Admittedly alive to the evils of centralization and the restrictions of bureaucracy, the Party claims a free hand for local authorities, assisted by grants-in-aid from Government sources, to extend widely the scope of municipal enterprise. Local authorities should, it is asserted, not only retail coal, but supply milk, and engage in other similar spheres of trade. All members of local bodies ought, it is said, to receive their necessary travelling expenses, and also be paid for time spent by them on the public service.
The Labour Party would re-organize the whole educational system from the nursery school to the university “on the basis of social equality”; “each educational institution, irrespective of social class or wealth, to be open to every member of the community on terms within his reach”—everything in the nature of military training to be absolutely prohibited. In regard to public health, the Labour Party holds that Government should build at the national expense the requisite number of dwelling houses, spacious and healthy, each having four or five rooms, larder, scullery, cupboards, and fitted bath, spaced not more than ten or twelve to the acre, and provided with a garden. National provision for the prevention and treatment of disease, and the care of orphans, infirm, incapacitated, and aged persons is also included as an indispensable part of Labour’s policy.
In regard to agriculture and rural life, the Party has formulated a number of proposals based on the Government’s immediately assuming control of the nation’s agricultural land, and—
“ensuring its utilization, not for rent, not for game, not for the social amenity of a small social class, not even for obtaining the largest percentage on the capital employed, but solely with a view to the production of the largest proportion of the food-stuffs required by the population of these islands under conditions allowing of a good life to the rural population with complete security for the farmers’ enterprise, yet not requiring the consumer to pay a price exceeding that for which food-stuffs can be brought from other lands.”
The means proposed to attain this end are large national farms, small holdings made accessible to practical agriculturists, municipal agricultural enterprises, and farms let to Co-operative Societies and other approved tenants, under a national guarantee against losses due to bad seasons. All distribution of agricultural food-stuffs—from milk and vegetables up to bread and meat—is to be taken out of the hands of dealers and shopkeepers, and is to be effected by Co-operative Societies and local authorities “with equitable compensation for all interests expropriated or displaced.”
The Labour Party also advocates Government importation of raw materials and food-commodities, and Government control of the shipping, woollen, clothing, milling, and other similar industries; the rationing both of raw material and of food commodities, and the fixing of all prices on the basis of accurate costing, so as to eliminate profiteering. It is, the Labour Party says—
“just as much the function of Government, and just as necessary a part of the democratic regulation of industry to safeguard the interests of the community as a whole and those of grades and classes of private consumers in the matter of prices, as it is by the Factory and Trade Board Acts to protect the rights of the wage-earning producers in the matter of wages, hours of labour and sanitation, or by the organized police force to protect the householder from the burglar.”
A Revolution in Public Finance
A complete revolution in national finance is overdue, in the opinion of the Labour Party. Too long, it says, has our national finance been regulated on a basis opposed to the teaching of political economy, according to the views of the possessing classes and the desire for profits of the financiers. There ought to be such a system of taxation “as will secure all the necessary revenue to the Government without encroaching on the prescribed national minimum standard of life of any family, without hampering production or discouraging any useful personal effort, and with the closest possible approximation to equality of sacrifice.” The Labour Party accordingly would institute direct taxation of all incomes exceeding the necessary cost of family maintenance, and the direct taxation of private fortunes both during life and at death for the redemption of the National Debt. It opposes taxation calculated to increase the price of food or necessaries of life, and holds that indirect taxation of commodities, whether by customs or excise, should be limited to “luxuries.” It would retain and increase the excess-profits tax and, until nationalization of minerals, the mineral-rights duty. The unearned increment of urban land and mineral values it would divert by taxation wholly into the public exchequer. Death duties would be regraduated and heavily increased, so as to turn into the national coffers all the wealth of every person deceased in excess of a quite moderate amount to be left for family provision. In addition, the Labour Party stands for “conscription of wealth,” described as “a capital levy, chargeable, like death duties, on all property, with exemption of the smallest savings up to £1,000, but rising rapidly in percentage with the value of the property, for the purpose of freeing the nation of as large an amount as possible of its present load of interest-bearing debt.” Co-operative Societies would be left entirely free from this levy.