The "C M." Campaign for Justice
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THAT our campaign to ease the intolerable 1 situation which has arisen in respect of the severity with which drivers of commercial vehicles are punished, even for slight and, often, technical breaches of the law, should have aroused enormous interest is not surprising. It is, however, satisfactory to us to find that in all the correspondence which we have received on this subject, no one has challenged the truth of our statements, whilst numerous further cases of the hardships which have been inflicted upon careful and conscientious workers have come to light.
Last week, in our second leading article dealing with the persecution of drivers, we urged the Transport and General Workers Union to help in ameliorating existing conditions. Our article was reproduced, almost in full, in last Saturday's issue of The News Chronicle, and as an addition to this, Mr. Ernest Bevin, the general secretary of the Union, upon being asked by that paper for his views, suggested that if we had gone to him at first we might have been better informed, and said that the Union had defended drivers in thousands of cases.
Surely that such defence was necessary in so many cases indicates the extent of the campaign and the manner in which the Courts are being congested. Mr. Bevin might well have remembered the old adage, that "Prevention is better than cure," particularly when the " cure " is a most uncertain one.
' The real point is that a large proportion of sta these cases .should never have been brought to Court. We would like to learn from Mr. Bevin in what percentage of cases such assistance, provided in the form of defence, secured acquittals, for we also pointed out that an unsuccessful defence appears merely to• aggravate the offence in the eyes of some magistrates. Thus the position of the man for whom a defence fails may be worse than if he had pleaded guilty in the first instance,