THE COWBOY PORTS

Cargo traffic through Britain's smaller docks and wharves, which are outside the main ports covered by the National Dock Labour Scheme, has almost doubled in the last seven years.

The growth of these unregistered ports has been a bitter bone of contention for registered dockers during the recent labour run-down at the main ports like London, Liverpool and Hull.

Their anger boiled over during last year's national docks strike when some of these non-scheme docks carried on working and acted as a strike-breaking force against the registered dockers.

But the principal obstacle to the dockers during the strike was not this at all. It was their own union bureaucracy led by Jack Jones. Dockers were led back to work to accept the run-down in jobs by their own union, which had ostensibly set out to halt the slide.

The vehicles used were promises of something emerging from the Jones-Aldington committee of inquiry and the National Ports Council longer-term look at the non-scheme ports, which has just been published.

Lord Aldington is chairman of the Port of London Authority, former vice-chairman of the Tory Party and close friend of Edward Heath, wealthy banker and profitconscious industrialist By jacking up the compensation payments to more than £4,000 in some cases for dockers willing to leave the industry altogether, Jones-Aldington was able, at the second attempt, to get the national docks strike called off. Jones offered the men large lump sums to quit the ports and in that way solved the menacing problem of the temporarily unattached register.

But the £4,000 can quickly evaporate in this period of uncontrollable inflation. On top of this, the dockers who left have exchanged at least modicum of job security offered by the Dock Labour Scheme for what?

The other part of the deal which got the docks delegates to vote to go back, despite the opposition from the dockers' mass meetings, was the promise of action over the nonscheme ports by way of an instant report. into leaving the industry, what chance is there of doing something about it at this late stage?

There was never any policy worth pursuing on the docks other than the wholesale expropriation and nationalization of the ports and associated industries without a penny The same is true of all other industries. The point being that whatever piecemeal fights are put up, there is little future for the working class Lord Aldington, chairman of the Port of London Authority. Above left: Dockers celebrate the rejection of the Jones-Aldington re port on July 27, 1972. Later Jones and the Stalinists buried the fight for job security in return for higher compensation payments—and thus the report accepted. Above right: Picketing at the unregistered Neap House Wharf. relatively quickly and cheaply with little more fuss than a glass of water poured over his head. 'Relatively' cheaply, because many of his members still question his role during that docks crisis.

But although the dockers live to fight another day, there is no doubting that an opportunity has been lost.

The exact moment when the fight to put an end to the anarchy of capitalist production can begin to reach a climax can never be predicted. But the crisis over the dockers' security of employment last summer was as good an issue as any.

The failure to turn that fight into something was en-