Wales and Monmouthshire (Report)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 2 August 1962.

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Photo of Reverend Llywelyn Williams Reverend Llywelyn Williams , Abertillery 12:00, 2 August 1962

I should like not to be interrupted because I am going to keep my word to the Minister to the split second. He will rise dead on 9.30. I give freedom to my hon. Friends sitting behind me to pull me down by the coat tails if I have not sat by then.

When we on this side talk about unemployment, when we reveal a concern about it, it is not because we claim to have any superior virtues over hon. Members opposite. We have not got more of the milk of human kindness than hon. Members opposite. In the moral sense we start from scratch: there is no superiority. There is an evocative connotation to the word "unemployment" which has a grip on the majority of hon. Members on this side—perhaps it would not be true of hon. Members on this side who are under forty, but for those who are more than forty, the connotation of the word is a haunting one. To the end of my days I shall never, never be rid of it. I know that there are some hon. Members opposite with deep, personal memories. I have read the debates on the situation in Scotland and in the North-East. The hon. Members for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, East (Mr. Montgomery), Glasgow, Pollock (Mr. George) and Cleveland (Mr. Proudfoot) have referred to the way in which they saw unemployment at first hand. For us on this side it is an indelible memory. At that time 400,000 of our fellow SouthWalesians had to leave. In the strict, legalistic sense there was no direction of labour but, metaphorically, they were driven by the scourge of economic circumstances to seek their livelihood away from their own homeland.

Being an odd creature, I sometimes like to look at these things in a homely context. My mind goes back to my boyhood, when three of us were pals, all of exactly the same age, and brought up in the same street on the fringe of the town of Llanelly. Fortuitously, I passed the scholarship, and my future was more or less determined by that. My two friends—and we were inseparable pals—well, one went to Enfield and the other to Watford. The one, I do not think I have seen since; the other I have seen about once since those boyhood days. They departed from their own home town, not because they wanted to—they were as affectionately involved in the wonderful community life of Llanelly as I was—but because they bad absolutely no choice.

The inevitable thing happened—they married English women. Of course, there is nothing basically wrong in marrying an English woman. I confess that I myself married a Lancashire lass, and my night hon. Friend the Member for Llanelly went to Hampshire for his wife—