The Press FRIDAY, AUGUST 31, 1951. THE VITAL ISSUE

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26514, 31 August 1951, Page 8

The Press FRIDAY, AUGUST 31, 1951. THE VITAL ISSUE

To-morrow the people of this country will have the duty and the privilege of deciding the kind of Government they will have for the next three years. They should keep clearly in mind not only the declared policies of the rival parties and their comparative records in. j office, but also the circumstances l which led to a General Election being held a little more than a year before its time. For in spite of all the other important issues which have been raised, and properly raised, by both parties during the campaign, the fundamental issue is still'that on which the Opposition I challenged the Government in Parliament and on which the Government decided to go to the country for a mandate. This issue is really very simple, although to some it may have been confused by secondary issues related to it or by the deliberate political attempts that have been made to obscure it. To see the issue clearly it is necessary to have the essential facts clearly in mind. For years the militant leaders of the watersiders’ union, who have been given a larger share in the control of their industry than other groups of workers, had been allowed by the Labour Government to override the processes of conciliation and arbitration by which other workers, for good reasons, are well content to abide. Repeatedly, authorities were set up to control the waterfront industry with the approval of the watersiders and on their explicit undertakings to abide by the authorities’ decisions. Repeatedly, the authorities were wrecked because the watersiders’ leaders acted as though they were bound only by the decisions they considered favourable and were at liberty to call their members to direct action whenever a decision seemed to them unfavourable. The new Government found the same union leaders in control when it came into office. After giving these waterfront leaders more than a year in which to demonstrate their good faith—a period in which the Government went out of iW way to be conciliatory in dealing with the union—the Government decided it could no longer tolerate direct action and defiance of the law. When the watersiders again flouted their wage-fixing authority, on a question on which they were so clearly wrong that the Federation of Labour and the overwhelming majority of fellow unionists could give them no support, the Government stood firm for industrial law and order. When the watersiders persisted in their defiance, when the work of the ports was brought virtually to a standstill, and when the threat of more widespread and more serious industrial trouble became imminent, the Government declared a state of emergency and took certain exceptional powers to protect the public and safeguard th# economy of the country. Labour and the Strike

The determination of the Government and the fortitude of the community eventually broke the strike, although at great cost. It was broken without the help of the Labour Party, which, for reasons of its own, decided to take no side in the dispute. But whatever the stand of the Labour Party on the original strike issue may have been, the Labour Party’s influence throughout the dispute was against the Government and sympathetic to the strikers. The Labour Party did not complain about the undemocratic methods of the watersiders, but was loud in its condemnation of the “ undemocratic ” methods used by the Government to defeat them. Since the end of the strike, the Labour Party has repeatedly asserted that the Government’s aim was to break the industrial union movement—not merely the excessive power, so often grossly abused, of the militant leaders of a single union. Events and statements since the end of the strike have shown very clearly that the militants themselves see their best and perhaps their only hope of regaining their former power and influence to lie in the defeat of the present Government by the Labour Party. Since the election campaign opened, the leaders of the Labour Party have clearly found the warm support of the strikers and the statements of their former leaders more than a little embarrassing. No one can have failed to notice that during the election campaign the Labour Party has set its face much more sternly against militancy and direct action than it did during the strike —when a clear expression of opinion from it upon the simple question of right and wrong would have helped toward an earlier settlement and saved the country much of its great loss. Promise or Performance

The vital issue in this election is whether law and order are to prevail in industry. It is vital because this country cannot afford to have its industry, especially the key industries concerned with transport, periodically thrown into confusion at the whim of militant union leaders. The present Government has shown that it can and will insist on the orderly settlement of industrial disputes by the fair and reasonably efficient machinery of conciliation and arbitration which the law of the country provides; and it has shown that it will not allow selfish sectional interests to override these orderly processes at the expense of the rest of the community. The Labour Party claims that it will do the same if given the opportunity. Here the public must weigh the party’s present claims against its past performances. Other issues will also weigh with the voters to-morrow, though not as

heavily as once seemed likely. If there was ever any real prospect of the election being decided on the cost-of-living question, it must have disappeared with the clear emergence of the simple fact that the Labour Party has no better answei’ to this problem than the present Government of this country or the governments of other countries— Socialist and conservative governments alike. Indeed, it is all too clear that the prodigal spending by which a Labour Government could redeem its lavish election promises would aggravate seriously the present inflationary pressure in this country. Nor can the intelligent voter seriously believe that salvation is to be found in a return to the controls so dear to the Socialist heart. They would be no more effective to “control” the cost of living here than they have been in Britain; and their cost, in the loss of a new-found economic and social freedom, would be paid in vain.