. We have heard to-day from the Government side deliverances which prove again to the working people of the country that we are the wealthiest and most powerful Empire in the world. Yet we cannot, with all that wealth, with all that power, with all the great display of wealth that there was in the House of Lords the other day, when the King made a Speech that is not a Gracious Speech—we cannot make a single attempt to alter the awful fact that there are thousands of our fellow-countrymen at the moment dreading being thrown out of their homes, not by Germans, not by Russians, not by any foreign Power, but by their own kith and kin, by those who own their homes and who are going to turn out people who have fought for their native land. Yet we have people, even on these benches, who have the audacity to tell us that there is not a class struggle in society. If we want evidence of it there it is in all its hideousness; there is the fact that in my constituency of Clydebank, which rendered its quota as well as any other part of the British Empire during the War, in Clydebank, which has built the finest battleship that is afloat to-day, the same people who did these things for this great Empire are threatened with being thrown out of their homes, and people are being threatened with eviction all over the country. We have raised the subject here, but there is not a word about it in the King's Speech. Therefore, I say your King's Speech to the people whom we represent on the Clyde is not worth a snap of the fingers. That Speech might as well never have been delivered. It makes no difference. What a glorious opportunity has been lost here. When we are in converse with hon. Members opposite, individually, how they reason with us, how they sympathise, how they say they believe sacrifices will have to be made and those who have the wealth of this country will have to shed some of it in order to ease the situation. Here was an opportunity of demonstrating that they really meant what they said, and they have lost that opportunity.

I wish to explain to the House the situation in Clydebank, and I am glad to see the Secretary for Scotland and the Lord Advocate in their places. We had not the privilege of having the Lord Advocate here when the Labour Party was in office nor in the previous Parliament. The gentleman who was Lord Advocate in the previous Parliament is now on the Front Bench, and I do not wish to antagonise him, because I am anxious, if it is humanly possible, to get concessions on behalf of people to whom I believe concessions should be given. It is not for the men I am appealing. I am appealing for the women and children whose husbands and fathers died in the War, and I will give names and addresses before I finish. Clydebank has been in the public eye for a considerable time, and the Press has done its utmost to make it appear that my constituents have made up their minds to pay no rent. That is the atmosphere which the Press of this country has created. I wish to say here that that statement is untrue and is a libel on my people. The people whom I represent are just typical of me. [ Laughter. ] They are prepared to play the game just as I have always been prepared to play the game. My people are not shirkers any more than their representative, and I do not shirk your sneers any more than I would appreciate' your cheers. They make no difference to me.

It has been made to appear that there is a "no rent" war in Clydebank. It is not true. My folk in Clydebank are acting constitutionally, That is the point I wish the House to grasp. We have held all along in Scotland, particularly in the West of Scotland, that there was no justification under the sun for an increase in rent, the reason being that the houses were built before the War, and that wartime conditions did not affect the houses at all. It is to be remembered that those whom we in Scotland call factors, and who in England are called agents, did no repairs. They came down here and got a Tory Government to allow them to increase the rents. I hope hon. Members watch that point, because it means that they had not been allowed previously to increase their rents. It never had been allowed before, the reason being that at the beginning of the War landlords in Scotland took advantage of the men being away at the War defending their homes in Flanders when they should have been defending them here. The enemy was at home, and I will prove it. When the men went away to the War in 1915 they attempted to increase the rents. Do not start the idea that widows and orphans are being deprived of rent. The people I have to deal with are Lord Invernairn and Sir Robert McAlpine. Those are two fine widows and orphans. Those are the people who own the property with which I have to deal. When the men were away fighting, they attempted to raise the rents, and we objected. They took cases before the Sheriff, and out of the 600 cases they took at that time, there were 400 of them who had either their husbands or brothers fighting in Flanders, with the result that they had to cave in.

Eventually, Lord Hunter was sent up to make inquiries into the conditions in Glasgow, and when he came back here, within 24 hours an Order in Council was passed, which stated that for the duration of the War, and six months afterwards, there was to be no increase in rents, not in the West of Scotland alone, but all over Britain. That took from the landlords and factors their power to wring from the people increases in rent. When the War finished, then they came to you folk, and you gave them the power to increase the rents by 33⅓ per cent.; 25 per cent, was given to them to enable them to make the repairs which had not been done during the War because of war-time conditions. They never made those repairs, so that we have always protested against the idea of giving any increased rent. We do not believe that they had any moral right to any increase, apart from the fact that our people at the moment are not able to pay any increased rent. The wages paid at the moment, on the average, to the shipbuilder, the artisan, and the tradesman are £2 10s. a week. Those who are commonly called the unskilled men, the labourers—I do not know such a thing as an unskilled labourer, because all labour is skilled; the only individuals who are unskilled are those who do not labour, and I am not interested in them—those who come under the category commonly called unskilled labourers have from 34s. to £2 per week.

