Industrial Combination
The mystery which has surrounded the negotiations for the merger of the Federation of British Industries and the British Employers' Confederation has not been dispelled by Tuesday's somewhat guarded announcement that the arrangement has now been agreed in principle. But it is clear that the new organisation will be enor- mously powerful, and will represent the employers of the whole country in negotiations with the Government and the T.U.C. Cen- tralisation of this order requires full publicity. It is everybody's business, and it is to be hoped that the details of the organisation, which will now be worked out by the leading officers of both bodies, and likewise the reports of its subsequent operations, will not be kept so strictly in the dark as were the separate proceedings of the F.B.I. and the B.E.C. No guarantee of publicity is provided by the liaison with the T.U.C., for in that temple the mysteries of industrial negotiation are guarded with an almost pathological ferocity. Similarly the Government and the Civil Service have shown no great inclination to emerge from the shadows cast by war-time secrecy. All this would not matter so much if it were possible to assume that British industry will always be conducted in a completely enlightened manner. But in fact both employers' and workers' organisations in this country have shown in the past a greater partiality for the illusory safety of restrictionism than for the wider duties and oppor- tunities of expansion.
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