PLANS AND COSTS SIR, —In a public discussion on the Beveridge
Plan a critic feared that the annual cost to the country of over £500 million could not be carried.
The chairman, an eminent engineer, advised that the problem be con- sidered in terms not of money units but of man-hours of labour. This is a pregnant phrase. Let us take the unit of man-power over the adult population at only one shilling per hour, then the equivalent of (,50o million is around 3o million man-hours per day. Of our population 25 million are now mobilised in the armed forces and in the factories.
Of the remaining 21 million another 5 million are of working age. There- fore there are 3o million workers to provide 3o million man-hours per day. The social security and amenities of the Beveridge Plan therefore require the equivalent of one hour's labour per day of every adult man and woman of working age. But is there so much remunerative work available?
To abolish the slums and to make rural life attractive and stop the drift to towns there is much to be done ; but as this war has demon- strated, nothing is impossible when all men and women are inspired with a sense of their duty to the country. Suitable cottages can be built and gardens added to them by the hundred thousand. Remember Winston Churchill's words on the Armistice of November, 1918: " A requisition for half a million houses would have been as easy to meet as those we were executing for aeroplanes, guns and projectiles, but the money cost which had never been considered before asserted its claim to priority from the moment the fighting stopped." Labour-saying devices for every home in the supply of pipe-water, hot and cold, light and warmth by electricity and gas, laundry and refrigerators are easy mechanical improvements. Villages will regain their ancient arts and crafts, the blacksmith and the carpenter will be restored. Well-equipped playing fields should be provided with apparatus for the health and pleasure of the children, and also club-houses with cinemas and gardens. Every amenity is within reach when men exchange their labour free from the restrictions imposed by the cash nexus of metal money, the last relic of the soul-destroying worship of the Golden Calf.
What can we do to gain this Utopia? We must retain in peace-time and further develop the methods which we have set up to finance the war. War has compelled us to break away from the grip of the money- lender which had brought us unarmed into mortal danger of German slavery. Parliament must legislate to make permanent the system of credit entrusted to representatives of the nation. The control of currency and credit must be taken over from the private company known as the Bank of England. The machinery of that Bank can operate unchanged but its direction must be firmly placed in the hands of men appointed by the Crown as Governors of the King's Exchequer. In ancient practice the Mint was a Royal prerogative. The men who ruled the Law and the Church were the Keepers of the King's Conscience, and the inde- pendence of judges and bishops is an axiom of the Constitution. Let the officers of the Royal Mint be similarly safeguarded from political pressure. So the old ill-repute of the money-market may be cleansed and ignorance of Finance may no longer be paraded as the boast of intellectual eminence and integrity.
If it be recognised that the wealth of a country consists in services rendered and received then our National income, recently estimated at Jj5,000 million, will be stepped up manifold by mechanisation and organisation. To finance the exchange of services is the primary purpose of a money-system. The Governors of the King's Exchequer will regulate the issue of paper-money free of interest on the credit of the State so as to balance production and consumption. This is the key of the change required that the power of the State be used not to earn profits for the few but to create employment for the Nation. Unemploy- ment will be reduced to the lowest minimum and all burdens of taxation will be borne with ease. Home agriculture, now fully mechanised, will feed our people, and the anxious minds which fear our exports will not balance our imports will be set at rest by a surplus of output from a fully employed resourceful people and by the swarms of tourists from foreign lands thronging to see this beautiful country and the strange inhabitants who rescued them from torture and death.—Yours, &c.,
Previous page