10.0 P.M.

These are the wages on which they are expected to rear a hardy, intelligent race. At any rate, that is what our people were, and those wages are given expecting them to maintain that hardy, intelligent race, whose sires the Romans could never defeat, but present-day conditions—there is no denying the fact—are defeating our people. Now we fought those increases in rent on every occasion, lawfully. We protested immediately that the increase went on, according to the issue of the document that went out by Act of Parliament intimating that the increase had to take place. We took up that document in the Court, and won in the Court, that that intimation was not legal and correct. The law was that the landlords should have intimated to the tenants to quit before they asked for the increases in rent. That was the law. It may seem silly, but it was you fellows who made it. The landlords had to intimate to the tenants to quit before they could intimate the increase, and we protested therefore that they had no right to the increase. We fought it to the High Court of Edinburgh, and we won, and then the landlords and factors came down to the then Secretary for Scotland, whose common name was Robert Munro, now Lord Alness, and he told them that he could do nothing. They wanted him to raise it in the Cabinet, but the Cabinet had their hands full with Ireland, and he told them that they would have to explore every avenue of the law before he could interfere. The only avenue left was the House of Lords, and, to the everlasting credit of the House of Lords [ Laughter ]—I am a Constitutionalist; it is because of these things that I am not a Communist; it is because I hope, I want you to believe me, with my colleagues, or we would not be here, that we will manage to forge out our difference on the anvil of the Floor of the House of Commons—the Lords stood by us. Then—and no disrespect is meant to the late Mr. Bonar Law—he brought in retrospective legislation which denied to the people of Scotland, because he fixed a date, the 1st December, what they had really won according to law. The people who call us the Bolsheviks were themselves the Bolsheviks, and we advised the people at that time not to pay the increased rent, but it was the law. Those who had paid, we advised not to pay. I got away with nine months paying no rent—no rent at all for nine months—and that was the law. The landlords had charged an increase when it was not legal, and the Lords decided in our favour that it was not legal for them to take that rent from us. Therefore, to get it back, we had to keep paying no rent. It was the only way. But it was difficult to get people to understand that, difficult to get people to make a fight regarding their homes, because it is bad enough for us to lose our work, bad enough to get the sack from a job, but it is worse, much worse, to lose your home, and people always dread losing their home. we have won in the Courts. This was a law drawn up by Englishmen to be operated in Scotland, which is an impossibility. But that law says before you get your increase in rent, the notice has to have the signature of a landlord, not the factor. In our country it was the usual habit for the factor to do all these things, as you can understand. Sir William Beardmore does not want to be troubled about house rent. He would rather have the contract given him for Singapore. Neither does Sir Robert McAlpine. He would rather be building your Tilbury Dock or make the arterial road from London to Glasgow. They have handed all that over to the factors. But you Englishmen, you said that the signature has got to be the signature of the owner, and only the signature of the owner. So in the Sheriff Court of Dumbarton, Sheriff Menzies again made a decision that these notices have got to contain the signature of the owner, and that means that 90 per cent. of the people in Clydebank have only the obligation to pay pre-War rent.

