What, the Workers think of their well-off leaders
Writing on the Dock strike Mr. Trevor Evans (Daily Express, 30/6/48) says that Mr. Deakin, General Secretary of the Transport Workers’ Union “made the elementary mistake last Sunday morning of arriving at the gates of the dock where he was to address the strikers in a chauffeur-driven, impressive limousine.”
Mr. Evans thinks that the above is the kind of thing that has undermined Mr. Deakin’s influence with the members of the union. Doubtless he is right. On the same day, however, Mr. Alexander Werth, Manchester Guardian correspondent in Moscow, expressed the view that the differences of wealth between the poor and the privileged in Russia have no such effect. “There are,” he writes, ” no murmurs when a chief engineer or a general is given a three-room flat in a new block in Moscow.”
Mr. Werth may be right, hut perhaps it is merely that he didn’t hear the murmurs. As he explained (Manchester Guardian, 25/6/48) that ”many Russian town-dwellers still live in conditions of what we would consider intolerable squalor and overcrowding,” and that in Moscow u four or five to a room is not uncommon,” it seems much more likely that the privileges of the lucky few are resented even if it is not wise for the Russian worker to express his resentment aloud.
The Communists and Unofficial Strikes
Recently the Communists have been giving their support to “unofficial” strikes, as when the Dockers came out. It would be a mistake to think from this that the Communists have consistently done so. Until they decided to come out in opposition to the Labour Government, which they had supported at the General Election and for long afterwards, they opposed unofficial strikes and denounced the strikers as the following examples will show. On 26th November, 1945, Mr. Ian Mackay, Industrial Correspondent of the News Chronicle, quoted from a speech made by Mr. Harry Pollitt at the Annual Congress of the Communist Party held in London on 25th November. Mr. Pollitt said :
“I am going to face you with the direct issue. You are either in favour of the party line as set out in the report or the line that mass strikes are the only way to realise the workers’ ends. If you are in favour of strikes I warn you that you are playing with fire in a way that can help to lose the peace and reduce this country to ashes . . . You can get a coal strike in the coalfields tomorrow if you want it. But if you do will it advance the working-class movement of this country or the prospect of our nation remaining first rate in the family of the United Nations?” (News Chronicle, 26/11/45.)
While Mr. Pollitt was making his speech London gas workers were actually out on .strike.
As recently as September. 1947, when the Grimthorpe miners were out on strike the Daily Worker featured a speech by Mr. Arthur Horner, Communist Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, under the bold heading: “Horner Says Grimethorpe Men Are Wrong.” (Daily Worker, 9/9/47.)
The Daily Worker commenced the report of Horner’s speech with the following summary : “The 140 Grimethorpe strikers were accused yesterday by Mr. Arthur Horner. the Miner’s secretary, of holding their 700,000 mining colleagues to ransom and threatening to destroy all the benefits of the five-day week.” Mr. Horner’s argument was that the Union bad given a pledge to the Coal Board and Government that the miners would produce as much coal with the 5-day week as they did before in 5½ days. If they did not produce the output lack of coal can “bring down the Labour Government.” Of the Yorkshire men he said:
“The attitude of the Yorkshire miners was also wrecking the whole policy of reforms which the Union was aiming at.”
These were hard words for a Union official to apply to his own members and they contrast strongly with his remarks to Lord Hyndley, Chairman of the Coal Board, made at Whitley Bay during the Mineworkers’ Conference. To Lord Hyndley who was on the platform, Mr. Horner said : “By and large we can say you have done well and we will continue to help you to do very much better.” The Daily Herald (9/7/48) reporting this, says it was made “with a slight bow to Lord Hyndley.”
Labour Government and Profit Boom
Under the heading ”Has the Profit Boom Ended?” a City Correspondent of the Daily Herald (27/6/48) wrote that “there is substance in the belief that for some companies the industrial profit boom is at an end, and lower earnings during the next year or two may mean dividends cannot be maintained at the current level.”
The Labour Government holds that it is not only practicable but necessary to plan the running of the social system. They have plans for everything and claim to be able to mould the system to their will. How then did it come about that there has been a profit boom? It would seem either that the boom in profits was in accordance with the Labour Government’s plan, or that it happened because their planning did not work. In either event it leaves them with some explaining to do.
Full Employment, for how long?
The Central Wandsworth Labour Party (Mr. Bevin’s constituency) has published a leaflet urging electors to join the Labour Party if “interested in maintaining full employment and all the other advantages that the Labour Government have gained for you.”
It also tells us that “unemployment is less than it has been since the first count 50 years ago.”
The conclusion we are asked to accept is that so long as we have Labour Government unemployment will remain at the present comparatively low figure of 300,000. It is very doubtful whether Mr. Bevin and the other leaders still believe that they can prevent capitalism from producing its periodic industrial crises, but whether they still believe it or not we shall in due course see unemployment jumping up to the million or two million mark again when the increased production campaigns here and elsewhere have run their course.
Mr. Aneurin Bevan on Tory vermin
In a speech at Manchester Mr. Bevan, Minister of Health, let himself go about the Tory Party. “They are lower than vermin,” he said. (Daily Mail, 5/7/48). For them he had “a deep burning hatred in his heart.”
It was not always so however. In 1940 when the Labour Party decided to enter into coalition with the Tory Party under a Tory Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Bevan said:
“The Government have been in office for two weeks and like my hon. Friend the member for Llanelly . . . I felicitate them upon the way in which they have set about their task.” (Hansard, 30th May, 1940.)
The Press naturally made much of Mr. Bevan’s abuse of the Tory Party but actually a more revealing passage in his speech was one that attracted no comment. He said that Churchill’s policy would mean ”cinemas, mansions, hotels and theatres going up, hut no houses for the poor.” (Daily Mail, 5/7/18.)
It is the last phrase that is significant. Mr. Bevan and the Labour Party charge the Tories with seeking to meet the needs of the rich. The Labour alternative is to try to help the poor by building comparatively low rented (and small) houses for them. It is only Socialists who seek the abolition of both rich and poor, of both the property-owning class and the propertyless working class.
Edgar Hardcastle
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