THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 1967. MUNICIPAL SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8334, 17 January 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 1967. MUNICIPAL SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND.

The members of the Progressive Party on the London County Council have apparently taken warning by the rout of the Progressives at the recent borough council elections in London, and are now intent on disavowing, at least for the present, any sympathy with those extremists who favour municipal trading. The opposition to this particular form of Socialism is. greatly strengthened by the appearance of Lord Avebury's new book on national and municipal ( trading. Lord Avebury points to the enormous increased municipal indebtedness in recent years, the. total in the United Kingdom now amounting to something like five hundred millions sterling. ' He emphasises t'ne utter fallacy of the contention that a great deal of this expenditure is remunerative, declaring that if the accounts were subjected to independent audits ( and proper made for depreciation and staff charges, hardly one municipal j enterprise in the country would show a profit. There are indications of a revolt against a system which has been the means of raising the rates to an almost intolerable degree. * But many of the voters, as Lord Avebury points out, are not affected by the increase of rates, and are, therefore, quite willing to •vote for the party that spends the most money, economy and retrench- ' ment' being always an unpopular policy. Then many of the largest ratepayers, such as joint stock companies, have no votes at all. It is shown that in West Ham these companies pay nearly 35 per cent, of the rates of municipal administration, in Liverpool 32 per cent., in Sheffield 30 per cent., in Birmingham 28 per cent., and so on. Lord £ Avebury suggests that to obviate this "taxation without representation," companies should be .able to exercise votes "in some reasonable proportion to the rates they pay." There are no half-tones about his denunciation of municipal management, which in

his opinion is necessarily bad management. It is not enough, for instance, that the members of the London County Council are amateurs in the conduct of the city's affairs, but they are overworked amateurs, who sandwich their municipal work in between their ordinary avocations, these latter ranging from the duties of Cabinet Ministers to those of shopkeepers and trade-union secretaries. And in many cases they have more to do on the County Council than they could manage if it was their sole occupation. It is in the intervals, we are reminded, of "supervising the education of some three millions of children, of policing the parks, minding the lunatics, licensing the music halls, and doing a hundred other things that a knot of the councillors, with no technical knowledge or experience, attempt to manage one of the largest tramway concerns in the world." Lord Ave,bury declares that municipal and national interference with private enterprise have retarded and have hampered industrial and mercantile competition.