A TRANSPORT HOUSE DOUBLE P UBLICATIONS of varying merit emanate from
Transport House, where both the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress have their homes. Last week some attention was directed in this place to a Labour Party pamphlet, Facing the Facts, in which it was difficult to discern any merit at all. This week there come, from the Labour Party Problems of ' Public Ownership, by Ernest Davies, M.P., and from the T.U.C. its General Council's. annual report, the outstanding feature of which is the statement on trade unions and the economic situation, or, put more briefly, the vital question of wages and prices. Both of them are serious contributions to the study of immediate and urgent problems, though they differ in this, that Mr. Davies' work is described as " A Policy Discussion Pamphlet," the views expressed being consequently his own, while the T.U.C. report embodies the considered conclusions of the one organisation representing manual workers as a whole today. Both the Labour Party and the T.U.C. have their annual conferences impending, but here again there is the difference that while the full Trades Union Congress will be called on either to endorse or to repudiate its Council's views (and judging by past experience it is perfectly capable of repudiating them) it is recognised that tlIP general discussion which Mr. Davies' pamphlet and others similar to it are meant to stimulate in the constituencies cannot be completed before the Party Conference, and are therefore designed to influence decisions lying further ahead.
It is the merit of both documents that they can be criticised equally by Right and Left, which means that both represent serious attempts at objective assessment of the existing political and industrial situation. If the T.U.C. report is, for reasons already stated, the more authoritative of the two it must be recognised how strictly limited the T.U.C.'s authority is. The Congress is not a federation. It is an association of trade unions, with no power to bind the constituent bodies, some of them very powerful, some of them dominated by leaders with whom Communism is apt to count more than trade unionism. When, therefore, the T.U.C. Council argues for restraint in wage claims the probable efficacy of its plea must be estimated in the light of the quite inordinate wage claims (e.g. for an increase of £2 a week) which certain unions have recently been advancing. In those circumstances it is creditable that the Council should take as firm h line as it does take in the present report, and quite intelligible that (with a pardonable, and not ill-natured, thrust at Sir Walter Monckton for referring back various awards of wage-increases) it should insist that there must be no Government interference with existing wage-fixing machinery. That warning may be unnecessary, but there is no need to complain of it.
On the main issue, the inevitability of an increase in wages resulting in an increase of prices, the T.U.C. Council is entirely sound. In the position it occupies it can do no more than point out certain basic truths to its constituent unions, but it does that with clarity and firmness, leaving the conclusions to be inculcated by'. implication. We face the danger today, the report states, that higher costs may so force up the prices of our exports as to make them unsaleable.
No trade unionist reading that can fail to recognise that one of the major constituents in higher costs is higher wages. Nor, it may be hoped, can he fail to realise that if export markets dwindle seriously any policy of full employment becomes so much moonshine. We must export to live, and if we desire to prevent living standards from falling there must be an increase in production and an avoidance of any substantial increase of wages, which would be bound to reflect itself in prices. In all that, everything the T.U.C. Council has to say is precisely right. But thg. same principle applies in the home market, as the Council might have pointed out more clearly. If wages rise the cost of production and the price of the finished article rise too. The consumer, having to pay more for what he buys, demands higher wages again—a process to which, unless common sense prevailed, there would be no end. It is useless therefore to confine talk of wage-restraint to workers in the export trades alone. -Prices must somehow be first stabilised and then reduced. Some prices have been, but there can be no general reduction unless there is wage-restraint. —It is not easy for trade union leaders, who owe their position in large degree to their success in getting better conditions for their members, to drive that doctrine home, and it is something that they should have stressed it as strongly as they have done.
There is one large section of the workers, those employed in the nationalised industries, to which the T.U.C. agreement about costs of production in the export trades does not, except to some extent in the case of the miners, apply. But the nationalised industries have problems of their own, and in view of the closeness with which almost all of them—coal, gas. electricity, transport—touch the individual citizen it is right that their activities should be kept under constant survey. To the application of that process Mr'. Davies' pamphlet would make a useful contribution if it did no more than analyse the problems arising and set out heads for study. Actually it does much more than that, and if the writer, a Labour M.P. pre- paring for the Labour Party a pamphlet for Labour readers, has the honesty to admit defects in the present system as well as emphasising what he considers its merits it is hardly fair to lay quite as much stress on the admissions as some corn-, mentators have already done. In regard to certain industries —coal, the railways, electricity, gas—the principle of national ownership is now accepted by all parties, though there may be, and notoriously are, differences about the details of its applica- tion. One point on which criticism, by no means always on party lines, has fastened, is the issue of centralisation or decentralisation. Here Mr. Davies usefully points out the variations which exist in .that respect between the different industries—the highly centralised Coal Board, the considerably less centralised Transport Commission, the Electricity Authority, with much of its powers delegated to fourteen Area Boards, the almost independent Area Gas Boards. There are reasons for these differences, but they are not necessarily decisive and lessons may be learnt from comparing the systems.
No one could expect that the nationalised industries, the oldest of them not yet in operation for six years, should have assumed their final form. What is important is that in those which both parties accept as permanent changes should be effected with an eye solely to the national interest and with a firm exclusion of party prejudice from discussion of them. There is no lack of problems, apart from what is perhaps the primary problem of centralisation. There is the question. raised by Mr. Davies, whether those industries whose working is resulting in deficits instead of profits should receive some assistance from the State and if so in what form. Mr. Davies admits frankly that " apart from the spirit of public service which should pervade public industry there is [in the national- ised industries] no automatic spur to efficiency; both the stimulus of private profits and competition are absent." It can hardly be claimed that " the spirit of public service " is proving very efficacious so far, and it is clear that raising prices to meet rising costs may in some cases so restrict demand (as in the case of railway passengers) as to leave the last state of the industry worse than the first. That is a problem that has to be faced, and Mr. Davies throws out tentatively the sug- gestion that all the nationalised industries should stand in together, a national pool being formed, from which the deficits of some industries would be defrayed from the profits of others; but he enumerates so many difficulties in the way of the appli- cation of the idea that it is clearly not a possibility of the immediate future. Other questions to be canvassed are the degree of Parliamentary control to be exercised over the nationalised industries and the methods of consultation between workers and managenient, and relations with the public through Consumers' Councils (so far of very little use) or otherwise. Conservatives as well as Labour voters would do well to study Mr. Davies' pamphlet. They will be justifiably annoyed at some of his unfair party hits; and they will note that, infected with the nebulosity which seems to be pervading the Labour Party at present, he has next to nothing to say about future nationalisation except that there should be nationalisation " wherever it appears to be in the public interest." No one in any camp need dissent from that. But they should study it.
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