You would think that it would be quite easy to get over that and that all the factors had to do would be to issue a new notice and get the signature of the owner. But that is where the fly is in the amber, the reason being that when they put up these new notices, all the arrears for years back evaporate into thin air, "over the border and away." That is the trouble in Clydebank, the rent. The position is not unconstitutional. My folk are acting according to the law, the English law. It is British law, because it both includes England and Scotland. I do not want to separate Scotland from England. Now you can see that what is happening is that the factors, or landowners, or property owners, are in a cleft stick, and in order to get round the difficulty—I will take you into my confidence—they have been negotiating with the Secretary for Scotland just the same way as they operated with Robert Monro when he was Secretary for Scotland; yes, and with the Member for West Fife (Mr. W. Adamson) when he was Secretary for Scotland in the Labour Government, and bringing all the pressure they could bear in order to turn this position and to get legislation. They managed it before with the Tory Government, and they are hoping to manage it again. That is the principal reason for my rising here to-night, in order that I might use all the influence I may have on the Floor of the House of Commons to appeal to you men not to be side-tracked, hoping that you will face this situation in all its realities and not run away with the idea that you can just do as you did before, introduce a short measure and so compel the people of Clydebank to pay increased rent. It cannot be done. There is no power on earth can take rent from the people in Clydebank that they have not got. You cannot take blood from a stone. My people are up against it, but it is perfectly true they did not pay these increases of rent. What they did with that money is they fed their children, and fed them better than otherwise they would have been doing if they had paid the increases of rent. That is where the money has gone. Gone where? Gone into the best asset that the British Empire can possibly have, into the children's stomachs. I appeal to the House to stand by the women and children of Scotland. It is not many concessions that Scotland gets. [ Laughter. ] Tell me what concession we have got since we came here? We have got no concession! Our country has rendered yeoman service to the British Empire.

We are designated the "wild men of the Clyde." The London Press says I am the wildest of the wild men of the Clyde. We have a right to be wild. We have a right to be angry. We know the history of our country. We know the quota that our country has rendered to this great and wonderful Empire. We know what Watt did, when he gave the world the separate condenser, that made the steam-engine of commercial value, and accomplished the greatest revolution the world has ever seen, without shedding one drop of human blood. I could give innumerable instances of my countrymen who have been responsible for this great engineering age that has made it possible for the Empire to be what it is. We represent the descendants of those great men. Not one of those great men has anyone left behind who is wealthy. We are the representatives; that is our glorious heritage. We see those people whom we represent dreading eviction. The week before there was an eviction in Cambuslang. The hon. Member for Govan (Mr. N. Maclean) referred to it in his speech. I went out there. I went to the homes, and saw the children and the mother who had been forcibly ejected. The man had given three and a-half years in the. Army. They were turned out of a house to which you have to go down three flights of stairs below the level of the public thoroughfare. It was unfit for human habitation, and that is the only type of house for which we have ever advocated they should pay no rent—a house that is not fit for human habitation. And that is the law of the land.

It is for those people that I appeal again to this House. I appeal on behalf of the women and children, on behalf of the mothers of the race, on behalf of the women of England and Wales as well as of Scotland, the mothers of the working class who have had eternally swelling up within their breasts the determination, if necessary, to work the very flesh off their fingers in order that their boys will be better men than their fathers ever were, in order that their daughters will be better women than they have ever been. Those are the ideals of the womenfolk for whom I appeal. What is their fate at the moment? They are struggling to-day as with a steel band, trying to get ends to meet, but those ends never meet. Those are the conditions that prevail, in your great and glorious British Empire, among the mothers of the class that gave us birth.

The Debate on the Address is certainly a wonderful Parliamentary institution. It enables hon. Members in all parts of the House to ventilate the different subjects in which they are interested. I do not propose to follow the hon. Gentleman who has just sat down into his very earnest references to the Clydeside rent question, nor into his more regal incursions into the atmosphere of Kings and Princes, nor even into his rather remarkable praise of the House of Lords. But I do want, in a few sentences, to raise one or two general points which arise out of His Majesty's Gracious Speech.

First of all, with regard to the question of Egypt. I think that the references to Egypt in the Speech are very true and very apposite. I think, moreover, that the action which His Majesty's Government took in Egypt was not only right and proper, but it was the only action which a great country could have taken. It was rather a remarkable circumstance, and I feel throughout the country many people must have heaved a sigh of relief that at long last a British Government had come into powei1 which was determined to assert the power of the British Empire. For the last six years it has been the habit of Government after Government always to compromise, always to give way, always to truckle to the person or the party which demanded most or threatened most, and anybody who appreciates the necessity for the assertion of our undoubted rights in the world cannot but be thankful that the Government took the action which they did take The war weariness of the country is at last beginning to pass away. There has been more bloodshed, more human misery caused by weakness in the world, even though it may have been a weakness under the cloak of the moderation of our statesmanship—there has been more human lives lost through weakness in the world than ever there have been through the fair and determined conduct of our policy. I do feel in regard to the Egyptian question that we are not by any way out of the wood yet.

