ABSTRACT
In 1922 a committee appointed by the Labour Party reviewed ‘The Douglas-New Age
Scheme’ and concluded that it was ‘out of harmony with the trend of Labour thought,
and . . . indeed fundamentally opposed to the principles for which the Labour Party
stands’ (Labour Party 1922). The rejection of its analysis by the Labour Party in 1922
proved decisive to the subsequent history of the Douglas/New Age economics. To
Douglas, Orage and many guild socialists at the time, the alternative economic
framework presented in the Douglas/New Age texts was in close accord with a
socialist critique of capitalism. ‘Labourism’, as propounded by the Labour Party,
challenged ‘not a single proposition of the capitalist system’. Rather, ‘every strike has
been a fight for position in the system’, with individuals aspiring to posts of status and
power within a system which they might as socialists have been expected to challenge
(Douglas 1922b: 152). Throughout World War I ‘Guild Socialist Fabian researchers’
worked in a close but uneasy relationship with ‘what Punch called
“Sidneywebbicalism”’ (Cole 1940: 160). By 1918 the statistical paternalism of Clause
IV nationalisation held sway in the Labour Party in alliance with the trade unions.
