Foreign News: Sightless Samsons

Twelve hundred delegates—more than ever before—swarmed last week to Margate for the 26th annual British Labor Party Conference.

All question of British Labor’s “going Red” seemed once more definitely remote as the conference refused to debate affiliation with the British Communist Party by a “card vote” of 2,706,000 to 349,000.

Though the extremist minority was loud and active, a majority of the delegates received in gloomy silence an address on the present British labor situation by Robert Williams, Vice Chairman of the Labor Party, onetime longshoreman:

“As to the coal miners and their heroic strike (TIME, May 10 et seq.), the policy of despairing resistance which they have adopted may be heroic but it is not war. . . . The coal miners are sightless Samsons groping to throw down the pillars of a temple the crashing of which may engulf this thing we call British civilization. . . .

“The Labor Party puts forward instead of this ruinous policy of industrial war an inflexible demand for the nationalization of the mines which we shall drive home at the next election. . . .”

Coal Counsel. With these keynotes sounded, the conference listened—not without interruptions from extremists—to the reigning “old guard” of the party: 1) One-time Premier Macdonald: “We have consulted as to the best means of helping the miners with the heads of other unions, and I am perfectly appalled at the widespread unemployment of union men. . . . The solution of the problem now lies in political rather than industrial action. Had my Government [Jan.-Nov., 1924] remained in office another year we would have introduced a bill for nationalization of the mines. We must work toward that end. . . .”; 2) James Henry Thomas, “Balance wheel of British Labor,” Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen: “Do you realize that at this moment 45,000 railwaymen are out of work, and 200,000 are working only three days a week? Yet the striking coal miners expect us to aid them by contributions and to levy an embargo on foreign coal. We cannot and we will not! It is impossible.” [Sporadic hisses and jeers.]