Functional socialism

FUNCTION 59

independent concerns, free from all control, answerable to no Minister and therefore not answerable to Parliament in matters of policy and administration.

These experienced men recognize that the House of Industry is the way out of existing confusions:

Parliament is alternately engaged in asserting its supremacy over these independent bodies which have acquired power to decide the course of industrial evolution, and in creating new independent bodies invested with extraordinary authority to be exercised without reference to Parliament at all. This contradiction is inherent in the present system of parliamentary government, with its two party confrontation and its amateurish economic and industrial experience. And the House of Industry alone is capable of straightening out this conflict of tendency. It will maintain the supremacy of Parliament, when Parliament is reformed, by the transformation of the House of Lords into a second chamber charged with responsibility for economic planning and the co-ordination and regulation of industry; it will bring under a properly constituted authority the various organs of economic goyernance and foster their development in harmony with a clear-cut and coherent policy of economic and industrial reorganization; it will assign to each of them its place in the general scheme; and it will relieve the political parties of their jealous suspicions of anything and everything which encroaches upon the sovereignty of Parliament and the integrity of Government resting upon the people’s will.

‘These views are doubtless in advance of the Labour politicians or the rank and file; they are