THE PAMPHLETS issued by the Fabian Society are usually sensible,
more so than the publications of the Labour Party itself. The most recent of them Plan for Steel Re-nationalisation, by John Hughes—is an exception. If it had been issued by the party, it could have been read as the pro- pagandist piece it is; but I am surprised the Society should have passed it. It does not even attempt to discuss what is surely the most im- portant question of all. The issue on steel is not Whether the boards of the de-nationalised steel companies have secured maximum efficiency in the industry. The proper test, surely, should be : has the steel industry, as at present constituted, done better than it would have done had it remained nationalised? And to answer that ques- tion, it is only necessary to look at the efforts of the industries which are under State control. A still better test is to ask trade unionists in the industry what they feel about re-nationalisation : something Mr. Hughes evidently neglected to do. `For the operatives and craftsmen in steel,' he writes, 'public ownership offers gains in status and security.' Mr. Hughes, I am sorry to say, is talking through his tutorial mortar-board; if he left his Ruskin students fora while and talked to the steel-workers, he would get the answer : that the operatives and craftsmen have no inten- tion of seeing their status and security pulled down to the level of workers in the other nationalised industries, if they can help it.
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