How Little It Counts in England To-day: A Labour View By Our Trade Union Correspondent, The great industrial struggle that is taking place in Great Britain to-day has shown more clearly than ever before how total the eclipse of the Liberal Party is, and how little it counts in England at the present day.
True, it has an industrial policy. With a great flourish of trumpets, several conferences and the _blessing of the "Manchester Guardian" and the "Nation," it promulgated an industrial policy several months ago.
Its main idea was the establishment of a National Industrial Council representing all industries and under which a joint committe in each industry would fix hours of work and rates of wages.
Some of the great manufacturers and capitalists still attached to the Free Liberals frowned upon these mildly revolutionary proposals, and some industrial students a little more up to date in recent industrial developments pointed out that nearly 60 Whitley Counecils, doing much the same work as that proposed, wera already in existence and functioning.
professor Ramsey Muir exposed the many ambiguities that characterized the scheme in all that part of it not already working under the present Government, andthe whole campaign fizzled out and was forgotten.
Muppie ano IReLaNnp.
No alternative programme seems to have commended itself to the Party, and now that the opportunity may have arrived to make the usual party capital out of the Government's muddling of the industrial crisis, it finds itself divided, and unable to formulate any clear line of policy that will either ease or remedy the situation.
The same weakness shows itself on the Trish question. Myr. Asquith denounces just those severe measures he used himself when Prime Minister. The Free Liberals would not grant the Irish the republic they seem determined to have. Yet they profess to support "self-determination" for the Irish people. Should a general election place the Free Liberals in office again—a quite impossible assumption, the one difference between the "Daily News" description of a reprisal then and now would be that what is now a Reactionary Outrage" would then be a "Re-grottable Necessity."
Even Governuent Econowizine.
"Retrenchment," another plank in the old Liberal Party program: me, cannot be made to square with the Party's policy of social reform. Free Liberal candidates for election are strong on increased old 2 aes
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.