GREAT BRITAIN: Unemployment Plans

With a Scottish peer and a confectioner to accompany him*, that wiliest of Welshmen, David Lloyd George, went to No. 10 Downing Street last week to talk Unemployment with Prime Minister MacDonald and his ministers. Britons soon had rumors aplenty to take their minds off the blistering “American heat” (see p. 19).

For nearly two hours he was drawn into consultation last week.. He left Downing Street smiling complaisantly. With no official announcement to go by, Britons had their choice of “strictly confidential” rumors as to the result of the meeting:

1) Realizing that another General Election is inevitable before many months, Messrs. Lloyd George and .MacDonald had agreed to join forces in an attempt to form a Coalition Government, not unlike David Lloyd George’s last Ministry.

2) As an immediate unemployment measure, they had agreed to boost British industry by a 10% duty on all manufactured articles entering Great Britain accompanied by a rebate for British Dominions—practically an adoption of Lord Beaverbrook’s widely touted Empire Free Trade, but omitting foodstuffs.

3) Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden, as a confirmed Free Trader, was about to resign.

4) There had been planned the creation of a number of gigantic public utility corporations in Britain Dominions, backed by the British government and the various Dominion governments. These corporations would be granted large tracts of land at specially favorable rates with the understanding that the new corporations would create new self-supporting communities for British workmen, technical and agricultural, to emigrate to.

This plan returns once more to the real crux of England’s unemployment situation: the falling off of emigration. Britons are unemployed at home not because English industry is doing badly (despite Indian boycotts and U. S. and German competition, more than a million more men are employed in British factories than were in 1921) but because British workmen who used to emigrate by the hundreds of thousands annually are either unable (foreign quota laws) or unwilling to leave the United Kingdom. Chief drawback to the scheme is that it once more passes responsibility for unemployment from Great Britain to the Dominions, who are not at all anxious to increase their own unemployment problems with an influx of workless Britons.

Whatever the actual decisions of the conference may have been, it was obvious that something was decided. Labor and Liberal leaders went about looking mysterious, announced a further unemployment conference for next week. The conference rumors, added to a late bulletin announcing that the previous week’s unemployment figures had been reduced by 32,780, were just enough to send The City kicking up its heels in the first “boomlet” in months.

* Robert Schomberg Kerr, Marquess of Lothian: B. Seebohm Rowntree, sociologist, maker of Rowntree’s Chocolates.

tEmigration 1910: 390,000; 1927: 154,000.