Orders of the Day — Schedule.

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at on 25 July 1922.

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The scheme now proposed is going to be a millstone round the neck of these electric undertakings. Consider for a moment what the railway companies, if they had been given such powers, could have done. Every farmer and the residents in every village through which the railway lines ran would have been able to get cheap electric power. You only need the skilled technical expert to work under the financial scheme of the railway company. This is the true method by which we could have regenerated the whole of the industrial situation, and we could in this way have provided power and heat and light in every corner of these islands, and we could have made this as great an invention as the invention of the steam locomotive. This bureaucratic Bill, which is framed on syndicalism lines, is standing in the way of natural heritage of the railway companies, and it will be a block instead of an assistance to the development of electricity, and it will do very great harm to the development of the industries of this country.