ABSTRACT
The ownership of a large fraction of industrial capital will have passed into public hands, not only by socialisation of particular industries or enterprises, but also by the surrender of capital holdings in payment of taxes on inheritance. Some key enterprises, as distinct from whole industries, will have been taken over and transferred to public management. The local Consumers’ Co-operative Societies would then presumably amalgamate the businesses thus acquired with their existing undertakings, retaining such central emporia or branch shops as they thought fit to carry on, and closing down the rest. In particular, the influx of a large number of new members quite uneducated in Co-operative ideas would tend to weaken the ties between Cooperation and the Labour movement. The Co-operatives are kept up to scratch by the competition of other kinds of traders; a monopoly of large-scale retail trading in the hands of single agency is hardly to be desired from the consumers’ point of view.
