In addition to the existing Regulations and penalties against workers in essential industries who come out on strike, the Government on April 18th issued new Defence Regulations providing penalties of a £500 fine, five years' imprisonment, or both, on persons found, guilty of inciting others to engage in a strike (or lockout!) which interferes with essential services.
The ostensible reason for the new measure is the belief professed in certain quarters that miners and others who have recently been on strike have not really had a grievance —as if having to work for the capitalist class is not grievance enough—but have been incited or persuaded by small outside groups like the Trotskyists. This prompts the natural question how is it that the Trotskyists can have proved themselves so much more persuasive than the more numerous and more experienced professional Union officials and Cabinet Ministers who were giving the opposite advice? If workers have so much reason to be grateful for benefits already received, and therefore have no cause for discontent, and if they have had their case adequately represented by their officials and reasonably dealt with by arbitration bodies, why have they rejected the guidance of their own Trade Union officials and members of the Government (not to mention all the newspapers) and turned to listen to the words of "agitators" outside their own ranks? If this were true, what an abject confession of bungling and incompetence on the part of the official spokesmen!
Of course, more sober observers do not believe it to be true. Here are statements from the Manchester Guardian and a miner's official:—
Merely to gird at the offenders or to take repressive measures will be to make things worse. Nor is it any use to bemuse ourselves by discovering "subversive elements”; the so-called "Trotskyists” and the I.L.P. may profess to love strikes for their own sake, but no one has yet proved that they have ever stopped a pit. They form a convenient excuse for baffled union officials, that is all. (Manchester Guardian, April 5, 1944).
No evidence had been discovered that there were Trotskyite or other subversive influences at work with the object of causing disturbances in the Scottish coalfield. (Abe Moffat, President of the Scottish Mineworkers, Forward, April 15, 1944.)
The Manchester Guardian is no doubt right when it said that repressive measures will make things worse. Already a gulf has grown between trade unionists and their leaders; this will widen the gulf and make the workers still more inclined to lack confidence in their appointed officials.
It is stated (Evening Standard, April 18) that this new regulation "represents the results of discussions which Mr. Bevin had with the Trade Union Congress and the British Employers' Federation,” and the Daily Herald says (April 19) that “the penalty for offenders against the new regulation has the approval both of the T.U.C. and the employers' organisations in its severity."
Back in 1926, at .the time of the miners' lock-out and national strike, Mr. Bevin and the T.U.C. and union officials were on one side, and the employers, Mr. Churchill and the Tory Party were on the other. So also in 1927, when the Trade Disputes Act was passed to curb the powers of the trade unions.
In 1943, when Sir Walter Citrine and the T.U.C. were trying to push the Government into a small modification of that Act, Mr. Bevin and Mr. Churchill and the employers and the Tory Party stood together against the T.U.C. and some of the unions.
Now we find the T.U.C. (recently so anxious to get restrictions under the 1927 Act removed) standing with the employers and with Mr. Bevin and the Government, including its Labour Party members, to add new restrictions to the old ones.
This, of course, is all done in the name of national unity. We wonder if the trade unionists who welcome this new restriction have seen what a deplorable effect it is going to have on working class unity.
Time will show what result the new restrictions will have on industrial disputes. If disputes continue, the Ministers and trade union officials who have had a hand in making a scapegoat of outside agitators will have to think again, and discover what is the real reason for working class discontent.
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