#OTD 1922. Clement Attlee makes Commons Maiden Speech on the "absolute folly" of unemployment:

"You are today in this country ruining future generations as you have ruined the present generation. It is not the fact that character is formed by unmerited suffering and privation"
"You may produce a case here and there of abuse of the dole...but the great mass of unemployed men are those same men who saved us during the War...They are the heroes of 1914 and 1918"
"The true wealth of this country is its citizens, and the finest of them, the very cells that build up our community, are the families that have a certain standard of life"
"In my district every day men are coming to me whom I have known years ago, and I see how they have fallen off through unemployment"
"You see men who were fit to be sergeant-majors in the Army —fine, upstanding men—reduced to dragging along the streets with their hands out for anything they can get. That is an enormous waste. It is not only waste, but absolute folly"
"If that man falls out of work, if he comes down to a miserable wage, it means that his home is broken up, and his whole standard of life goes down and down"
"We know, too, the results of the census, which showed that in the London area alone there are 600,000 persons who are living in one-room tenements"
"You are not going to get an A1 nation under those conditions: You are not going to get a moral nation under those conditions; you are not going to get a sober nation under those conditions"
"Why was it that in the War we were able to find employment for everyone? It was simply that the Government controlled the purchasing power of the nation"
"They said to those who were running industry that their factories must be turned away from producing luxuries and must produce those sheer necessities. That is what we are demanding shall be done in time of peace"
"As the nation was organised for war and death, so it can be organised for peace and life if we have the will for it. That is why we reject all these facile assumptions that you can wait until trade is a little better. You cannot wait. The waste is going on all the time"
"I stand for no more war, and for development in peace; and I say that you are to-day in this country ruining future generations as you have ruined the present generation. It is not the fact that character is formed by unmerited suffering and privation"
"It simply means what I have seen for seventeen years in the borough of Stepney—the boy or the man getting unemployed and sinking, sinking, sinking right down to the unemployable."
"We do want an economy campaign, but it must be a true economy campaign—economy in mankind, economy in flesh and blood, economy in the true wealth of the State and of the community, namely, its citizens.
"That can only be brought about by deliberately taking hold of the purchasing power of the nation, by directing the energies of the nation into the production of necessities for life, and not merely into the production of luxuries or necessities for profit"
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