The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

xiv FOREWORD

and endeavour to reconcile their conflicting interests on matters of industrial reorganisation. Later on it is possible that the National Council contemplated by the Melchett-T.U.C. Conference might develop into a true economic authority and organ of control. This, we fear, cannot be said of the Economic Advisory Council which the present Labour Government created, apparently at the instance of the Prime Minister himself. This body is little better than a haphazard collection of individual people connected with trade unionism, capitalist enterprise and the professional treatment of economic theory and political science. This group of trade unionists, employers and professors appear to meet infrequently. They have a secretariat which keeps them working at some sort of agenda. Their views are presumably given due consideration by the Cabinet but their limits of usefulness are manifestly fixed by the respect which the Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues may be supposed to entertain for the intellectual reputation of the group. A body of this kind stands obviously at a far distant remove from the Parliament of Industry, or the National Economic Council, or the Economic General Staff, which has been the subject of discussion inside the Socialist and Trade Union movement.

If Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s highly governmentalised conception of an Economic Advisory Council is to be accepted by the Trade Union and Socialist movement as the fulfilment of the idea it has cherished, there is no more to be said. To