British Socialism / An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals

by J. Ellis Barker

Unless the Imperial Government interferes, the local debt will soon be larger than the National Debt.

We have seen in the beginning of this Chapter that, as regards local government, the Socialists pursue a twofold aim: (1) To level up their districts; (2) To urge their districts to launch out into something new. Therefore we find, as Mr. John A. Fairlie says in his book on "Municipal Administration," that "the danger of excessive debt is most serious in the smallest cities. The largest cities, while they have the largest debts, have also the largest resources, and also the best-developed financial administration. The cities of modest size, however, which attempt to equal the works of the metropolis without its available sources of revenue, are very likely to find themselves in serious difficulties."

The time may come, and it may come soon, when British local indebtedness will become greatly reduced by local bankruptcy and repudiation. That process would have no terrors for Socialists. They ought rather to look forward to it. As they demand the repudiation of the National Debt (see Chapter IX.), they should logically also strive to repudiate the local debt. A general repudiation of local debt would be the fitting and logical aim and end of municipal enterprise. Municipal enterprise aims at expropriating private property-owners, who, rightly considered, are paid not in cash but in debt certificates. The repudiation of all local debts would convey gratis to the municipality the municipally managed undertakings which, rightly considered, belong to the stockholders, and would at the same time ruin the capitalists who have advanced the money for acquiring those undertakings. The Socialist policy would triumph. This would be the fitting end of a rule by irresponsible and penniless demagogues.

To the Socialist there is no limit to municipal enterprise. Not some branches of private trade and production, but all private trade and production are to be taken over by the municipalities. Private enterprise is to be extinguished altogether. The municipalities are to be universal owners, manufacturers, and providers. Among the first things which Socialist municipalities wish to control are the supply of bread, milk, coal; hospitals and public-houses, banks, fire insurances, and pawnshops.[686]

All workers are to be municipal officials. Stretching out beyond their borders, the municipalities are ultimately to absorb the country, and to bring it under Socialist management and government.[687]

Some of the more immediate aims of Socialism as regards London are expressed by Sydney Webb, the brilliant, but unfortunately somewhat over-imaginative, leader of British scientific Socialism, as follows:

"We see in imagination the County Council's aqueducts supplying London with pure soft water from a Welsh lake; the County Council's mains furnishing, without special charge, a constant supply up to the top of every house: the County Council's hydrants and standpipes yielding abundant cleansing fluid from the Thames to every street. When every parish has its public baths and washhouses open without fees, every Board school its swimming-bath and teacher of swimming, every railway station and public building its drinking-fountain and basin for washing the hands, every park its bathing and skating ponds—then we shall begin to show the world that we do not, after all, fall behind Imperial Rome in this one item of its splendid magnificence. By that time the landlord will be required, as a mere condition of sanitary fitness, to lay on water to every floor, if not to every tenement, and the bath will be as common an adjunct of the workman's home as it now is of the modern villa residence. And just as in some American cities hot water and superheated steam are supplied in pipes for warming purposes over large areas, we may even see the County Council laying on a separate service of hot water to be drawn at will from a tap in each tenement. Why should London's million families waste their million fires every time hot water is needed?

"The economy of fuel leads, indeed, to the municipalised gas-supply, then laid on, as a matter of course, to every tenement, and used, not only for lighting, but still more largely for cooking in the stoves supplied at a nominal charge.

"In order to relieve the pressure of population in the centre, and reduce the rents of the metropolitan "Connaughts," the County Council tramways will doubtless be made as free as its roads and bridges. Taxes on locomotion are universally condemned, and the economic effects of a penny tram-fare are precisely the same as those of a tax on the trip. The County Council will, however, free its trams on the empirical grounds of economy and the development of its suburban estates of artisans' dwellings, built on land bought to retain the unearned increment for the public benefit. Free trams may well imply free trains in the metropolitan and suburban area. Does not the Council already run a free service of steamboats on the Thames at North Woolwich—eventually, no doubt, to be extended all along the stream?

"Public libraries and reading-rooms in every ward are nearly here already, but we may expect that the library and the public hall will go far to cut out the tavern (at present our only 'public' house) as the poor man's club. As for bands of music in the parks, municipal fêtes, and fireworks on 'Labour Day,' and other instances of the communalisation of the means of 'enjoyment,' all this is already common form in France. The parks, indeed, will be tremendous affairs. But when London's gas and water and markets are owned and controlled by its public authorities; when its tramways, and perhaps its local railways, are managed like its roads and parks, not for private profit, but for public use; when the metropolis at length possesses its own river, and its own docks; when its site is secure from individual tyranny, and its artisans' dwellings from the whims of philanthropy; when, in short, London collectively really takes its own life into its own hands, a vast army of London's citizens will be directly enrolled in London's service."[688]