The minister, Sir Alfred Mond, issued his scale in Jan. 1922. It did not satisfy the Poplar guardians, who now pressed for a loan to tide them over their immediate difficulties. A special inquiry was then instituted by the minister into the circumstances of Poplar. The report was unfavourable to the guardians, and de clared that by more economical methods they could save f 100,00o a year. This they hotly denied; they still demanded their loan, and insisted on their right to administer relief at their discretion. The minister thereupon played his trump card. He issued a "peremptory order," applicable to the Poplar Union alone, providing that no relief in excess of the "Mond scale" to an able bodied person or any member of his family should be legal, unless specially sanctioned by the minister. The guardians, however, per sisted in defying this order, and so laid themselves open to sur charge. After a few month5 a curious complication was introduced by the Local Authorities (Emergency Provisions) Act, 1923, which apparently revoked automatically the "Mond scale," but left the Poplar order intact, though the two had been closely bound up together. This anomaly lasted till Feb. 1924. The guardians meanwhile were regularly surcharged by the auditor, but succes sive ministers of health shut their eyes to the matter, until at length John Wheatley in 1924 rescinded the order, and announced that no action would be taken to enforce surcharges in respect of the "illegal relief" given before its rescission. That was the end of this particular battle, though it was not the end of high relief scales. Other boards of guardians continued to favour "Poplar ism" and pursued a guerrilla warfare with the Ministry of Health.
There was, of course, a division of opinion over "Poplarism." The one side insisted that it was not only the right, but the duty of the guardians to give adequate relief ; the other retorted that the Poplar conception of adequacy was preposterous. But the division was not, as is sometimes supposed, simply one between Socialists and anti-Socialists. The critics included many sup porters of the Labour party who not only looked askance at law breaking tactics, but foresaw disastrous results if the policy of lavish and unconditional relief were to become general. At the same time they appreciated the difficulties of Poplar and similarly placed unions, and argued that the mischief could only be remedied by the reform or the abolition of the poor law. In this view the "Poplarists" themselves concurred, and, indeed, it was realised on all sides that the poor law guardians were not and could never be a satisfactory unemployment authority. But nothing was done to relieve them of their burden, and fresh trouble soon developed.
the conditions, and so found themselves with no funds out of which to pay their outdoor relief, their officers' salaries or the other expenses of the Union. The minister thereupon took the unprecedented step of guaranteeing payment of tradesmen's bills for outdoor relief supplied in kind on orders made by the guardians and marked with a special stamp. The amount of the relief was not, however, to exceed three-quarters of the amount which would have been granted under the guardians' scale. This plan worked for four weeks, and then, as the guardians were still obstinate, the minister threatened that he himself would take over the whole business of administration in the West Ham Union. He had (at that date) no legal power to do this, but he would, of course, have got an indemnity from parliament. The threat brought the guardians to heel; they accepted the conditions and got their loan. But this was only the first round. In the summer of 1926 there was a renewal of the contest. At the beginning of May some mom persons in the Union were in receipt of relief ; by the middle of the month the general strike had brought the number up to 165,000, or 21 % of the population. The board of guardians now applied for another loan of £425,000. The minister pointed out that the district auditor had held their expenditure to be in many cases entirely unjustifiable, and certain members of the board agreed with this view. Their scale of weekly relief was 24/– for a man and wife, and 4/– for each child, up to a maximum of 49/–, plus 1/6d. for coal. He once more insisted upon drastic economies, as a condition of the loan; but the guardians refused to amend their scale, and he administered a knockout blow. Under the bill that was passed into law as the Boards of Guardians (De fault) Act, 1926, he superseded the West Ham guardians and handed over their functions on July 20 to three paid adminis trators, two civil servants and one ex-civil servant, nominated by himself. Under the new regime the number of outdoor paupers rapidly fell (it was 6o,000 on July 17, 1926, and 41,000 on March 26, 1927), and the expenditure was substantially reduced.