The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

Xvi FOREWORD

Parliamentary Committees with increased powers of administration. These are counsels of despair. The true remedy lies surely in the creation of an economic organ, the House of Industry, as a properly constituted authority exercising full powers of control and co-ordination over credit, exchange, production and distribution.

The creation of the House of Industry has a more fundamental significance in relation to economic developments than in relation to the present inefficacy of Parliament. It will certainly serve the secondary purpose of relieving the congestion of business in the House of Commons and will remove the obstruction of an hereditary and irresponsible second Chamber, without raising the bogey of single-chamber government. But its primary purpose is to unify and co-ordinate the economic powers which are exercised outside Parliament by various bodies whose existence the House of Commons is compelled to recognise but is powerless to restrain, and the new bodies which the House of Commons is recklessly investing with control over industry. Their mere existence constitutes a problem which myopic politicians, including (we regret to say) Ministers in the Labour Government who, nurtured in Socialism, should know better, have not understood.

Chief among these extra-parliamentary organs of economic government which the capitalist system has produced are the great organisations of employers and workers, such as the Confederation of Employers’ Associations, the Federation