Labour Wants Strike Threat Protected

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30541, 9 September 1964, Page 17

Labour Wants Strike Threat Protected

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

BLACKPOOL, September 8.

Mr Harold Wilson yesterday pledged the next Labour Government to introduce laws to protect the right to threaten a strike.

This has become a burning issue in the eightmillion strong Trades Union Congress from which the Labour Party gets most of its financial support.

The 1000 delegates at the opening of the congress’s annual conference gave Mr Wilson a standing ovation. Mr G. H. Lowthian, the president, called him “the next Prime Minister.”

Mr Wilson referred to a recent House of Lords ruling in a trade dispute about the dismissal of an employee of the British Overseas Airways Corporation. The Law Lords ruled that the trade union officials who threatened a strike if the employee was not dismissed were liable to damages. Mr Wilson told cheering delegates that this had caused confusion where there had been none for over half a century. The House of Lords decision placed a premium oh “wild cat” (unofficial) strikes —which the nation could not afford (the right to strike in itself is not in question but only the threat of one). Mr Wilson asserted that the Government was using this decision to institute “an unspecified inquiry into unspecified aspects of trade unionism." “We reject this manoeuvring over a vital question of the. law of this country,” he said. “We shall legislate to put this matter of legal interpretation beyond all doubt.” Mr Wilson was speaking as a fraternal delegate to the conference. Earlier, he said a Labour Government would call for a

planned expansion of incomes related to rising productivity. ■lt would apply equally to profits and dividends including income from rents. Labour had the right to ask for an incomes policy because it would contribute the necessary conditions, he said.

A Seventh Biography No fewer than seven books have recently been written about Mr Harold Wilson, leader of the Labour Party. The seventh, which has just appeared, is mainly a pictorial record of his life, with an assessment of his career, by Mr Michael Foot, M.P., and some of Vicky’s cartoons. Ail profits will go to Labour constituency parties. Mr Foot tells the story of how the late Mr Aneurin Bevan once asked Mr Wilson, sen., what his son was going to read at Balliol. “Pure mathematics,” he was told. To which Bevan replied: “Just like his father; all fads and no bloody vision!” Mr Foot says the anecdote has some signifiance for “Harold Wilson, despite all his staggering precocity, has in some senses been a late developer." He adds: “Once he was so stuffed with facts that there seemed to be room for nothing else.”