Badly Strained

Whatever else the British working classes grumble or dispute or strike about, their perpetual grievance is against Britain's flat legal prohibition of all sympathy strikes. Last week the British Trades Union Congress, representing nearly 6,000,000 workers, unveiled the old grievance again.

First seed of the grievance was sown following Britain's only general (nationwide) strike in 1926, when Baldwin's flustered Parliament passed the Trades Disputes Act. The Act outlawed all general strikes. Because its terms were so vague, it allowed the courts scope for declaring almost any strike illegal. The trade unions found it an elastic defense against their plans and programs.

At Blackpool, tawdry, tinseled haven of Britain's working-class vacationers, delegates to the trade unions' annual convention heard with disgusted snortings a letter from Winston Churchill: "I wish to represent as strongly as possible that [repeal of the Trades Disputes Act] should not be pressed. . . . I am specially anxious that nothing should be done to impair national unity and also the good relationships between the Government and the Trades Union Congress."

The convention, rebuffing Churchill, recorded its "profound dissatisfaction" with the Government's attitude, instructed its executives to press persistently for revision of the despised old Act.

Commented the Congress' General Secretary, sharp-brained, smooth-mannered Sir Walter Citrine: "The war is being made an excuse for the Government's failure to deal with this reform. National unity does not mean that the trade-union movement should be gagged. . . . Labor's loyalty has been badly strained."

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