LABOUR'S FUTURE.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20490, 8 March 1932, Page 13

LABOUR'S FUTURE.

♦"7 HOUSE OF INDUSTRY. STRANGLEHOLD ON FINANCE. ('ROM OUR OWN CUB RESPONDENT.) LONDON, January 28. Speaking at the annual conference of the University Labour Federation at Cambridge, Mr'S. C. Hobson said that two movements were on foot to strengthen the House of Lords to an extont that would, almost make it invulnerable to any future Socialist control in the Commons. Ho foresaw, not perhaps in the immediate future, but ultimately, the abolition of the Houso of Lords and the formation of a House of Industry, a powerful representative organisation of employers and employed to deal with economic control. He thought that the class struggle would finally express itself in some such economic organisation. One of the ultimate results of the reorganisation of industry would be that the State would be supplied with the necessary money from the sources of production, not from the results. "It would, .in the end, mean the abolition of the income tax. It would be a good thing for the Labour Party to go to the country next time and say, 'Vote for the Labour Party and the abolition of the income tax.' " Mr Arthur Greenwood, Minister for Health in the late Labour Government, who presided, said that he did not want to see the energies of the Labour movement diverted from their primary objective. The time to be spent in the tearing down of tariffs in the first couple of years of v the next Labour Government would be better devoted to getting a grip on the financial machines of the teOuntry. The danger he saw, having served in two Labour Administrations, was of living from hand to mouth and from day to day with current problems, many of them imposed on them by their predecessors. They would have to turn" .their backs on what the present Government had done, and the first thing they had to do was to ( get a stranglehold on finance.