A Spectator's Notebook T HERE is more, I understand, behind the
rumoured postponement of the new Unemployment Insurance Bill than meets the eye. On the. face of it there is no reason whatever why the Bill should not be law by June 30th, the day when the existing Act expires, for the Royal Commission on whose recommendations the Bill is to be based reported at the beginning of November. But the Bill is held up and a new stop-gap measure will be needed. What has actually happened, I believe, is that the party in the Cabinet in favour of uniting Transitional Benefit and Public Assistance under a new Statutory Commission over which Parlia- ment will exercise only shadowy control has carried the day. That may be easy to decide on paper, but to draft a Bill in face of the legal and administrative diffi- culties the new proposals have encountered is another matter. And when the Bill does see the light the complications will only just be beginning. Sir Henry Betterton, having been overruled in. Cabinet, can clearly do nothing but support the new measure in the House, but the County and Borough Councils, which are to be superseded wholesale by the new statutory body, will no doubt find plenty of ways of making their views heard. And opponents of bureaucracy will have some- thing to say to a proposal which hands over something like £60,000,000 a year to bureaucratic control.
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