The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

EFOREWORD Xvil

of British Industries, the Trades Union Congress ; the big banking and financial interests ; the powerful groups that dominate sections of industry, transport and trade; we might even say the Newspaper Trust. These are the real governors of our economic and industrial organisation. They dictate industrial policy and decide the course of economic events, with scant deference to the views of Ministers or the authority of Parliament. On rare occasions Parliament has been goaded into an assertion of its supremacy over one or another of these bodies, and political parties have taken fright over their pretensions to equality with them where economic matters are concerned. Thus we had the frantic assertion of Parliamentary authority in 1926, when the Trade Unions, through the T.U.C. General Council, had the hardihood to deny the mine-owners’ dictatorship in the coalfields and called a national strike in protest against the Baldwin Government’s support of the dictatorship. The politicians’ answer to the declaration of the T.U.C. that the mine-owners must negotiate and not dictate the settlement was to say first that the T.U.C. had challenged the supremacy of Parliament, then to use all the forces of government to defeat the T.U.C., and finally to try by legislation to divest the Trades Unions of their natural authority and power.

It is true that defiance of Parliament is usually submissively accepted by the politicians when it is the employers who defy: the Baldwin Government swallowed the affront put on Parliament

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