Ex-Labour M.P. Starts Campaigning Against Steel Nationalisation

Grey River Argus, 15 September 1948, Page 5

Ex-Labour M.P. Starts Campaigning Against Steel Nationalisation

LONDON, Sept. 13. Mr Alfred Edwards, M.P., whom the Labour Party expelled, has launched a fund to oppose the nationalisation of the steel industry. Mr Edwards is the director of a steel company. He said the Government would lose the next election if this legislation was carried through. “I have never seen a Socialist in an official position whom I would entrust with an important position in any of my own businesses, nor should we put them in charge of the nation’s business,” he said. “The Ministers are surrounded by young men from the London School of Economics. There is not one who has ever earned his living by running a business. The steel price will go up. Our exports will be jeopardised. The whole thing is not essential.” Mr Lewis Cord, a Canadian industrial consultant, told the Industrial Welfare Conference that the nationalisation of industry in Britain had increased the cost of top management and reduced efficiency. Britain should have remained the world’s industrial leader and teacher, but instead she was now asking America for advice. Britain had been discredited around the world industrially with “a thoroughness of which you all ought to be ashamed.”