Orders of the Day — Supply.

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at on 24 June 1942.

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Photo of Dr Hyacinth Morgan Dr Hyacinth Morgan , Rochdale

I have only 15 minutes, and I have been here all day, and I really cannot stand it any longer. It is very tedious indeed. There have been some queer speeches made to-day, even on our side. One of our Members actually said that the report of the West Indies Commission had been published. It has not. Only the recommendations of the Commission have been made public—for a very good reason. When that report is made public, it will give the British people a greater shock than they had over Malaya and elsewhere; and the conditions it deals with relate not to war-time but to peace-time. It reveals deplorable, disgraceful social and economic conditions.

Take the case of venereal disease in Jamaica. I put a Question to the right hon. Gentleman's predecessor asking whether it was not true that on one occasion two children of seven and eight years of age were receiving treatment for venereal disease, caused by an adult male, and whether that treatment was being given in an open dispensary, without their parents being present. I have the Question and the Answer here. It was admitted that the conditions were quite unsatisfactory, and it was stated that the late Secretary for the Colonies was communicating with the Governor. I have heard nothing since. No charge was made against the culprit, because it was pretended that nothing could be done. These children, except on the first visit, had to attend a dispensary where there was no segregation between male and female. That sort of thing makes me disgusted with the Colonial Office. It has nothing to do with politics, but only with ordinary decency. I have mentioned in a previous Debate the diseases that exist there, when you have a Colonial Development Fund which is recommended by the Royal Commission to spend £1,000,000 a year on welfare work. In spite of that, such conditions are permitted for the treatment of children who innocently have been infected in this way. Quite frankly, that ought to be stopped. When I have asked Questions about it, the right hon. Gentleman, who, no doubt, cannot know everything but who is advised by official who should know better, has always tried to give an evasive answer. I take my information from the" Colonial Office reports,

I am going to refer to the St. Kitts sugar factory, because the hon. and gallant Member for South Cardiff (Colonel A Evans) said that he did not believe that there was exploitation of the native worker, while the hon. Member for Bournemouth (Sir L. Lyle) said he did no know what a vested interest was. One hon Gentleman has mentioned the export of textiles. On the island of Barbados they cannot prosecute mothers, under the Compulsory Education Act, for not sending children to school, because it has beer proved in evidence before the Royal Commission that the mothers were too poor to buy clothes, and that the children were running about naked. The fathers were getting only is. a day, the same wages as they got in the time of slavery, l00 years ago. I put a Question down, and the right hon. Gentleman challenged my figures. My information is taken from the Stock' Exchange Year Book, from the actual reports of the company, and from a confidential report made for the Government. It is a confidential report which was submitted to me by one of the planters and his solicitor, so that I should know the facts, but which the hon. Gentleman said he will not accept. It is a report made to the Colonial Office. He will not accept these facts. St. Kitts is a very small island on which sugar is the one product. Six thousand people are directly involved in the sugar industry, and about 16,000 out of the 18,000 people on the island are indirectly connected with it. You have the interesting spectacle of an agricultural population having to live in the city because there is no land available on the large plantations to give them housing. I am taking these facts from Government reports, and they cannot be denied. They can be found in the report on malnutrition.

Before 1910 the planters each had their small sugar mill, in which they could grind their sugar canes, but London London financiers came along. The hon. Member for Bournemouth, who does not know what a vested interest is, will be interested to know that London and local financiers got together and formed a company, which built a central sugar factory to deal with the sugar canes. This is a Colony which exports sugar and imports taxed food. The company was formed with a capital of £6,500 and issued A and B shares which have never been paid for but are regarded on the Stock Exchange as fully paid up. The A shares from the start got their share of profits, and they lent in debentures a sum of £130,000 at 5 per cent. They built a sugar factory and stipulated that its cost should be paid off in a certain number of years, and in 1925 the money was paid off, and they borrowed more money to build a railway round the island to bring the sugar cane to the factory, and the cost of that railway has already been paid. You talk about the Parisian gangsters, but this island is being sacrificed and throttled by the City financiers of this country. I do not want to get excited over this, and I want really to be peaceful. If the Colonial Office would realise the conditions which exist, they would want to do well, but they do not realise the position. Not many of the officials of the Colonial Office go out to the Colony. They do not see the conditions and talk with the local people. In 1925, when the debentures were paid off and when accumulated profits were due for distribution, the city financiers formed a holding company called the St. Kitts Sugar Factory, Ltd. They bought up all the A Is. shares and exchanged them into £2 shares, thus watering the capital 40 times. I have seen the figures in the OFFICIAL REPORT. Since the day of the formation of the company, the A shareholders, the moneylenders to this island in order to throttle its agricultural economy, had never received less than 100 per cent. I challenge the hon. Gentleman to deny that. They have paid from 100 to 600 per cent. in a year, and, in the year in which they converted the company into a holding company, they paid 1,100 per cent., while the wages of the labourers remained at 1s. and 1s. 2d. per day.

