Parliament Public Ownership, by A.H. Hanson

[p024] Parliament & Public Ownership. By Cassell and Company, 30s. This book deals with the conflict between democracy and bureaucracy in the nationalized industries. Mr. Hanson, however, can think of demo- cracy only in the bourgeois sense of periodic elections to Parliament. And since he also regards bureaucracy as ‘one of the inevitable and irreversible consequences _of the technological revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries’, he finds himself in a cleft stick. ‘ Business-like efficiency in administration’, he says, ‘would appear to be incompatible, at least to some degree, with democratic control.’ Outspoken bourgeois economists, such as Joseph Schumpeter, denounce any suggestion of popular participa- tion in government and insist that the main economic agencies must be as free from ‘interference by politicians’ as from ‘fussy citizens’ committees’ or the demands of their own work- men. Mr. Hanson is uneasy about such extremism, but his view of society would seem to impel him to the same conclusions. Thus his book reads like a tortuous attempt to avoid the logical results of his own social out- look. He examines ad hoc committees, autonomous public corporations, semi-autonomous bodies; he — com- pares the merits of ‘unitary’ or ‘federal’ constitutions, of centralized or decentralized administration; he discusses how much or how little supervisory authority Ministers or MPs should have; he assesses the value of Questions in the House, and of Select Committees... All this is both exhaustive and exhausting. But he has very little to offer at the end. He advocates departmental forms of administration, together with a wide delegation of authority to some kind of internal board (com- posed — needless to say—of ‘top managers’). In addition, he suggests a ‘measuring agency’ which could undertake an annual examination of the nationalized industries. This is pretty thin. But Mr. Hanson’s problem is that he sees industrial development as something quite separate from democracy. The latter is—-in general—‘desirable’, so some way has to be found of grafting it on artificially, in such a way as to cause as little disruption as possible. Thus, Mr. Hanson writes from the standpoint of one entirely caught up by the Establishment. The existing State forms are an accepted frame- work of society. They may be modi- fied here and there by extremely clever and suitably ‘distinguished’ people, but no significant changes are expected. In 237 pages about the nationalized industries, the workers in them barely rate a mention. As for the possibility of a different sort of State, with workers’ control of industry, this is utterly beyond Mr. Hanson’s comprehension. He dis- misses it in a single paragraph as an idle dream (‘a combination of the best features of Athenian democracy with the spirit of William Morris’s “ News from Nowhere”’). Stalinism, to him, has proved it impossible. Like other former members of the Communist Party who have moved to the Right, Mr. Hanson makes no distinction between Stalinism and Leninism. This is a conservative book, by a conservative writer. It is all the more depressing since, at one time Mr.

[p025] BOOK REVIEWS Hanson was at least on speaking terms with Marxism.