“MENACE TO LIBERTY”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25802, 24 March 1945, Page 8

“MENACE TO LIBERTY”

BIG BUSINESS IN BRITAIN APPEASEMENT OF UNIONS “ If I were asked to define the biggest menace to liberty in Britain, the biggest threat to the interests of the consumer—which means all of us—l should only say that it was the growing line-up between Big Business and the Big Trade Unions to exploit the consumer,” writes Mr W. J. Brown, M.P., in the Evening Standard of London. “Just as there comes a stage where the free competition between rival concerns—from which the consumer derives at least the benefit of competitive prices—gives place to combination and cartelisation, so there comes a stage in the struggle between the employers’ organisations and the unions where the two find it more profitable to join hands.

“The great Big Business combinations, confronted with the growth of great industrial trade unions, ‘do a deal ’ with them —at the expense of the rest of us.

“The Americans are more logical than we are in this matter. They insist that capitalism rests on the two principles of free competition and the open market. Cartelisation abolishes the competition and closes the market. The appeasement of the trade unions completes the process. “We are heading for the Corporate State dominated by Big Business, which has ( squared the unions, and of whose decisions the State, using the instrument of a Tied Parliament, will be the ratifying agency.”