The Leader of the Opposition yesterday stated that everything must depend upon what was the final judgment and opinion of the Egyptian Parliament. So far as I understand the situation it is that the present Egyptian Prime Minister and Government have not the support of the Egyptian Parliament, which at present is in a state of prorogation, or at any rate adjournment, for it is not sitting. But what will happen when the Egyptian Parliament once again meets and immediately, possibly, passes a vote of censure on the present Egyptian Government? Our Government here, in the centre of the Empire, may still have to face in the very near future a recrudescence of the difficult situation in Egypt. I hope that if that set of circumstances should arise they will deal with it as firmly and as strongly as they have hitherto dealt with the question. I sometimes think that since the War we in this country have gone what I may call "Parliament mad." We have been trying to foist our parliamentary institutions upon many countries most of which, so far as Eastern countries are concerned, do not understand Parliamentary institutions and very possibly are not fitted properly to conduct them. I wonder whether Egypt, if it had remained a province of the Turkish Empire, would to-day have had a Parliament. I wonder whether India, if the War had not taken place, would have had to-day a Parliament, or a legislative institution. Oriental countries have a very long tradition of history. They have grown up as we have grown up, and they have learned to fashion the form of government which suits them best, and without in any way desiring to traduce the great institution of Parliamentary and constitutional government which we possess, and which we understand, and which suits us, I venture to say that because that suits us, Parliamentary institutions do not necessarily suit other nations, and particularly the Oriental nations.

Just one word with regard to inter-Allied debts. I think the House will have heard with appreciation and with some relief the speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer this afternoon. I listened to the various speeches on the question of inter-Allied debts from the Liberal Benches to-day and yesterday with complete agreement—in fact, I think that what was said by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Spen Valley (Sir J. Simon) and yesterday by the right hon. Gentleman who was Prime Minister of the Coalition Government commanded practically the universal assent, I think I may say, of all parties in the House. And the reply to-day of the Chancellor of the Exchequer upon that subject was, in so far as one is able to understand it without having read it, eminently satisfactory. It would have been intolerable and unthinkable that this country, which has borrowed only to lend, and which has lent quite as much as it has borrowed, should have been left with the present American Debt settlement, while France and the United States made some settlement more advantageous to France; and much though we value the French entente, much though we appreciate the great qualities of the French nation, and much though we remember their association with us during the War, the British people would never have understood, and so would never have tolerated, an arrangement by which France was to get from America concessions with regard to her debt to the United States and we received no similar concessions. Consequently I think the House received what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said on that point with complete satisfaction. I understand that the Home Secretary is going to speak, and I am not going to detain him, but as he is going to reply, perhaps he will allow me to say a word on perhaps what is a very minor point in the King's Speech—I refer to the small reference to a question which affects the constituency I represent, that is the question of the completion of land purchase in Northern Ireland which figures in the speech from the Throne. The Prime Minister very rightly and truly said that this and the concurrent question of guaranteeing the bonds issued by the Irish Free State were long overdue and Bills should have been passed dealing with them years ago. They have been introduced first by a Unionist Government and then by a Labour Government, but owing to the fact that two Autumn Sessions had failed to materialise, and owing to General Elections, those Measures had never been completed. I am sure the right hon. Gentleman representing the Home Office who is responsible for the affairs of Northern Ireland, will do his best to see that these very-long overdue and outstanding matters are carried through without any further delay. If he does this he will only have carried out a pledge given in the first instance by the Prime Minister of the Coalition Government at the time our legislation was going through, and subsequently by every Government which has succeeded.

Perhaps I may be allowed to answer the question just put to me by the last speaker by saying that I hope to introduce the Northern Ireland Land Purchase Bill this Session, and I hope it will be carried into law early next year. It is practically a non-controversial Measure and has been agreed to on all hands, and therefore I think it will pass very quickly through this House. I apologise to the hon. Member who represented the Home Office in the last Government who, I understand, intended to ask me some questions, but it has not been his fate to be called upon. If the hon. Gentleman will put his questions on another occasion, or put them to me personally, I will do my best to give him satisfaction. There are one or two speeches about which I should like to say a word or two. I should like to have dealt with the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Spen Valley (Sir J. Simon). That speech was largely dealt with by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I have nothing to add to his statement. I was at a lose, however, to understand why the right hon. and learned Gentleman should complain of the niggardly manner with which we have dealt with the question of old age pensions. He told us that in the pre-War period of our Ministry we were not as advanced as we might have been. Since then we have learned many things, but I am not quite sure that the Liberal party have learned as much as we have because we have 411 Members and the Liberal party have not so many. The reason for this state of things is that we intend to put into operation during the next four or five years a great many schemes of social amelioration which are long overdue. I trust that we shall have the co-operation and the assent of the Liberal party in all those measures that we hope to bring forward in the near future during the next few years.