I went into this matter thoroughly. The planters wrote to me and came to see me and said that they had seen that I had asked Questions in the House of Commons, and that they had time and time again protested against the arrange- ments and would like to see some of the profits come to them so that they would be able to pay good wages, which they could not do because the London financiers prevented it. Many of these directors are directors of sugar factories in Trinidad, Barbados, British Guiana and so on. The hon. Member for Bournemouth, who is interested in sugar and ought to know, tells me that he does not know what a vested interest is. That is a vested interest. When a trade union was formed in 1938 or 1939 its secretary was threatened that if he did not withdraw his statement that present-day wages were to be compared with those paid in the days of slavery, he would find himself brought under the Defence Regulations. What can the people do in St. Kitts, which is a small island, to change this throttling system and get out of it? Will you submit this matter to arbitration, or will you allow this devilry, this quintessence of satanic finance, to continue, thus holding down the island and preventing the people from getting a chance? I do not know what the difference will be, but they are going to coordinate the officials of the West Indian Development Fund and local Governors. Suppose the officials of the West Indian Development Fund found the Governors do not want to do certain things about health, or domestic affairs, or agricultural wages, would there not, in that case, be a clash?

The hon. Member for Bournemouth had no answer to the problem of what would happen to the labourers who left agriculture to go to the bases. I will give him the answer. If they will take their sugar estates and convert them into communal farms or run them on partnership lines, so that the workers get a decent wage, he will find that that is the answer and that they will come back to agriculture. I know that the question is a difficult one. I can pay tribute to many of the local officials and Governors. After all, I was under them. In my babyhood I had the free entrance to Government House in one of the islands. I pay tribute to men doing good work under very difficult conditions. Some are very good officials, and some are very bad. I am not blaming everybody. The responsibility is that of the Colonial Office. The Colonial Office passes the baby to the local Governors, and the local Governors pass it back to the Colonial Office. I have been out there, lived there and seen these things. I have not paid an occasional visit like some hon. Members, but I can speak of my own practical experience and knowledge. The Committee must forgive me if I get rather heated. I really love these people. I have been out there, and they asked me to go out and help them to prepare their evidence for the Royal Commission, and I regarded the invitation as their appreciation of my efforts. Let me give an instance. We are a naval nation. The West Indian Islands are very scattered. Why not federate them together? Why not have uniformity of laws and customs' and federated services, legal, medical, agricultural, economic and labour? Why keep the islands under the Imperial policy of "Divide and rule"? Why not keep them together? Why not federate some of the tinier islands? Surely that would be a good thing to do.

Take the question of the Colonial nursing service. Disease is rampant. What are the Colonial Office doing towards the proper development, co-ordination and planning of a decent West Indian Colonial nursing service? What are they doing about that in the different islands as well as arranging for training of West Indian women recruits here? We have scholarships for men in the West Indies but no scholarships for girls. The scholastic attainments of a girl can be of the best, but the only scholarships are for boys, in the West Indies, who can come to Great Britain. There is only one district nurse in Barbados Island, which has a responsible Government and a population of 200,000 people and this one district nurse was appointed only in 1939. Nothing has been planned for a Colonial nursing system by which nurses trained in one island on a standardised course can go to another island and find the same standardisation. Each island is allowed to be a law unto itself as regards nursing services. This has hit even Governors hard, because sometimes they have been treated by nurses who are incompetent.

Why is there no plan for decent training here, where there are facilities, equipment, knowledge and sister tutors? I wrote three years ago to the London County Council about such a scheme, but they never bothered. One or two hospitals have, but the L.C.C., with the necessary hospital facilities, cannot do it. Cannot the Colonial Office do that? Cannot they start devising a scheme for training nurses and bringing girls here from the West Indies? Cannot they include that in the West Indies Development Fund in order to alleviate suffering in the West Indies? Would that not be something to help West Indies nursing? At present there are local wards in many islands to which sisters from Great Britain go out as nurses. They remain as sisters, but the poor black woman, who has risen from the bottom, and has taken the responsibility of doing a sister's job, is never called "Sister." They are simply called "ward nurses." Their status depends upon their colour. Because one is a West Indian and black and the other is a European and white, one must be called a ward nurse and the other must be called a sister. I am sorry if I have been tempestuous, but I feel deeply on this subject. The right hon. Gentleman must excuse me.

Although I feel deeply, I want to emphasise that certain Colonies are doing fine work. Since the riots in 1937 Trinidad has done absolutely wonderful work in housing, water supply, sanitation and other reforms. Trinidad is the richest Colony in the British Empire in relation to its size, because of its soil, and if it was amalgamated with the West Indies its revenue would be able to help the other islands, especially if you took the Income Tax from the oil dividends which come to this country and put it back into the Colony as part of the Development Fund. If you made that rich Colony pay for certain reforms, in poorer Colonies, you would be doing some good. If I have been hitting too hard, it is not because I do not appreciate the work which has been done; it is because I see work which is undone and which ought to be done. I hope that as time goes on the Welfare Department will be developed and that the right hon. Gentleman will do all he can to see that reforms will be carried out, that competent officers, who will be able to come to decisions and face the Colonial Office, will be appointed—men who, because they are on the spot, are prepared to back their own decisions, subject, of course, to the overriding considerations of British policy. I am grateful to have had this opportunity of addressing the Committee, and I thank Members for listening to me so patiently.