The Industrial Programme of 1918 The new constitution of the Party which was adopted in 1918 was described as a scheme to secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution of them upon the basis of common ownership of the means of production coupled with the application to each industry or service of the best system of popular administration and control, and to promote the economic emancipation of the people, especially those who depend upon their own exertions by hand or by brain for the means of life. In explanation of this rather vague programme, the Party stated in a contemporary leaflet, that they intended that the supplies of food and other necessaries of life, especially bread, meat, milk, sugar, butter and margarine, water, coal, light, and transport by rail, steamer, tram and bus, now almost entirely controlled by monopolists, combines, trusts and rings, should be acquired by the State to be administered nationally or municipally solely in the interest of the public and the consumers. In the Party’s proposals for reconstruction as contained in _Labour and the New Social Order_, which was finally settled by the Labour Party Conference in June 1918, Labour declared that it stood for: “The progressive elimination from the control of industry of the private capitalist, individual or joint-stock, and the setting free of all who work, whether by hand or by brain, for the service of the community and the community only,” and registered its refusal “absolutely to believe that the British people will permanently tolerate any reconstruction or perpetuation of the disorganization, waste and inefficiency involved in the abandonment of British industry to a jostling crowd of separate private employers with their minds bent, not on the service of the community, but—by the very law of their being—only on the utmost possible profiteering. “What the Labour Party looks to is a genuinely scientific reorganization of the nation’s industry, no longer deflected by individual profiteering, on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production; the equitable sharing of the proceeds among all who participate in any capacity, and only among these, and the adoption, in particular services and occupations, of those systems and methods of administration and control that may be found in practice, best to promote, not profiteering, but the public interest.” Land Nationalization At the Southport Conference, 1919, a resolution in favour of land nationalization was formally moved by the Miners’ Federation and carried unanimously by the Conference without argument or explanation; it reads thus: