Manawatu Evening Standard. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1928. NATIONALISATION IN PRACTICE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVIII, Issue 240, 7 September 1928, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1928. NATIONALISATION IN PRACTICE.

The nationalisation of land and industry figures in the platform and policy of practically every Labour Party in the British Empire. It appears to be founded upon the belief that the State can do things a great deal better than private enterprise, and that

the profits that would be derived from the control of industry and

all forms of banking, exchange, insurance, transport and manufacturing industries would be of such benefit to the State that all the public services could be maintained out of the revenues derived therefrom. That is the theory, but it is a theory that finds no favour with some of the ablest of the British Labour Socialist leaders. The British Labour Party nevertheless proposes to begin the nationalisation business by operating 1 the “coal, transport, power ana life insurance industries,” with “the utmost rapidity that circumstances allow.” The land and other industries will follow in due course. It is noteworthy, however, that the British Socialist Labour Party only desires to nationalise those industries which have reached a high state of development under private enterprise, for, in the official statement made on the subject it says: “The railways could, without practical difficulty, be transferred to public ownership. . . . On the other

hand, motor road transport, both commercial and passenger ... as well as a large amount of water transport . . . are not sufficiently organised to be merged immediately on the more highly developed and more ' firmly established forms of transport.” When the Socialist Government came into office in 1924, Mr J. H. Thomas, M.P., speaking on the nationalisation problem in London last August twelvemonth, said the Cabinet spent a good deal of time discussing nationalisation and its. application, but “we found that the difference between the platform and the board room is the difference between the impractical and the practical.” At Oxford in February last Mr Ramsay MacDonald, the Socialist leader, said it was a profound mistake in talking about coal and unemployment to say “our one cure is nationalisation.” The party believed in nationalisation certainly, but its method, “while laying down a g-eneral conception of social organisation and responsibility, does not say that that, here and now, is a practical cure for all our grievances.”