Behind Britain's Dock Strikes

...In all these actions, there is evidence of close contact with the Moscow-run World Federation of Trade Unions through its London branch...

...Of course, the Communists' successes are mixed with failure...

...Party leaders had hoped that their activity would help swell their ranks...

...The Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR is in a particularly strong position, since it has not been proscribed on the grounds that it is primarily cultural (sic...

...A special firm has been set up to distribute Communist films at very cheap rates...

...Although numerically weak, the Communists played a prominent role BEHIND BRITAIN'S DOCK STRIKES By John Clews LONDON A STUDY of the Communist party's present position in Britain reveals a curious paradox...

...Then the strike began in Communist-dominated garages like Dalston and Twickenham and spread rapidly on the basis of the leaflet's demands...

...Nevertheless, things are going well for Moscow in Britain...

...In some quarters, there is still speculation as to whether the strike was actually Communist-inspired or the result of a general grievance that the CP exploited...

...Nevertheless, the British-China Friendship Association, the British-Soviet Friendship Society, the British-Polish Friendship Society and similar groups are getting more and more Labor MPs and Labor-party members in their delegations...

...It was described in a Government White Paper as a "cold and deliberate plan" of the Communists, who were "completely indifferent to the loss and suffering that might result...

...Of the 400 present, some 350 were active on various levels in 45 different unions covering all sections of industry...

...A Daily Worker editorial on the "overtime menace" was reprinted by the NASDU as a fighting pamphlet...

...All the evidence available, however, indicates that the former is true...

...The problem of "voluntary overtime" for dockworkers, the official cause of the strike, has been the NASDU's main scourge...

...Most of these factories, as might be expected, are doing important defense work...

...T&GW officials were content to do nothing and thus let things get out of hand...

...Other strikes have occurred recently at the instigation of the Electrical Trades Union and the Constructional Engineers Union, both Communist-infiltrated...

...All the major ports??London, Liverpool, Birkenhead, the Tyneside and Southampton??were tied up, most of them for nearly a month...

...Peaceful coexistence" is becoming more and more respectable, British and other European firms are eager for East-West trade, and Russia can profit from the dock strike, because her deliveries were held up and she can impose severe penalties under various clauses in her trade contracts...

...It is interesting, too, that in the middle of the dock strike London's Red industrial activists met under the chairmanship of Claude Berridge, a Communist and leading official of the Amalgamated Engineering Union...

...It should be noted, too, that the decision to call off the strike??which was announced in the Daily Worker the night before NASDU spokesmen officially told the dockers to return to work??was based on conditions that had been proposed three months before it developed...

...And the guiding spirits behind this strangulation movement were a handful of men from the Communist-led National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers Union, which succeeded in calling out 44,000 dockworkers...

...Indeed, the dock and bus strike may harden the public's attitude toward them, particularly if anti-Communist union leaders make their members realize the extent of Communist activity in their ranks...

...Moscow's "new line" has brought about a sudden boom in delegations to Iron Curtain countries...

...In contrast to earlier ones, they consist of the politically naive and even anti-Communists...

...But, despite what CP executive-committee member John Gollan terms "the continued stagnation in the membership of the party," the Communist cause is flourishing in Britain as a Moscow instrument...

...A similar situation developed in the London bus strike, which immediately preceded the dockers' action...

...It followed the familiar Red pattern, with a mixture of action by small Communist-led unions and "unofficial" Communist-led strike committees...

...Recently, for example, the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR sponsored a Russian tour for five British musicians...

...This has not happened...

...Most of the newly revived organizations sponsoring these pilgrimages have been proscribed by the Labor party as Communist fronts...

...There has also been an inter-union fight between the Stevedores and Dockers on the one hand and the huge Transport and General Workers Union on the other...

...The list of plants to be considered includes two important shipbuilding firms, a large steelworks, two large automobile plants, an aircraft factory and one of the biggest electrical-equipment plants in the country...

...this "non-political" film went off on a tangent to show happy Soviet workers and farmers toiling for the socialist fatherland...

...Like the dock outbreak, it ended without any real achievement, except that a number of drivers and conductors found new jobs while out of work and the staff situation is now more critical than ever...

...As a purely political body, the Communists are on the decline...

...There is one bright spot in this generally dark picture, however: While the pattern of strike action laid down by the Communist Party Congress in the spring is now being worked out, the formal body of the Communist party is withering away...

...The recent Parliamentary delegation to Moscow contained such resolute anti-Reds as Stanley Evans, Labor MP from Wednesbury...

...In violation of a sacred inter-union agreement, the NASDU enticed several thousand dockworkers away from the T&GW and, consequently, was temporarily expelled from the Trades Union Congress...

...The CP's London District Bus Advisory Committee issued a leaflet demanding certain wage adjustments and a rearrangement of the working week??both of which were impossible under existing conditions...

...Arthur Deakin, fiercely anti-Communist General Secretary of the T&GW, is a major Red target...

...Thus, several million British viewers were fed some excellent Kremlin propaganda, and, in terms of political capital, the cost of this particular delegation's trip was worth every copeck...

...He returned with a film record of the trip??made with Soviet-provided equipment??and stressed his complete freedom to select what he wished and use his own commentary...

...Indeed, Communist operations in the film and television fields are far more important...

...This was in support of a strike by the Communist-dominated Canadian Seaman's Union...

...This fiction lets it operate in political territory closed to its blood-brother, the British-Soviet Friendship Society...

...Another industrial conference, involving shop stewards, will be held shortly to discuss priority strike targets...

...Approximately $560 million worth of import and export cargo was locked up in 350 ships...

...The negative aspect of Communist activity in Britain was dramatically illustrated during the recent dock strike here...

...The general policy agreed on covered agitation on the factory floor, penetration of the Labor party through trade unions and trade councils, an all-out attack on right-wing labor leaders, and a drive to convince workers that the present full-employment conditions make strikes all the more desirable now...

...JOHN CLEWS, a journalist and specialist on Communist activity, has written for the Manchester Guardian...

...This was over genuine grievances: irregular hours, spread-over duties, and often excessive overtime due to the general shortage of public transport workers...

...As it turned out...

...The NASDU achieved notoriety for its leading role in the 1949 Beaverbrae strike, which dragged on for three months...

...It is difficult to assess the real influence of these delegations...

...There have been other Red-inspired strikes since 1949, but the latest has been the most important...

...Some innocuous feature movies are shown in London and a few even make the rounds in the provinces...

...And it was undoubtedly groups of Communist activists that transformed a matter of general indifference into something dynamic...

...Party membership has sunk to a low of 35,000 in a population of over 50 million, and the Young Communist League now has less than 3,000 card-carriers...

...At least two of them were solid party-liners, but the group's official leader was Kenneth Wright, head of the BBC's television music department...

...In television, the main target, almost every Soviet cultural group somehow manages to get a spot on one of the top programs...