“(b) To reduce the number of licences and regulate the conditions under which they may be held; and
“(c) If a locality decides that licences are to be granted, to determine whether such licences shall be under private or any form of public control.”
Extension of Municipal Enterprise
“Other main industries, especially those now becoming monopolized, should be nationalized as opportunity offers. Moreover, the Labour Party holds that the municipalities should not confine their activities to the necessarily costly services of education, sanitation and police; nor yet rest content with acquiring control of the local water, gas, electricity and tramways; but that every facility should be afforded to them to acquire (easily, quickly and cheaply) all the land they require, and to extend their enterprises in housing and town planning, parks and public libraries, the provision of music and the organization of recreation; and also to undertake, besides the retailing of coal, other services of common utility, particularly the local supply of milk, wherever this is not already fully and satisfactorily organized by a Co-operative Society.”
Control of Capitalistic Industries and Businesses
“Meanwhile, however, we ought not to throw away the valuable experience now gained by the Government in its assumption of the importation of wheat, wool, metals and other commodities, and in its control of the shipping, woollen, leather, clothing, boot and shoe, milling, baking, butchering, and other industries. The Labour Party holds that, whatever may have been the shortcomings of the Government importation and control, it has demonstrably prevented a lot of ‘profiteering.’ Nor can it end immediately on the declaration of peace. The people will be extremely foolish if they ever allow their indispensable industries to slip back into the unfettered control of private capitalists, who are, actually at the instance of the Government itself, now rapidly combining trade by trade, into monopolist Trusts, which may presently become as ruthless in their extortion as the worst American examples. Standing as it does for the democratic control of industry, the Labour Party would think twice before it sanctioned any abandonment of the present profitable centralization of purchase of raw material; of the present carefully organized ‘rationing,’ by joint committees of the trades concerned, of the several establishments with the materials they require; of the present elaborate system of ‘costing’ and public audit of manufacturers’ accounts, so as to stop the waste heretofore caused by the mechanical inefficiency of the more backward firms; of the present salutary publicity of manufacturing processes and expenses thereby ensured; and, on the information thus obtained (in order never again to revert to the old-time profiteering) of the present rigid fixing, for standardized products, of maximum prices at the factory, at the warehouse of the wholesale trader, and in the retail shop. This question of the retail prices of household commodities is emphatically the most practical of all political issues to the woman elector. The male politicians have too long neglected the grievances of the small household, which is the prey of every profiteering combination; and neither the Liberal nor the Conservative Party promises, in this respect, any amendment. This, too, is in no sense a ‘class’ measure. It is, so the Labour Party holds, 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 all grades and sections of private consumers, in the matter of prices, as it is by the Factory and Trade Boards Acts, to protect the rights of the wage-earning producers in the matter of wages, hours of labour and sanitation.”
Labour’s Agricultural Policy
An official pamphlet called the Labour Party and the Countryside states Labour’s agricultural policy “as settled by representatives of the Party’s 300,000 affiliated agricultural members.” With pride it is announced that members engaged in industry and living in towns had no finger in it. It is claimed to be the fruit of practical experience—the conclusion of experts. Endorsed by the National Executive of the Labour Party, it is stated to crystallize the principles upon which the Party will deal with agricultural and rural problems. The basis is to be the non-sectarian principle of “increased production of food stuffs by the employment of more British labour on better cultivated British land.” The Coalition Government is charged with repudiating this principle and with having perpetrated in 1921 a shameless and scandalous deceit in “scrapping” the Corn Production Acts, 1917 and 1920.