Foreign News: Red Pockets

Beneath the bright white lights of Bournemouth’s Pavilion—more commonly switched on for comedians and jugglers entertaining the seaside resort trade—Britain’s trade-union movement showed its age last week. World War II and service in Britain’s postwar Labor government have given the brash, rash revolutionaries of yesteryear a more mature sense of responsibility, a new aura of middle-class respectability. Less anxious to “nationalize everything,” more alert to the Communist menace in their ranks, the leaders of the Trades Union Congress (8,377,325 members in 185 affiliated unions) have moved steadily to the right in recent years. But despite this right turn, some pockets of militant Communism still remain in the movement.

Biggest pocket is the Electrical Trades Union, whose 239,334 members are controlled by Communist President Frank Foulkes and Communist General Secretary Frank Haxell. And the opening session of the goth annual meeting of the T.U.C. last week found the Red electricians in a peculiarly vulnerable position: although 38-year-old E.T.U. Member Leslie Cannon had been elected a delegate to the congress by the union’s membership, Frank Foulkes and “Squeaky” Haxell had refused to accredit him because he had quit the Communist Party in disgust over Russian repression of the Hungarian revolution. But when fiercely anti-Communist Labor M.P. Walter Padley jumped to the rostrum to demand a debate on this piece of party-lining highhandedness, the congress exploded into an angry uproar. With Cannon looking on from the visitors’ gallery, Communist Foulkes defiantly proclaimed that it was nobody else’s business whom the E.T.U. accredited. “I don’t like Walter Padley,” shouted Foulkes, “but I don’t try to stop his union sending him here.”

Ringing his bell for order, T.U.C. President Tom Yates tacitly endorsed Foulkes’s position, quickly passed on to less controversial issues. But the incident left a bad taste in many a British mouth. Suggesting that the T.U.C. pass a rule banning Reds from office in its affiliated unions, the liberal Manchester Guardian asked: “Why should democratic trade unionists be expected to put up with Communists as a matter of political course?”