The TUC are about as desirous of providing an alternative government to the Crown in Parliament as the Chiefs of Staff... The fear of domination by t… - Enoch Powell

I sometimes hear the suggestion made, even in the Conservative Party, that one would wish to see the official, responsible trade union leaders encouraged and strengthened, given the power to make binding contracts on behalf of their members, and placed under liability to penalties if their members break them. This would be the diametrically wrong direction in which to move. It would entrench and give legal sanctions to collective price-fixing itself, which is the essential economic evil. But there are more objections than on economic grounds alone; there are also grave political objections. If unions are to contract to deliver a stipulated quantity, and presumably quality, of labour at a stipulated price, then they would need to be endowed with disciplinary powers over their members, in order to secure the performance of the contract: the members would have to be subject, besides the general law, to a kind of private law or code. A trade union would cease to be in any sense a voluntary association; for only union members, and that, members of a specific trade union, would in practice be employable. This is the union shop and the closed shop—which the Tory Party has always repudiated—with a vengeance. The idea would carry us far down the road to the fascist, corporate state, where the economic life and decisions of the individual are regulated by corporations of employers and unions.

Though legend relates otherwise, I would not have chosen, if I could have avoided it, to become the eponymous exponent of the conviction that by no contrivance can the prospective size and distribution of our population of 'New Commonwealth ethnic origin'...prove otherwise than destructive of this nation. The basis of my conviction is neither genetic nor eugenic; it is not racial, because I can never understand what 'race' means and I have never arranged my fellow men on a scale of merit according to their origin. The basis is political. It is the belief that self-identification of each part with the whole is the one essential precondition of being a parliamentary nation, and that the massive shift in the composition of the population of the inner metropolis and of major towns and cities of England will produce, not fortuitously or avoidably, but by the sheer inevitabilities of human nature in society, ever increasing and more dangerous alienation.

The idea of the State-controlled economy is not modern at all. It is very old; and not only very old, but refuted and superseded long ago. It is quite true that the great principles of capitalism and free enterprise were expounded and explored around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Newton discovered gravitation in the seventeenth century. Copernicus proved in the sixteenth century that the earth revolves round the sun. But these truths are not thereby "out-of-date". They are not refuted by the lapse of time. The errors which they replaced are errors still. It is the Socialists and the economic planners who are the Ptolemaics and the flat-earthers of the modern world. They have not moved on beyond capitalism: they have moved back before it. In order to find the parallels to their faith in state regulation and control of the economy you have to go back behind Adam Smith and his contemporaries to the elaborate management of trade in the guilds and boroughs of the Middle Ages or to the French bureaucrats of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.