GREAT BRITAIN: Toward the Ice Age

Socialist George Bernard Shaw said 43 years ago: “There are two . tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.” Last week in Bridlington the Trades Union Congress, representing 8,000,000 organized workers, had full possession of its heart’s desire—a Socialist government. Yet under the seeming agreement among the delegates in the Spa Royal Hall was frustration, and perhaps tragedy.

The T.U.C., like unions everywhere, had been built up as a fighting force to win what its members wanted. Under a capitalistic sytem, one of unionism’s functions was to limit the power of owners and managers. Had it a similar function in the socialist (or socialoid) society which unionism had created? T.U.C. delegates last week fumbled around for answers, found none.

Mother & Child. The power of the T.U.C. was seeping away. Said a leader of the Railwaymen’s Union: “It’s like a mother giving blood transfusions to save her child. To save our political offspring, we look like draining ourselves of every independent aim we ever had.”

The split between workers as party members and workers as union members was not allowed to break up the Bridlington show; conflicts were carefully covered up in compromise resolutions. Explained one delegate: “Barkis isn’t always willing, but he usually has to say he is.” So, with their eyes on the approaching general elections, the delegates grudgingly gave the government its way on every important question.

The delegates got some evil-smelling doses to swallow. Leader of the House of Commons Herbert Morrison had sent up from London a cabinet decision that manual workers in nationalized industries for a period of two years must not even discuss pension plans with the nationalized boards running their industries. Said a Durham miners’ leader: “Mind you, it’s not that we trade unionists want to force the government into doing something the nationalized industries can’t afford. We’d be perfectly willing to hold an inquiry on the point. But we’re not going to be told by the government that we may not exercise the fundamental trade-union right of negotiating on the issue.” In the end, a T.U.C. resolution attacking the cabinet’s decision was withdrawn when leaders explained that the cabinet’s decision was not final.

The ablest leaders of yesterday were gone from the T.U.C. platform. Many were in government jobs. In a puzzling sense they were in the positions the capitalist bosses used to occupy—and sometimes their attitude toward the unions was that of bosses, not that of brother laborites.

Few tough fighters or bright young men were being developed in the unions to take their places. The class barriers of the bad old days had enriched the labor movement by keeping men of ability like Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin within the working class. Latter-day Bevins would not be forced to work as dockers or pop vendors. With government scholarships, bright boys would end up as smooth-tongued Oxford dons like Board of Trade President Harold Wilson. The gap between Labor Party men in the government and the men in the unions was growing.

Muscle & Mastodon. It had become party mutiny, almost national treason, to defy the leaders by use of the strike weapon. T.U.C. Chairman Will Lawther had been a union battler who had spent two months in jail for defying the government during the 1926 general strike. Now he was Sir William, by grace of the King last January. Last week he told the delegates that “unofficial” strikes—as most of them were these days—would worsen Britain’s already acute economic position, weaken the T.U.C. and wreck Labor’s chances at the elections. Strikes were not needed any more, thought Sir William.

Bridlington was a conference of compromise that settled nothing, left Labor looking to the future with self-doubt. Membership in the T.U.C. had nearly doubled in the past ten years, but British unionism was running to fat rather than muscle. Free collective bargaining and the strike were atrophying in the present chilly Socialist climate. British trade unionism seemed a bit like a Pleistocene mastodon. It still made occasional roaring noises amid the forest’s falling leaves. But there was a sharp nip in the air. The Crippsian Ice Age was setting in.