I hope this country realises what it is in for
if the Labour Party remains in power and some of its members have their way. A Left- Wing weekly which reckons to speak with some authority on Labour policy had this to say last week : "Its [the Labour Party's] duty is to stimulate the trade unions and the Co-ops into the revolutionary changes in their own structure without which Socialism's next step cannot be taken, while simultaneously solving its own special political problem —how to plan the private sector of the economy, now war-time scarcity has disappeared."
So this is Labour's special political problem—" to plan the private sector of the economy "—to ensure that concerns like Unilever or Courtaulds or I.C.I. or Stewarts and Lloyds, to say nothing of tens of thousands of smaller enterprises, shall conduct their business not in the way experience has shown to be best, but in the way some academic planner ordains. "The man in Whitehall knows best." What becomes now of Mr. Morrison's claim that 80 per cent. of the industry of the country remains in private hands ? It remains there, I suppose, so long as the hands are guided by Mr. Harold Wilson or Mr. Strauss or even the genial Mr. Stokes. No doubt many sober.Labour leaders would repudiate this doctrine, but it is well to realise that the planning of " the private sector of the economy " is what one wing of the party at least is out for. You have been warned.
* * * *
Previous page
