Evening Post. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1926. LABOUR REBUFF TO BOLSHEVISM

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 91, 14 October 1926, Page 10

Evening Post. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1926. LABOUR REBUFF TO BOLSHEVISM

The activities of the Bolsheviks have been conspicuously advertised in the news of the last twenty-four hours. Messages from Pekiu and New York, from Riga and London,, have concurred in testifying to the übiquity of their propaganda and to the intensity of its actions and reactions. Though Zinovieff is discredited, deposed, and has apparently been reprieved from two years' "leave of absence" in Siberia only tw face a more perilous ordeal, the correctness of his diagnosis of world politics from the Bolshevik standpoint has not been impugned by his late colleagues, nor is it likely to be. Britain is the principal obstacle in the way of the World Revolution, and Britain's vulnerable points are in her coal mines and her Eastern trade. The measure of Bolshevik responsibility for the calamity which has overtaken British trade at Hong Kong and may shortly be extended to Shanghai is indicated by the categorical assertion cabled from Pekin yesterday that "the Red victories in China are obviously due to Russian leadership because the Red armies are greatly outnumbered." The remarkable success achieved with the other objective of Soviet policy is revealed in the melancholy reports which Mr. J. H. Thomas and Mr. Ben Tillett are reported to-day to have submitted to the British Labour Party's Conference. Mr. Thomas's union could not pay the levy proposed in aid of the miners on strike because since the Ist May, the day when the strike began, 45,000 railway men have been unemployed and 200,000 have been working three days a week. Of the transport workers for whom Mr. Tillett; spoke 80,000 are unemployed and 100,000 are working part time; and their union has spent £1,000,000 on the miners' behalf arid is now £500,000 in debt.

The inter-relation of these melancholy figures, both with the malady of Britain and with the policy of Moscow, is too patent to require proof, but it may be illustrated by a single item under each head. In August the "Manchester Guardian" published a photograph of a railway station with empty trucks in the foreground and t empty trucks stretching away in unbroken Jine until they are lost in the distance — three miles of idle trucks on a disused branch railway near Market Harborough, in Leicestershire, waiting for the end of the coal strike! As to the Bolsheviks' contribution to the business no recent figures are available, but on the 17th June the Home Secretary stated in the House of Commons that, excluding the £26,247 which the Trades Union Congress had refused during the General Strike and the £200,000 which the British Government stopped during the same period, £380,896 had come from Russia for the support of the miners. The reason for the distinction was that the miners' strike was "an ordinary trade dispute" and not an unconstitutional enterprise as the General Strike had been. Since then Mr. A. J. Cook has from time to time been moved to exclaim, "Thank God for Russia!" but whether contributions have yet reached the million mark has not been jiisclosed. Whatever the total, the Eed subscribers have had good value for their money, for though their encouragement has beggared the British unions, that is, of. course, from their standpoint as welcome as the blow to the trade and the power of Britain. The philanthropy of Moscow ib inspired by a desire not to alleviate the miseries of the world, but to increase them, and in Britain it has made .i promising start with the work which has achieved such a brilliant success in its own land.

In. striking contrast with British Labour, which, though it did itself honour by declining Bolshevik money while the strike was national, has since for all practical purposes associated itself with the pious gratitude of Mr. Cook, is the attitude of Labour in America. Mr. Purcell, the British Labour M.P., was. completely routed by Mr. Green, the President o£ the American Federation of Labour, and by the Federation itself, when he sought to bespeak its sympathy for his Russian friends, and the attitude of the Federation as disclosed in a New York message to-day appears to be, if possible, more uncompromising, still. The exact bearing upon the main issue of the rejected resolutions urging a modification of the United States immigration laws in favour of aliens seeking refuge from "political and religious persecution" does not appear. But the resolutions reported by the Resolutions Committee—whether those of the Convention or of the Committee itself is not quite clear —were ns thorough-going in their defence of "American principles" against any Bolshevik infection as. a representative committee of either of the main political parties could well have been. The resolutions expressed "full agreement with President Coolidge in holding that American principles should not be bartered" and even disapproved of the proposed Labour Commission of Investigation to Russia. On both these conclusions American Labour may rely upon the hearty support of "big business." On the second its attitude is the exact opposite of that o£ the British Trade Unions I which sent their credulous mission-

Aries on a personally-conducted tour of Red Russia two years ago to return with a delightful version of "Gullible's Travels." Still more to the point wer-3 the Resolutions Committee's more direct references to Soviet policy. Instead of the sympathy which Mr. A. J. Cook and other less extreme leaders of British Labour have been professing with Bolshevik tyranny jas the pioneer of the world's freedom the American Committee expresses "profound sympathy with the masses of the people of Russia in their moral, political, and spiritual enslavement." The statement adds:— We regard the Soviet regime as the most unscrupulous, most anti-social, and most menacing institution of the whole world to-day. It is not "Jix" or Mr. Churchill or Lord Birkenhead that is speaking, but a'representative voice of American Labour. British Labour cannot yet speak in the same way of the men who have helped it to disaster, but its turn will surely come soon.