I had hoped, and in fact it was the purpose for which I rose, to say a word or two upon the Zinovieff letter, which was raised by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Platting (Mr. Clynes). He told me he hoped to be back here by half-past ten, and that is really why I delayed rising, because I knew that he had to attend a meeting elsewhere. I am sorry that he is not here, but perhaps it is as well that I should explain to the House exactly the position we take in regard to the Zinovieff letter. In the first place, the Zinovieff letter is only of importance because it has put into categorical language what has been said over and over again at Moscow for the last few months. If the Zinovieff letter had merely appeared in the "Daily Mail" as an ordinary item of news, and had not-appeared with the full sanction of the Prime Minister of the late Government, I do not think that any very great attention would have been paid to it. It would have been an ordinary letter carrying out exactly the statements which have from time to time been made by Zinovieff and other leaders of the Bolshevist party in Moscow.

The real reason why the Zinovieff letter attained such, from the opposite party's point of view, unenviable notoriety during the Election, was not because we did something, not because the "Daily Mail" did anything, but because the right hon. Gentleman, as Foreign Secretary, thought it of such importance—it was quite impossible for him to have thought it a forgery—that he wrote a letter to M. Rakovsky complaining in such stern terms to the representative of a friendly nation. [ A laugh. ] I am putting myself in the position of the right hon. Gentleman. The late Prime Minister deemed that Russia was a nation friendly to this country. That is his whole policy; his whole policy is founded upon that; and yet he thought it his duty to write such a stern letter to the representative of a, to him, friendly nation, because he felt that that letter was one which never ought to have been written, and which—there is no other reason for his writing that letter—he himself believed to be a genuine expression of M. Zinovieff's opinion.

I have been asked what we have done in regard to it, and the Prime Minister has given me permission to state the names of the Cabinet Committee. He intended to have stated them yesterday, and they were stated in another place. It was referred to a Cabinet Committee consisting of the Lord Chancellor, an ex-Lord Chancellor—Lord Birkenhead— the Foreign Secretary, the ex-Foreign Secretary—Lord Curzon—and Lord Cecil. Those five members of the Cabinet went thoroughly into it They had placed before them at the Foreign Office the whole of the evidence that was placed before the late Government, the whole of the evidence which caused the late Prime Minister to write that letter and say to all the world, in effect, that the Zinovieff letter was a genuine one. In addition to that, they had further evidence placed before them from the sources which this country has in foreign lands, and I am prepared to say—I am allowed to say on behalf of the Cabinet—that, having put this matter into the hands of these five gentlemen, we who were not on the Committee were prepared to accept the statement which they made to us that they, as men of business, as men of affairs, as reasonable men, able and will- ing to weigh evidence, were convinced that the letter was a genuine letter and not a forgery. That statement of five of our body was enough for the other members of the Cabinet. I think it will be enough for my hon. Friends on this side of the House. Beyond that, I think it will be enough for the people of this country when I say, on my responsibility as a Minister at this Box, that we are not prepared and do not propose to give to the House or the country—it would be impossible to do so—the evidence upon which that opinion was based, or the names of the people concerned in it. It would be impossible, for reasons of safety to individual life, that the names of the people who produced this evidence should be given. We are satisfied, and I think the country will be satisfied with that statement.

May I ask whether the statement made by the right hon. Gentleman means that this Cabinet Committee had no further evidence beyond that which was presented to the previous Cabinet?

May I just have this interruption. Are we to assume that this Russian letter is to be finished to-night at 11 o'clock and that we are to have no reply to the Member for Dumbarton Burghs (Mr. Kirkwood) on his housing policy from the Secretary for Scotland?

