724
R. H. S. CROSSMAN
tively-if we are not prepared to see the Labour Party wither away
-we must be prepared to reshape its policies so as to present an
outright Socialist challenge to the Affluent Society and give warn–
ing of the coming crisis. In so doing we should make it unambigu–
ously clear that, if we are given a mandate, we shall overcome this
crisis by delib erately reversing the balance of the economy and en–
suring .that the public dominates over the private sector. For only in
this way shall we make it possible to work out a true national re–
sources budget, which strikes the proper balance between produc–
tion and consumption goods and ensures that community interests
are given their proper priority over individual consumption ..
A Socialist program of this kind will involve transferring gi–
gantic powers, which are now dispersed among the oligopolists, to
the central Government and the planning authorities which it
would have to establish. Of course there would be dangers to free–
dom in this process of subjecting irresponsible economic power to
public control. The increased power of the Executive which Social–
ist planning must bring will be in danger of degenerating into the
kind of totalitarianism we have seen in Eastern Europe unless it is
counter-balanced by a revival of the challenge which Parliament
used to make to the Executive. Since the war we have watched a
dreary process by which the House of Commons has been progres–
sively deprived of effective authority until it is in danger of becom–
ing one of the ceremonial aspects of the Constitution, alongside the
Monarchy and the House of Lords. But this draining away of the
power of decision which used to reside in Parliament has not
brought an increase of Cabinet or Ministerial authorfty.
On
the
contrary, the power of decision which Cabinet, before the era of
oligopoly, used to possess, at least within limited spheres, has been
steadily decreased, until today, as Professor Titmuss has shown, we
are witnessing
a retreat from Government.
Democratic control of
the forces which determine social and political development is stead–
ily declining and with it the ability of the nation to act as a nation
and of the people to exert a free democratic will.
If the Western
world is free, as it certainly is, from the terrible evils of totalitarian–
ism, it is the victim of an even more d ebilitating disease-the emer–
gence of a modern feudalism, which is strangling our democracy
before it has had time to grow up.
