Family Allowances
The House of Commons motion in favour of family allowances was agreed to last Tuesday without a division. More than one excellent speech was made on its behalf in the course of the debate, and the only discouraging feature of the proceedings was the attitude of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Had Sir Kingsley Wood said, in effect, "I am entirely in sympathy with the proposal, but I cannot at eresent on top of war taxation find the money for it," he would have been on strong ground, which even dissentients could have respected. But what he did was to start with a parade of all the arguments that could be trumped up on the side of inaction. "Even if," he said, "one accepted the principle," there were a number of important matters which still remained to be decided ; and he went on to particularise those—e.g. whether the scheme should be non-contributory or contributory—about which nearly all believers in the policy have ceased disputing. In short, he made it pretty clear that his heart is not in the matter, even while promising to give it full consideration in the autumn "in the light of the Beveridge Report, the further conclusions of organised labour, and the financial position." His attitude fits in only too well with the character of the White Paper published last month on the decline of the birth- rate—a document full of quiet optimism and whitewash along the regular lines of a Civil Service argument in favour of turning a blind eye to trouble and doing nothing.
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