It is impossible for me to reply to the Member for Dumbarton Burghs, not from any lack of respect to him, but there will be other occasions when we can hear his eloquence and when the Secretary for Scotland will be able to reply. But in reply to the right hon. Gentleman who has asked that question I have already said that—if he had listened more carefully—this Committee had before them the whole of the evidence put before the late Cabinet Committee, and they had other and further evidence which they have since received from the Foreign Office. That is the statement I make. I do not think it is right we should go further. On our responsibility as a Cabinet we believe that letter to be genuine. It really comes to this. Hon. and right hon. Gentlemen have to choose whether they believe the word of M. Zinovieff or the statement of the British Cabinet Committee.

The right hon. Gentleman will perhaps say, per contra, whether they will believe the word of the British Delegation now in Russia, who held a meeting and are satisfied that the letter was, in fact, a forgery.

I have said where the choice lies. It is open to the hon. Member to believe what he likes. It is open to the country to believe what they like, and I think they will believe what I believe. A word or two in regard to the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Platting. He complained of misrepresentations during the Election. I should like to clear that away. There were so far as I am aware no misrepresentations. There were strong statements of opinion. There always are strong statements of opinion during general elections. I have never yet—and I have spoken at a great many meetings in the country with a great many candidates!—I have never heard anyone make a statement which to my knowledge was untrue or a misrepresentation of the facts. They may put their own construction on these facts and they may draw, and, doubtless, did— and I did, too—certain conclusions from the facts. These are the statements we made and which we believe are true, and it was put before the people of the country and hon. and right hon. Gentlemen had an opportunity of putting forward their views. I put it to them now. They are beaten. Let us get on with the work of governing the country. I remember something about—

Terminological inexactitudes!

Something worse than that. I remember something about scraping in the garbage of the dunghill. When people are fighting, let them fight fairly and, when they are beaten, accept their defeat.

Let them always take their victory modestly.

We always do. We are told that unless we give this loan to Russia the advent of revolutionary Communism is assured. What did the right hon. Gentleman mean by that? I thought that the late Government had nothing to do with Communism. I wonder whether he got that statement, as he might well have got it, out of a paper not unknown to hoc Members opposite—"The Workers' Weekly." I remember on 6th September a very remarkable statement made in that paper:

I do not know whether the right hon. Member for Platting agrees with the "Workers' Weekly," that we are going to face the Council of Action once more. We know now where we are. We were warned beforehand that if we denounced that Treaty, that if we did not carry out that Treaty, we were to meet the Council of Action once more. Very well, we are prepared to meet the Council of Action. We are prepared to meet revolutionary Communism, if the right hon. Member for Platting throws revolutionary Communism at our heads. In simple language, his view is that we are to submit to whatever proposal the late Government and the Russian Government arrived at in the form of a Treaty, and unless we submit to that, unless we make friendly relations with Russia, unless we lend a large sum of money or guarantee the loan of a large sum of money—I can see no difference between the two—we are to have revolutionary Communism or the Council of Action.

If Russia wants to be friends with this country, let her begin by stopping her propaganda all over the world. We are told that she is a friendly nation. We are told that she desires friendship with this country. We are told that she wants to make a further commercial treaty in addition to the Treaty of 1921. Let her begin by crying "Hands off the British Empire. Hands off India. Hands off Egypt." Hands off every country in the world where we control the government of other nations. What right has she, if she is a friendly Power, to propagand against us, to try to raise rebellion against us, and to try to make our rule futile in every country in the world where we rule. Before she wants a treaty with us, let her stop that. I can say quite definitely on behalf of this Government that there will be no treaty with Russia so long as she continues her propaganda.

