Foreign News: Squirrels v. Bankers

Mother of the British Labor Party and still its most potent mentor is that mighty group of British labor organizations whose Trade Union Congress met last week in storied Nottingham Town, onetime haunt of exemplary highwayman Robin Hood.

Almost at once the galleries became full of fist fights. Not in years has British Labor’s turbulent left wing given and taken so many sanguine noses. No less than nine ushers had to join forces to eject a burly young heckler who kicked and punched while he howled: “In the name of our 2,000,000 unemployed—down with Ramsay MacDonald!”

Then there was a wench who kept screaming: “Long live Russia!” The steward who put her out returned ruefully nursing a deeply bitten hand. Naturally the delegates on the floor were quieter than their friends in the gallery, but the Congress’s trend was distinctly leftward. Neither Congress Chairman John Beard (a fusty old ex-insurance canvasser) nor the Labor Government’s representative Home Secretary John Robert Clynes seemed able to stem the drift. In the end square-shouldered Ernest Bevin, fat, rumbling-voiced, forceful Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, emerged as the hero of the current Congress session.

Keys for Cages. Mr. Bevin is succinctly said by his admirers to have a “good jaw.” He began by jawing the Congress into adoption of his resolution that the Government should begin to pay old age pensions to all workers at 60. Then, with the snowball of approval rolling his way he launched fiery onslaught against what Europe calls “rationalization” and America “Fordization.”

Just now England is on the point of “rationalizing” her steel industry under the fiscal aegis of her great banks and with the technical assistance of a U. S. steelman. (See p. 43.) All such developments were attacked by Mr. Bevin as tending to replace men by machines, reduce the number of jobs, increase unemployment. His resolution against “rationalization” passed amid cheers, cleared the way for another directly attacking the bankers which was urged by vociferous John Bromley.

“It is time for the Trade Union movement to begin to regulate the bankers,” said he. “So long as we leave the control of credit in their hands, just so long will the workers be left to grind out wealth like squirrels in cages, while the bankers hold the keys to the cages.”

Last victory of the week for the Bevin jaw was the Congress’s adoption without a dissenting vote of his resolution demanding that the Labor Government overhaul the Department of National Health. “Scandalous conditions exist!” he cried. “In the winter poor people have to wait so long in queues at the free clinics that they catch worse colds than the ones they came to be cured of. . . . They are constantly made to feel the humiliation of their poverty . . . supercilious doctors . . . shame! . . .”

To fight to the fore in a great Trade Union Congress stamps a man as a comer. Moreover the widespread Transport Union of which Mr. Bevin is Secretary is one of the best vote getters in all Britain. Cor respondents saw in his leadership of ‘Labor’s reaction against “rationalization” last week a popular lever by which hefty Ernest Bevin may presently jack himself up to cabinet rank.