TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE REPORT, THE WHOLE REPORT, AND NOTHING BUT THE REPORT. THE Spectator, soon after its re-founding in 1828, secured the attention of the country by the phrase it used in the great Reform Bill controversy—" the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill." We say of the Geddes Report with equal conviction—the Report, the whole Report, and nothing but the Report. If the country wants to be freed from bankruptcy and a financial system more deadly and more cruel than the worst form of war, it has only got one course open to it. It must adopt the drastic measures recommended in the Geddes Report and adopt them as a whole.
That the Geddes Report is perfect in every line or word we have not the slightest desire to suggest. It is, of course, fallible like every other human document ; but it is cer- tainly not half so fallible as the criticisms that have been directed to it. At any rate, it is a coherent piece of work constructed by able and far-seeing men and with a definite and perfectly reasonable and practical object which they have kept steadily before them. They knew what they wanted, what we all want, and what we must have to be saved, and they have shown us how we can get it, and shown this not vaguely or generally, but by clear, specific, detailed suggestions. We can, if we adopt the Report as a whole, at once reduce our expenditure, and so our taxation, by £75,000,000—a sum, remember, not including but in addition to a sum of about the same amount already proposed to be cut off by the Government. This means, then, a total reduction of over one hundred and fifty millions. Later the Report assures us that we can-and ought to reduce it by another large amount.
That we must somehow or other get at least £150,000,000 off our taxes is admitted by every sane man. Opinions may differ as to the way in which this reduction is to be obtained, and we are perfectly prepared to admit that in this or that particular the Report may make faulty recom- mendations, or that even when the recommendations are not bad per se wiser ones might have been made. We say deliberately, however, that such an admission does not for a moment invalidate our view that the country ought to insist upon having the Report, the whole Report, and nothing but the Report. It will be a far safer and therefore a much more practical plan to stick to the Geddes Report root and branch than to seek for perfection. When in danger the wise man takes the road that leads to safety, however rough, and does not postpone his escape till the time when a better road has been constructed. That time may never come.
Our need of escape is overwhelming. Every day which we consume in doing nothing and in merely talking about what we might do, or could do, or ought to do, the haemorrhage grows worse and the national strength weaker. We have got to act at once. Now, here is a working scheme drawn up by capable men which enables us to act, which is coherent and properly thought out. Therefore, we should adopt it and not refine upon it. The difficulty is to know exactly in what way the people of this country are to insist upon being, as they desire, saved from bankrupthy. They know instinctively that the talk about the dangers they will run by cutting down expenditure is unreal. They know that it is possible to give apparently sound reasons for not allowing this or that item of expenditure on defence to be curtailed.
But they realize that this is not the whole of the problem. That problem involves a comparison of dangers. We cannot make our security complete. We have got to run some risks. But the risk of being destroyed by bankruptcy, of being taxed to our utter destruction, is really greater than, though not so visible as, the risk of not spending enough on our Army and our Navy to give us security against every imaginable danger. Indeed, the danger of being invaded or conquered is at worst a risk, whereas destruction by bleeding to death through over-taxation is a certainty.
But, though we are sure that the country feels all this, it will very likely see its will over-ridden by the very able and very strong-willed people who are determined to cut the heart out of the Geddes Report. How, then, are we to get the Report, the whole Repoit, and nothing but the Report ? To begin with, the constituents must put pressure, and put it at once, upon their Members to adopt the Report. And while they put that pressure, they must refuse to argue on the merits of this or that item, or to answer such insidious questions as " Do you really mean that we should go without this absolutely necessary guarantee of national security ? " The answer must be, " We must have the Report as a whole, and not merely selections from it." The danger in this respect is that those Ministers who want to defeat the Report, and they are very powerful, will try to get a General Election before the Report can be adopted. They will not make the Report as a whole the issue at the Election, but in each constituency the case appropriate to the locality will be dwelt upon. The voters will, in fact, be asked, "Do you wish to throw all these poor men out of work ? " and so forth. It is hoped that by these means the stroke of the Geddes Axe will be avoided, and that the new Parliament will contain enough Members hostile to the Report to keep up the system which now gives us a vast Praetorian guard of State employees. These men are living on the mad extravagances of our present fiscal anarchy and will not allow us to go back to our pre-war scheme of adminis- tration and expenditure without a bitter struggle.
What the House of Commons should do in the interests of the nation, and what individual Members, if they are wise, will do in their own interests, is to determine that no dissolution shall take place till the Geddes Report has i been accepted and put into operation, and once more— the Report, the whole Report, and nothing but the Report. If this is done, if the Budget for 1922 is based upon the Report, and the intolerable burden of taxation which is now destroying industry is removed, the Election, when it does take place next year or in the autumn, will reveal a real sense of gratitude among the electors to the men who have saved us even at the very edge of the precipice. There is another reason why we must have the Election after and not before the adoption of the Report. To postpone adoption for another year will, remember, cost us at least a hundred millions that might be saved.