Under the Treaty of 1921, anybody who desires to do so can trade with Russia. The trading terms Under the Treaty of 1921 are such that any individual person who desires to trade with Russia can do so. Of course, I am not responsible for any losses which they may make in so doing. They are at liberty to trade, but that is a different thing from making a treaty with Russia of the character which was made by the late Government, ending up with a loan of a large sum of money, popularly supposed to be something between £30,000,000 and £40,000,000. We heard the speech of the late Prime Minister yesterday, and we heard the speech of the right hon. Member for Platting to-day, both screaming with anger against us for having denounced the Russian Treaty. I dare say it is within the memory of hon. Members that the late Government failed in their treaty with Russia. The late Government, on the 5th August of this year, issued from the Foreign Office a statement that the negotiations with Russia had broken down, that no agreement was reached, and that the Treaty would not be signed. There was no objection from hon. Members opposite then, except from a certain number who immediately interfered. From the Government there was no scream because negotiations had broken down. They took it quite as a matter of course. We cannot enter into a treaty with Russia, and there will be no treaty with Russia. But the late Prime Minister knows how to deal with Russia. I do not know whether anybody has read —it is almost as useful reading as the "Workers' Weekly"—one of those publications of the Labour Government on foreign policy, in which the right hon. Gentleman the late Prime Minister laid it down, quite definitely, that ever being repaid? The reason why we were averse to lending this money to Russia was the statement of Russia herself that there was little probability of the money being repaid. The Treaty of 1921 was purely a trading agreement and nothing else. Under this last Treaty M. Kameneff told Russia exactly what it meant. I am glad to see the hon. Baronet the Member for Swansea (Sir A. Mond) in his place again, and to acknowledge that what I am going to quote was from a speech he made during the Election. I have had a very careful translation made of M. Kameneff's speech on 22nd August when he put before the people of Russia exactly what he understood by the Treaty, and I am going to ask the House to say that what he understood was something totally different from anything like the trading agreement of 1921. He said:

Does the right hon. Baronet suggest that the late Government was prepared either to guarantee or to make any sort of loan to Russia on these terms as laid down by Kamineff? Is he not aware that we insisted on adequate security?

I am aware that this is the statement of M. Kameneff, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, after having heard from his own representatives here the whole of the negotiations— which we have not heard—that took place, the whole of these secret interviews between M. Rakovsky and the late Under-Secretary and a few of the Left Wing of the Labour party. We do not know what took place. I suggest that M. Kameneff does, and knowing that, this is the view he takes of what was meant by this precious loan by our Government to the Russian Government.

The Treaty speaks for itself.

The Treaty is bilateral. It has never been interpreted yet. Until it has been interpreted by some competent authority I am entitled to say what the other party to it thinks it meant. This is what M. Kameneff thinks it meant. We here are not going to enter into any treaty of any kind which M. Kameneff could possibly interpret in the light of that speech.

The hon. and gallant Member for the Fairfield division of Liverpool (Major Cohen) made a number of suggestions in regard to war pensions. He raised several new points which have not been put either before the Government or the Ministry of Pensions, and he asked that we would grant a Select Committee to inquire into those points. Those proposals were unexpected. We had not heard of them from my hon. Friend, who, I admit, has done so much for the ex-service men in this House and outside it. We are all pledged to do the utmost for the ex-service man, but the hon. Member must give us time to consider the speech which he has made, and to get a report from our Pensions Minister on the suggestion. While this must not be taken as a pledge that a Select Committee will be granted, we will give very careful consideration to his question, and will let him have an answer in due course. One other word in regard to the speech of the right hon. Gentleman who said that we must govern a little more nearly in the Labour spirit if we were to govern successfully. I really think they might leave us to govern in a Conservative spirit. We have had enough of the Labour spirit. We know what the Labour spirit means. Class hatred to begin with. That is true of a great many hon. Members—

No, it is not.

Little Englandism for another thing. [An HON. MEMBER: "Let him go on and he will hang himself."] I am rather tough in the neck and it will take a long time. We are not going to govern in what most people regard as the spirit of the Labour party. We are going to govern in the spirit of a Labour Government. You opposite do not represent a Labour Government, you do not represent Labour in this country. There are 411 Members of Parliament on this side of the House, and I am prepared to say that 400 of them were returned by a majority of Labour votes. You cannot get out of it. If Labour really agreed with Socialism you would be on this side of the House and we would be on the other side. The 5,000,000 votes that you talk about were not given for Socialism; a large number of them were given merely for sympathy with a general idea of class solidarity. I speak as one who had a very large labour majority in my division—not black coats and rich men, but the solid working-men of this country—[HON. MEMBERS: "The Zinovieff letter!"]. No. If I had time I could tell you why the Labour Government were turned out. It was not only the Zinovieff letter; it had something to do with the Labour Minister's rabbits, with your neglect of the unemployment question, and it had something to do with the feeling of the working men of this country that they had been fooled by the Labour party. It was really a revolt of the solid working men of this country, and a determination on their part to have a Conservative Government returned by a majority of Labour votes. And I say to you to-night that you will find in the next four years more genuine labour legislation in the interests of the working classes passed by the Conservative Government than by any preceding Government.

Ordered, That the Debate be now adjourned.—[ Mr. Kennedy. ]

Debate to be resumed upon Monday next (15th December).