Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am ar 15 Gorffennaf 1925.
I have listened very carefully to the replies from the other side, and I have never listened to such weak and lame explanations in all my life. I want to lead the Committee back to the position of 1897, where the widow was allowed £300, or an average of three years' wages. I am familiar with hundreds of these cases. The £300 or the three years' wages could be paid over to the widow, and, as a result, some insurance agents approached some widows, and frightened them by saying they would not get the full £300, or the three years' wages, and some of these widows, whose husbands belonged to no trade union, used to settle for £50 or £60. Mr. John Hodge, the late Member for Gorton, in an amending Compensation Bill introduced into this House, gave similar illustrations, and in the Bill it was decided that the £300, or the three years' wages, in future should be paid into Court, and that the Judge, instead of banding over all the money to the widow, should apportion it to the widow and also to the children each week. We said this £300 was not sufficient for women and children, and the Holman-Gregory Committee decided that workmen's widows and children were entitled to £800. We succeeded, in Committee upstairs, in getting £600, and this money is apportioned to the children in increased benefits. The Government's proposal now is to deprive them of the benefits we gave them in Committee. It is wholesale robbery, and I want to warn the Ministers that the Budget and this Bill have been the chief plank in the Forest of Dean. They have had their reply to-day.