Between 4 and 5 million persons (there may be duplications) have had their wages raised since July - to end of December - by £800,000 gross per week. The typical increase seems to have been about 3s. or 4s. per week.
(3) The cost-of-living index has gone up between 1st September and 1st January by 12.3 per cent. (The food only index by about the same amount).
(4.) There were in August 1¼ million wage earners whose wages were linked to the Cost-of-Living Index Number. Since September 2nd further agreements have been made. The known number of workers covered is now 2 million. Every week more wages are being put on the index number.
(5) These wages which will rise automatically with the index number will set the pattern for all wages.
(6) To stop the wages of these 2 million rising in accordance with prices the Government would have to induce or compel the parties to tear up the agreements.
(7) To stop other wages following the Cost-of-Living wages upward the Government would have to impose on them a most unfair embargo. Labour would not stand it. In any case the Government has no power to do any such thing. Legislation would be required.
(8) The Government has no power whatever to forbid increases in wages. Even though power were given to it by new legislation the first attempt to use it would do no more than disclose the impotence of Government.
(9) The Ministry of Information will do well to keep right out of any campaign for the pegging of wages by consent or by compulsion.
(10) Discussions on all these matters of wages and cost of living have been going on between the National Advisory Labour Council and high officials (also Ministers) of the Treasury and the Ministry of Labour for some time past. So far as I know, the Ministry of Information has had no part in them. Had we taken part we should be much better equipped for planning this campaign. There is to be another meeting on 6th March. It is essential we should be represented.
(11) If prices rise wages will follow. Wages can be kept down only by keeping down prices.
(12) The Ministry of Information can, however, do something to create a public opinion in which greedy demands for increases unwarranted by the rising cost of living will be regarded as bad form.
(13) It can do that by making widely known, by every medium of publicity, the stern fact that the war can only be paid for and won by every member of the public going on short commons.
(14) Crowther's “Paying For The War” gives an excellent basis from which popular treatments can be worked out, and served out (in articles, speeches, lectures, radio talks, press advertisements, etc). Also Lord Stamp has circulated a memorandum which I have not seen.
(15) These should be expositions, not exhortations.
(16) But the more important part of the campaign will be that which tells the public what to do and what not to do with the income it receives - whatever the level of that income may be.
(17) The need is that the public shall not buy anything it can do without. But the Ministry dare not (see letter from Lord Stamp) tell the public not to spend in this or that way (tobacco, hard drink, cosmetics, newspapers) or it will be savagely attacked by the interests affected.
(18) There is a choice of two courses. One is to say, “Don't spend.” The other is to say, “Do save.” In effect they come to the same thing. If you save you don't spend.
(19) To say “Don't spend” leads to all sorts of trouble, including counter-propaganda. To say “Do save” achieves the same object without any of the troubles. Also “Do” is a better publicity motif than “Don't.”
(20) Our campaign should therefore be entirely or mainly a “Do save” campaign. We should either take over or supplement the Publicity work of the National Savings Committee.
(21) The National Savings Committee has formed, in the last ten weeks, 10,343 savings groups (mostly in factories and business concerns). This is almost as many as had been formed in the previous ten years. If they had the whole-hearted backing of the Labour Party and the T.U.C. they could form 100,000.
(22) The one obstacle to that whole-hearted backing is the savings clause in the U.A.B. regulations.
(23) Labour says, “We will not urge our members to save unless the Government gives outright assurance that should a person afterwards claim Assistance he will not be compelled to disburse his war savings before Assistance is granted.”
(24) The National Council of Labour has put this point to the Ministry of Labour and the Treasury at a recent conference. (At which we ought to have been represented!) The Treasury and the U.A.B. see difficulties - of practice and of principle.
(25) The U.A.B. has certain discretionary power, but they do not extend to an exemption of War Savings Certificates. New legislation would be required.
(26) In my view this matter of saving is of such cardinal importance that all other considerations (adverse repercussions, etc.) will have to be set aside. The Treasury and the U.A.B. will have to give way.
(27) There remains one other message to be put over as part of the campaign. It is to get the public into a mood in which it will not turn cantankerous at particular shortages.
(28) That will be achieved partly by explanations of
why
things are not obtainable; but also by presenting the putting up with deprivations and hardships as either heroic, or humorous, or both.
(29) But what is needed most of all is some dramatic gesture or act or declaration by the Government from which the campaign would take its colour and derive its spirit and force.
(30) A declaration that no excess profits whatever shall be left with the profit-maker would strike the sort of note I have in mind. A declaration that no person or body shall be permitted to come through this war better-off than he would otherwise have been.
(31) With that might go a declaration to the effect that: “So far as lies in our power, no-one in this land shall go ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-conditioned, ill-trained, or ill-doctored. We cannot afford to have among us neglected and unhappy people. Only so shall we come through the stresses and strains of the war to victory over evil and an after-war world worthy of our triumph.”
By some such declaration of national policy the Government would win the fervour of apathetic youth, would cut the ground from under much subversive propaganda, and would strengthen the national war effort.
