"Even if every person in the country had the ideal virtues that the working classes were asked by certain rather thin skinned and somewhat stilted critics of theirs to possess, and the capacity to turn his attention to every skilled trade in the country, and the very finest technical skill at his command, so long as they had the present system of industrial anarchy, when demand was never gauged by those controlling supply, when overproduction was a feature of one series of years and under-consumption a feature of another, they would have to face the unemployed problem. If that were so, it became a matter for the State to settle. The time had come to banish for ever from their thoughts the old-fashioned heresy that unemployment was merely the expression of individual shortcomings. Unemployment was the expression of the failure of social organisation, and so it became the duty of the State to protect the unemployed men from the awful horrors that attended unemployment."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomAcademics from the United KingdomLabour Party (UK) politiciansPresbyteriansPoliticians from Scotland
Original Language: English
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Speech in the House of Commons (30 January 1908)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ramsay_MacDonald
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Ramsay MacDonald
Ramsay MacDonald (12 October 1866 – 9 November 1937) was a British statesman who was the first ever Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, leading a Labour Government in 1924, a Labour Government from 1929 to 1931, and a National Government from 1931 to 1935.
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