Budget Proposals

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 20 April 1953.

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Photo of Mr Charles Fletcher-Cooke Mr Charles Fletcher-Cooke , Darwen 12:00, 20 April 1953

I understood that the reason for increased wages in the immediate past has been that more money was needed in the wage packet to pay for the cost of living. If, however, the cost of living is to be reduced, as clearly it will be by this Budget, it is wrong for the hon. Member for Northfield and others to encourage people to think that the reason still obtains. And nobody has denied that the cost of living will be reduced by this Budget.

I think the attack has largely been directed to the reduction of Purchase Tax on luxury articles such as jewellery, furs, pianos, and so on. The moral indignation expressed about these inanimate chattels has been so great that one almost feels that they themselves are largely to blame. I much prefer the attitude taken up by the president of the 80,000 amalgamated weavers in my area of Lancashire who has been pressing for a reduction in the tax payable on the highest quality of textiles. I think that is the right attitude to take.

It may be unfortunate, but the world is wicked and those are the things we can best sell abroad. These luxury goods, which are sometimes called luxury goods when one wants to attack them and quality goods when one wants to defend them, are the things for which there is a ready market abroad. It might be nicer if we could re-design the world ourselves and sell ordinary grey cloth or utility or under-the-D-line things abroad. Unfortunately that is not what the foreign trader looks to England for; he looks to England for quality goods of a high price. He is prepared to pay for those and not for the kind of articles which perhaps attract greater moral worth.

We have had a recent example of that over the question of some embroidery and decoration for the Coronation. These high-quality crafts have died to a certain extent, and in order to get the cloth embroidered properly, we have had to go abroad for work which was formerly the pride of this country. The same thing is happening with other crafts and will continue to happen unless the load of Purchase Tax can be taken off them, in which case we can hope to retain some of our export markets which pay us well for a relatively low effort but, of course, involve high and specialised skill. That is why we are all hoping that the horrible Purchase Tax, which crystallises in a purely fortuitous stream British industry as it is today, will go as quickly as it is apparently withering.

I want to make one serious observation about the White Paper on a point made fairly both by the right hon. Member for Leeds, South (Mr. Gaitskell) and the right hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Strachey). In Table 30 on page 41 of the White Paper relating to the distribution of manpower we see in bold relief the fact that during this period of relatively slack water manpower has not moved as we hoped it would. Do not let us deny this point to the Opposition, because it is their best point in the entire debate, and it is a serious one. It is worrying that the engineering industries do not seem to have attracted the labour one might have expected during the last year. My right hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Leicester, South-East (Captain Waterhouse) made the point earlier today that he knew firms in his area whose machinery has been working at only 60 per cent. capacity because of the shortage of labour. If that happened last year, when there were relatively more people on the labour market than for some time, it is a serious matter.

I hope we shall all do a little more thinking on the subject, because my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary to the Treasury pointed out some of the difficulties. He said, for instance, that in order to get employment one cannot move from the South Coast up to the Midlands and change one's sex. We know all that, but what we want to know is what the Government, and particularly the Minister of Labour, will do to try to stop the freezing that is going on with regard to the mobility of labour. All pulls and tugs in the modern State are against mobility. The employers are against it— they like to keep as many people in their industry as possible even if it is contracting. The trade unions are the same. The local authorities are the same—they reserve houses for people who have been in their area over long periods. All these great, responsible authorities tend, no doubt with the best will in the world, to preserve and freeze the labour structure as it is. This must not be allowed to happen.

Although the right hon. Member for Dundee, West, mentioned this point, I do not think he had any solution to offer. He asked, does it not show that in all modern economies you cannot transfer manpower by financial policy? I do not think it does show that, because I do not think that the reserve has yet been exhausted. I should like to ask the right hon. Gentleman what he meant by that rather sinister question. Does he mean that the only way one can transfer manpower in a modern economy is by direction? Since he is not here, I shall have to take another opportunity of asking him that question, because it is perhaps at the root of our economic problem in this economy today, since it is upon the mobility and flexibility of labour, upon our opportunities of taking advantage of the various winds of demand that blow upon this country, that our survival may well depend.