![]() A strike in the Betteshanger colliery in Kent in 1942 prompted the first mass prosecutions under Order 1305. Coal and engineering were particularly affected. The number of strikes increased each year until 1944, almost half of them in support of wage demands and the remainder being defensive actions against deteriorations in workplace conditions. Despite the provisions of Order 1305 there were very few prosecutions until 1941 since Bevin, anxious to avoid the labour unrest of the First World War, sought to promote conciliation rather than conflict. During the first few months of the war, there were over 900 strikes, almost all of them very short but illegal nonetheless. Until 1941 when the Soviet Union entered the war, communists in Britain, having little commitment to the war effort, refused to be bound by the national unity consensus and in particular the ban on strike action. Bevin established a Joint Consultative Committee of seven employers' representatives and seven trade unionists to advise in the conduct of the war effort on the home front. Strikes and lockouts were banned under Order 1305 and the 1941 Essential Work (General Provisions) Order allowed for the dilution of labour and the direction of skilled workers to wherever they were most needed. The Emergency Powers Act and Defence Regulations provided the government with all the power it needed to direct and control labour. The measures introduced during this war were similarly draconian. Clearly Bevin's standing as leader of Britain's biggest trade union (the Transport and General Workers Union) was intended to deflect the kind of opposition to the control of labour which had been such a feature of the First World War. Other Labour members held ministerial positions, the most important of whom in terms of labour relations was Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour and National Service. Of the five members of Churchill's war cabinet formed in May 1940 two, Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, were Labour MP's. For Britain the political wartime consensus extended beyond state controls to social reform, enabling parliamentary labourism in the form of the first majority Labour government to reach its 'finest hour'. In these conditions the post war domestic policies of the Allied powers were forced to pay regard to the needs of the masses to a greater extent than ever before. The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union whose decisive contribution to the defeat of fascism was widely acknowledged, lessened for a while the anti-sovietism and anti-communism which had pervaded the inter war years. During the war Labour leaders not only acquired invaluable experience, after twenty years in the wilderness, of ministerial responsibility, but also helped to construct the collectivist practices of wartime which laid the foundations of the Welfare State. The roots of the first majority Labour government 1945-1951 were to be found during the Second World War when, from 1940 Labour participated as a full partner in Churchill's coalition government.
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