The angry silence
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The deputy chief constable of Lincolnshire says that the dock pickets' violence this week at Neap House Wharf, on the Trent, was the worst he had seen in all his years with the police. And this violence was by representatives of the people whom the JoneslAldington committee, with Government backing, are trying to foist on Container handling firms, and on whose behalf the same committee is now proposing the imposition of a levy on companies resisting the closed-shop employment of registered dockers. Port employers, unions and Government are trampling on the wishes of these firms in order to get their long-neglected chestnuts pulled out of the fire; and any employers who resist the blandishments are, with the current technique of the instant smear, labelled "cowboy".
Hauliers and container handlers, with livelihoods at stake, are the last people to wish to see the dock strike prolonged but it/s monstrous that they should be made the sacrificial victims 'to placate the militant employees of a shrinking industry which has perpetuated, and even extended, inflationary and protective terms and conditions unmatched in Britain.
Have the dockers, whose problems are largely the result of their own strike-happy intransigence in the past, so brainwashed the country that everyone is too numb or dumb to question their assumption that the world owes them a living, even at the expense of fellow union members' jobs and the future viability of individual companies? Where is the firm, clear voice putting the hauliers' case to the nation?
Force breeds force and success breeds success: if the Government thinks that the industrial blackmailer is any less persistent than the other sort it is due for a sad lesson in the coming months. But to stop the rot it needs a show of support; and while transport — one of the country's biggest employers — may f6r all we know be lobbying hard behind the scenes, its public utterances have been notable only for their absence.