Of course, I would. I am consistent. You over there are not consistent at all, and your leaders in the late Cabinet, were not consistent. I am very pleased to be able to support my hon. Friend, because the Government have taken the only sane course, to cut down your expenditure when you are in short street. The permission that the right hon. Gentleman obtained was not confined only to the £9,000,000. It went very much further than that, and I do not think the Committee, three months ago, when they approved it, realised that they were sanctioning not merely a £9,000,000 advance to the Road Fund from the Exchequer for 1931–32, but were in effect giving direct sanction to the whole five-year programme and the trunk road programme. The right hon. Gentleman nods his head. It was in fact so, because in the second year of the programme you agree to advance from the Exchequer a huge sum of money—£9,000,000 in these days is a huge sum—and in effect say that in the next three years, when the Road Fund is short of money, you will agree to the Exchequer advancing the sum necessary to meet the difference between the revenue and expenditure of the Road Fund, whenever the financial year comes under review.

The Committee is in an unusual situation to-night. Three months ago almost to the day it agreed to this huge five-year trunk road programme at a total of £49,500,000, practically £50,000,000, spread over five years, over and above the ordinary expenditure, and to-night they have to face the fact that the present Government, I am thankful to say, have taken the wise view that this expenditure of money is not justified and that the whole of this programme, or as much as can be saved from the wreckage and has not been already absolutely committed by contracts to be carried out, will now have to be held back, postponed and in some cases, I dare say, entirely abandoned. It may be said that it is extraordinary, seeing that a Socialist Government is extravagant—that is what you expect from it, and that is what it is there for—that the local authorities, who as a whole are far more sane than the central Government, agree to such wild cat schemes. The answer is twofold. They were dealt with by two able and extremely persuasive gentlemen, the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Hackney (Mr. Herbert Morrison) and the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Central Edinburgh (Mr. W. Graham). You can perhaps hardly conceive that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Hackney was the persuasive genteel gentleman and the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Central Edinburgh was the stern autocrat, but that was the fact. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Hackney with his well-known persuasiveness got hold of these local authorities. He had them in his room and he talked to them very nicely, and, what was much more important, promised them grants beyond the dreams of avarice, grants far greater than had ever been the general rule before, and in consequence they succumbed to his blandishments and agreed to these very extensive works, which after all, were to be paid for—I stand to be corrected if I am wrong—as to not more than 20 per cent. out of local rates and 80 per cent. out of the Road Fund.

Those authorities which did not fall in with the persuasive activities of the late Minister of Transport were threatened by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Central Edinburgh in a speech which he made during the London County Council elections that, if they did not agree to what the Minister of Transport put before them, legislation would be passed to compel them to agree. [HON. MEATTIERS: "Hear, hear!"] That from the Socialist benches shows what care hon. and right hon. Gentleman have for local self-government. They think that it is right that representatives of ratepayers, the local voters in a big town or in a large county area should be dragooned by the central Government. I take exactly the opposite view, that local government is the sane government and ought to be looked after, and that the central Government should interfere as little as possible with the discretion of local authorities.

In spite of all this expenditure of money and all those blandishments and threats, what was really accomplished by this vast programme? Up to the end of May last, the right hon. Lady the Mem- ber for Wallsend (Miss Bondfield), in an answer which she gave as Minister of Labour at the end of May, stated that 96,000 individuals were in employment in the last week of May owing to road and bridge works which were expedited for the relief of unemployment. That was, after all, a very small contribution to the doing away with unemployment. If you have 96,000 persons employed upon road relief works out of 2,700,000 unemployed, it cannot be said, even if all the work was useful work, which it was not, to have done very much towards solving the problem. But when we consider what those 96,000 persons were costing the country, one is absolutely appalled at the amount of money which has been wasted. I will not go over the old formula that £1,000,000 spent in 12 months gives employment to 4,000, but, if you apply that formula to the figure of 96,000, you will see that the country was spending in employing those 96,000 persons at the rate of £24,000,000 per annum.