VALUE OF A WAGE PACKET

What it will buy

Miss Roberts told electors at Dartford East County Secondary School for Boys on Friday that, so far as devaluation was concerned, they still had to feel the full effects of the cuts. Most of the cuts would not take effect until after the election. They now had to pay more for goods from America.

“Where I accuse the Government of dishonesty in this” she went on, “is that on September 18 Sir Stafford Cripps said the only immediate increase would be in the price of bread. That was quite wrong. The very next day the price of non-ferrous metals went up to the many manufacturers using them. It was the financial policy of the Government which took us to devaluation. The value of wages is not the actual amount in the wage-packet, but it is what that amount will buy in terms of goods,” said the candidate.

In another two years' time, said Miss Roberts, that financial policy would bring them to the greatest unemployment problem they had ever known. Unless they improved their economic position and reduced the level of taxation, it would only bring them to further devaluation. They were the most highly taxed nation in the world. The basic fact of human nature was this—that if you wanted people to work and give extra work, then you had got to give extra rewards. At present, taxation obscured all that.