In a sense, the whole problem turns upon the question of unemployment. We cannot without ruin continue to support the vast army of unemployed now in existence. But there is only one way, as other States in other periods of history found, in which the spectre of unemployment can be laid. That is by a revival of trade. But trade can never be revived as long as it lies prostrate and shattered under the deadly blows of the tax-collector. If, however, we can free trade from its oppressor, and, even though we are still heavily taxed, we are not utterly crushed, industry will revive, and with it, of course, employment. We shall break the vicious circle and begin a progressive system of improvement. When there is more employment the taxes will yield more, and as they yield more, the rate of taxation may be reduced. Then trade will revive still more rapidly and enjoy a still greater stability. In these considerations is to be found the true answer to the people who say that a too rapid cutting down of Government work will only increase unemployment. This argument is one of the most dangerous that could possibly be used. It is the argument of the man who swallows a deadly poison in the belief that it is a healing medicine. France for some time during the Revolution of 1848 hesitated to alter her mad policy of Public Works for fear that unemployment would grow worse. When, however, she refused any longer to yield homage to the policy involved in the so-called " droit de travail," the right to live working or to die fighting, the reaction was immediate. In spite of the fact that there was so much that was wasteful and bad in the despotism of. Napoleon III., the adoption of a sound economic policy in regard to unemployment caused an almost instant boom in trade. One would have thought that it would have taken years to get over the horror of '48 and the civil war in which some twelve thousand men were shot down in the streets of Paris during the industrial anarchy caused by the system of Public Works, National Workshops, and the other economic follies of the Provisional Government. Yet the trade revival was a matter of months rather than of years.
We must shut our ears determinedly to all talk of making things worse by a policy of national thrift. Useless and unnecessary Government expenditure is the worst possible type of economic waste. The public is, we hope, realizing that the Geddes Report is due to the application of certain sound principles that have been advocated by the best business men in the country for the last two years. The Government, to their credit, asked the Geddes Committee to advise them how to get a hundred millions off the Estimates in addition to the Government's own departmental plans for reducing expenditure by seventy-five millions. Though it is turned round and the wrong way up, this comes very near to the rationing system. We would rather have had the Government say, The country cannot bear at the very most more than nine hundred millions of taxation a year. Suggest to us the best method of allotting these nine hundred millions." But in effect, if not in principle, this is what the Geddes Report really comes to. It has actually reallotted the national spending income—i.e., a sum which can be taken out of the People's pockets without ruin. In other words, it declares how much each Department can have to spend. The members of the Geddes Committee would no doubt have preferred to say to each Department, " This is all you can have. You must think out the best way in which you can make use of it." We may feel sure, however, that in that case the unwilling Departments would have at once retorted to this proposal, " The thing is impossible. We cannot do it. You have ignored our chief needs and the dearest interests of the nation." Therefore, in order to be effective, the Geddes Committee had to show that they had gone over the expenditure of each Department and fully con- sidered the case against cutting down. By doing this they placed themselves in a position to show the country that it must not be imposed upon by talk about impossibility. In other words, one must read into the Report in regard to each Department : " Here is a plan which shows you how you can cut your coat according to the cloth we give you. If, however, you can find a better way for using the piece of cloth—which, remember, is the very most you can have—then by all means cut it in your way."
For example, we hold very strongly that though in the Education vote a great reduction must be made, such reduction should not take place in the teachers' salaries. In that case the Department should be given as a block grant the sum which the Committee regard as all that we can afford to spend on Education. The Department should then reallot it so as to avoid the 'reduction of salaries. That may be difficult, but it is not impossible. In other words, rationing is not incompatible with the carrying out of the Report. It is only when a Department turns sulky that we need fall back on the detailed sug- gestions of the Report. The essential thing is to limit each Department to the sum and no more allotted by the Committee.
In saying that the adoption of the Report is the road to our economic salvation, we are not thinking of the indi- vidual taxpayer. We are thinking of the safety and welfare of the nation as a whole. Who is there who longs to see a better world for the workers, one in which they will get a greater share of the world's goods, one from which the horror of unemployment will be banished, one in which wages will not be a matter of phantom figures but will give the workers in goods and not in make-believe the remuneration which they desire and deserve ? All such persons must learn that to obtain this happy result a reduction of taxation is vital. Let no one suppose that we can have social reform and high taxation joined in a harmonious union. If you think that you can place the burden of taxation upon the rich and not upon the poor you will soon discover your mistake. Taxation, like disease, always finds out the weakest is and fastens thereon— that is upon the poor man. It s the man with no one below him in the economic or social scale who bears the ultimate burden. The man who suffers is the man in the last row. When a row of half a dozen billiard balls is hit, it is the last ball in the line which runs back and not the first five. We cannot end this article without expressing the very great debt of gratitude which we feel, and which we are quite sure the nation feels also, to the able and patriotic men who undertook the tremendous work of producing this -Report and who did it with such conspicuous good sense and practical ability. They are Sir Eric Geddes (the Chairman), Lord Inchcape, Lord Faringdon, Sir Joseph Maclay, and Sir Guy Granet, and with them Mr. Gerald Steel, the Secretary.
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