ATTACK

• Political strikes and made illegal. A severe shock for the National government was the mutiny of the Atlantic Fleet in harbour at Invergordon on September 15, 1931. It was begun as an action against proposed pay cuts of up to 20 per cent and spread to involve 15,000 sailors.

MacDonald announced hurriedly that wage-cuts for teachers, police and the armed services would be limited to 10 per cent.

In all industries employers followed the government's lead and proceeded to cut wages. A drive to replace national agreements by local deals was begun so as to break up the power of combined employees and make wage-cutting easier. The COle dition of the man with a job was not to be much better than that of the unemployed.

'Britain in the 1930s' by N. Branson and M. Heinemann gives some examples of the conditions prevailing in that decade.

A series of separate reports on the condition the working class showed the direst levels of poverty.

A survey taken on Merseyside covering 1928-1932 reported 30 per cent of working-class families in want. Seebohm Rowntree's comprehensive study in York of working-class families showed that all those on unemployment pay were below the standards of basic human needs and the poverty line In 1936 the survey by John Boyd Orr showed that only 50 per cent of the population could afford a minimum nutritional diet and for 10 per cent (4! million) diet was deficient in every constituent food examined. Increases in rickets and general malnutrition were reported.

Many turned to the Poor Law and the workhouses for support. By 1940 11 million pensioners were qualifying for a special supplementary pension from the Assistance Board.

In 1934 the unemployment benefit cuts were withdrawn, but the new Unemployment Act transferred of sitional benefit to a newly set up Unemployment Assistance (UAB). Thousands were shocked to find even more cuts resulting.

Children who were working were forced to leave home for fear of being the means of further reduction of assistance to their parents. Old people went into the workhouse and some committed suicide for fear of having the same effect on their relatives.

The Board was given DOW CIs to establish training centres as 'concentration camps' (the Home Secretary's own phrase), and create a system of forced labour, either unpaid COr at non-union 'nominal' rates. In this way were the worst-off sections of the working class chosen to pay the most for the maintenance of the proht system.

Unemployment was not the only weapon used to force through wage cuts and break up massive opposition to the National government's measures. In 1927, a year after the General Strike, the Tory government had passed the Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act-a vicious piece of anti-union, anti-working-class legislation. Its main measures strikes, ge neral sympathy • A criminal liability imposed n trade union officials, shop stewards and members of strike committees involved in an illegal strike • Any workman picketing for an illegal strike liable to arrest for an illegal act.

Contracting-out of paying funds to unions for political purposes replaced with contracting. in and unions' statutory rights to use funds for political purposes withdrawn. • Civil servants prohibited from joining a union affiliated to the TUC or Labour Party on pain of loss of employment and pension rights. • Employees of municipal or other public authorities (like Port of London Authority) on strike to be open to criminal as well as civil damages.

This Act was now brought into use against strikers and pickets and against demonstrations over the dole cuts, the means test and unemployment. The police were reorganized on a more muntary Dasis and became in- militaner hannin hanoma creasingly violent in breaking up demonstrations and attacking strikers.

General use of blacklegs, company spies and blacklists for victimizing workers was in process, encouraged by the Act.

But unemployment and the 1927 legislation were not only used to cut wages. Throughout industry a massive rationalization, speed-up and intensification of labour programme, begun under the • Labour government, was stepped-up.

Time-and-motion systems were introduced into engineering workshops, including use of the notorious Bedaux System. Conveyor lines were speeded up and new, faster and more dangerous machinery installed in pits and factories.

Simplified processes and machinery also meant dilution of labour; the replacement of skilled by semi-skilled workers, semi-skilled by unskilled, and apprentices by unindentured school leavers who could be sacked as soon as they were old enough to demand adult wages.

In Walter Greenwood's novel 'Love on the Dole' young Harry Hardcastle, eventually to go on the dole himself and join the trudge for work, views the events in the factory:

'Strange movements were afont. chanoe takino nlace averu- aivul, luange where. A great deal of the old machinery was taken away and replaced by new, beautitul, marvellous contraptions that filled the eye with pride to look upon. Hundreds of the old faces were missing one Monday morning. A batch of new . boys came into the machine shops and. strange relate, shops, and tane to Not them dentured apprentices. Nobody Top: 'HMS Norfolk', part of the Invergordon fleet. Far left: Men of the fleet. Left: Ramsay MacDonald.

knew why; nobody cared. Rumour said that trade was bad. But how could it be with all this new machinery, this general upset, re-shuffling and re-organization? All this was more suggestive of busy times. Anyway, they couldn't sack him; he was a bound apprentice for seven years, only two of which had elapsed.

In 1932, 150,000 weavers struck against employers' replacement of four-loom working by each worker being required to operate SIX looms. Also proposed was a 12}-per-cent cut in pay.

The 1927 Act was increasingly invoked against the strikers. Baton charges by police against demonstrators were backed by court proceedings against pickets for 'obstruction'. Leaflets urging solidarity and mass picketing were declared illegal and were confiscated. Relief was refused to the families of strikers and food and coal vouchers withheld by relieving officers.

In the mining industry the pit owners used mass unemployment and the effect of the defeat of the General Strike to attack trade unionism. Tremendous pressure was put upon workers to leave the Miners' Federation and to join 'non-political' company unions.

The miners tenaciously fought this move and adopted the 'staydown' strike as a method of winning their demands to be allowed to join a proper trade union and to enforce negotiating rights for the Miners' Federasome examples of action gives 'Britain in taker by miners. In the Rhondda, 1,500 men stayed down for 13 days to ensure the right to maintain membership of their union. In Nottingham, police were drafted in to deal with strikers, and six miners were sentenced to hard labour under the picketing section of the 1927 During the period of 1931-1934 hundreds of arrests for political offences were made and meetings outside Labour Exchanges banned.

Tomorrow, the last of Bernard Frank's articles will show how the working class was betrayed.

February