Clause 2. — (Powers of the Corporation.)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 27 April 1949.

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Photo of Mr Harold Macmillan Mr Harold Macmillan , Bromley 12:00, 27 April 1949

I beg to move, as an Amendment to the proposed Amendment, in line 18, to leave out from "not," to "exercise."

The phrasing here is— Provided that—(i) the Corporation shall not, without the consent in writing of the Minister, exercise their powers under this subsection so as to bring any company into public ownership or form a publicly-owned company, if the consequence thereof would be to increase the sum of the activities which the publicly-owned companies are authorised as aforesaid to carry on; On the last two Amendments, we tried to arrive at a position by which the power of the Corporation should be limited so that it should not be able to carry on all the activities which are authorised, though not in fact carried on at the moment, by the memoranda of association of all the companies concerned, and that they should not start companies within that ambit. That was rejected, and the Government has therefore now armed the Corporation with this immense range of powers, which have been referred to by my hon. Friends in detail. Not content with that, they want to go further. They want, not merely to have the right to operate within this immense range, but they want, if they can get the consent in writing of the Minister, to plunge into a still more advanced range and to bring companies into public ownership so as to increase the activities which the publicly-owned companies are allowed to carry on, or which they are allowed to carry on if they get the consent of the Minister. I do not see why the consent of the Minister should be the method by which they should be authorised to embark into yet another field.

9.45 p.m.

I should have thought that the proper procedure there would have been by way of an amending Act of Parliament such as we recently had in the case of the Coal Board's activities, where Parliament was asked to approve of any fresh increase in the range of activity beyond what was originally contemplated. But under this proviso, if they can find a Minister suitably weak or pliant—and from my experience that should not be difficult—they can embark upon a whole range of activities even beyond those laid down in this tremendous range which we have already been discussing. By a stroke of the Minister's pen they can acquire these new rights.

I do not see why this proviso is drawn in this way. I should have thought it much better that they should not, whether with or without the consent of the Minister, do what is here contemplated, but that they should do what is still not an unreasonable suggestion even in what remains of a democratic society—go to Parliament from which they drew their original authority and ask for an extension of that authority. If that necessity should arise, it would not be a very difficult thing to do it in that way. I very much hope that the House, which has not shown by its vote its acceptance of what seemed to us a very reasonable limitation, will at least agree that, in these cases, the consent of the Minister should not in itself allow this further extension, but that some other procedure, at least by both Houses of Parliament or some democratic Parliamentary procedure, should take the place of the purely bureaucratic and autocratic character of the Minister and the Corporation acting together.