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Introduction 
The public interest displayed with regard to the Statement 
on the Iron and Steel Industry submitted to representative 
conferences on May 16th last by the Executive Council of 
the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, has justified its 
issue in pamphlet form as a means to a wider circulation. 
The Statement and Resolution were adopted by the 
Conferences and the proposals received the support of 
overwhelming majorities at public meetings subsequently 
held in important industrial centres throughout the country. 
The Statement expresses the point of view of the workers 
with regard to the position of a great basic industry and 
their conception of its place and importance in the national 
economic life. 
It is the point of view of those who are not without pride 
in their craft or calling, who believe in the potentialities of 
an industry in which they have invested their lives and the 
wellbeing of those dependent upon them, and who claim 
that their ability to think, their skill and experience, and 
their capacity for service should be accorded a true measure- 
ment of value and of status in any scheme of industrial 
organisation and development. 
The Statement is not a political treatise, designed to 
provide a battle cry for opposing political parties. So far 
as it calls for the intervention of Parliament it is in the 
sense only that Parliament is an expression of the will of 
the people, whose interests it is to see that an industry which 
in the wider sphere has played so important a part in the 
advancement of civilisation shall in due measure make 
its contribution to national progress and the common 
welfare. 
The question raised on the front page of this pamphlet 
is one of the utmost significance, not merely to the share- 
holders of the multifarious units which comprise this 
important.industry, but to the nation as a whole, and in 
what follows the workers through their organisation offer 
constructive criticism of the direction and control by private 
enterprise of an industry so essential to the national economy. 
They assert, in effect, that private enterprise must justify; 
its claims by actual achievement, rather than by the tradi- 
tions of nineteenth century individualism or by criticising 
the workers’ proposals on the assumption that leadership, 
technical knowledge, inventive genius and the skill and ex- 
perience of labour cannot be as effectively and as success- 
fully applied if the ownership and control of the industry is 
vested in the whole nation, than in a part only. That view 
has been expressed in its most definite form by the National 
Federation of Iron & Steel Manufacturers when they 
state— any form of organisation partaking of the nature 
of nationalisation must inevitably destroy the competitive 
power of the industry in world markets and thus involve it 
in complete collapse, rendering its continued existence only 
possible by subsidy from the taxpayers.” 
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