Wheat Quota Costs
The Wheat Quota Bill is working its way comfortably towards the Statute-book, but some figures which Major Gwilym Lloyd George quoted on Monday, and which Sir John Gilmour did not challenge, throw an instructive light on the financial side of the project. Basing himself on what is understood to be the official assump- tion that the quota will result in another 400,000 acres being placed under wheat, at a cost of £6,000,000 to the bread-consumer, Major Lloyd George calculated that the amount of wheat the 400,000 acres will produce could be bought in the open market, and £100 a year paid to the thirteen thousand men employed, for at least £2,000,000 less than the £6,000,000 the quota scheme is to cost. He might have added that the wheat so purchased would be better wheat. When it is remembered that the wheat quota and the astonishing beet sugar subsidy— Sir John Gilmour gives the total of this to date as £34,331,333—represent the endowment of an industry by the often hard-pressed workers in others, whether as taxpayers or consumers, the financial side of the arrange- ment demands more vigilant scrutiny than most of its critics and defenders have accorded to it yet,
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