“absolutely to believe that the British people will permanently tolerate any reconstruction or perpetuation of the disorganization, waste and inefficiency involved in the abandonment of British industry to a jostling crowd of separate private employers with their minds bent, not on the service of the community, but—by the very law of their being—only on the utmost possible profiteering.
“What the Labour Party looks to is a genuinely scientific reorganization of the nation’s industry, no longer deflected by individual profiteering, on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production; the equitable sharing of the proceeds among all who participate in any capacity, and only among these, and the adoption, in particular services and occupations, of those systems and methods of administration and control that may be found in practice, best to promote, not profiteering, but the public interest.”
Land Nationalization
At the Southport Conference, 1919, a resolution in favour of land nationalization was formally moved by the Miners’ Federation and carried unanimously by the Conference without argument or explanation; it reads thus:
“Seeing that the land alone of all the factors of production is both indispensable to man and incapable of expansion by human agency, it is pre-eminently the rightful property of the nation as a whole. The present system which treats land as private property and prevents free access to it, hampers industry, checks production, crowds the towns by depopulating the countryside, obstructs the provision of good housing, lowers the standard of public health both physical and moral; this Conference strongly urges the Government to bring forward, as early as possible, some scheme for the nationalization of land so as to abolish the present unjust system of land ownership and land leasing. It strongly deprecates the action of the Government in preventing the completion of the valuation of the land, and demands that such valuation shall be completed as early as possible, with a view to the ultimate complete socialization of all land and minerals.”
The Control of Industry
In view of divergent proposals and the general lack of any precise information as to the Party’s intentions in regard to the control of industry, it is not surprising to find this resolution passed at the Southport Conference, 1919, and, significantly, moved by the British Socialist Party:
“That it be referred to the Executive Committee to consider and report to a further Conference on the arrangements to be introduced into industry in order to provide Labour with facilities to control industry—that is to say, to participate in the promotion of undertakings, the negotiation of contracts, determination of the product, and the selection of markets—and the extent that such control by Labour can be secured, or is desirable, on the basis of the private ownership of land and capital. The Executive shall indicate the distinction between conciliatory Labour and Capital and the actual control of industry by the workers, and to that end is instructed to report on:
“(a) The Industrial Councils and their bearing on the question.
“(b) The co-partnership of Labour and Capital.