The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

x FOREWORD

the Trade Union and Labour movement has demanded the setting up of a House of Industry, which we have called, sometimes an Industrial Parliament, or a National Economic Council, or an Economic General Staff. We frankly admit that in our discussion of the idea of a Parliament of Industry, or National Economic Council, Parliamentary ideology has confused its advocates and influenced their vocabulary. Control of industry, the planning, co-ordination and regulation of economic affairs, cannot be dealt with even by analogy on Parliamentary lines. It is misleading to talk of Trade Parliaments, Industrial Councils, or Parliaments of Industry, when we have in mind, not merely the regulation of relations between employers and workpeople, but fundamental matters of economic planning, co-ordination and control. Hobson has called his organ of economic authority the House of Industry because no better title has occurred to him, and none has occurred to us. It is sufficiently denatured as to politics and positive enough as to economics, though the title is not perfect, either as a definition or as a description.

Parliamentarism and the analogies—misleading as we have suggested—of political democracy coloured the presentation of the proposal to establish some organ or agency of economic control in Labour and Trade Union discussions. This is very obvious in the report of the provisional joint committee representing the Trade Unions and the employers, arising out of the Industrial