Mark Hall's hallmark
Page 29
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WITH a keen sense of timing, Mr Editor, you included the report of TUC boss Mark Hall's address on the Employment Bill in the same issue as the one in which Hawk gave such a rollicking to the Post Office for their Luddite attitude.
I suppose it is unrealistic, of me to expect Hall's people to admit that the rights he speaks of are nothing less than undeserved privileges that no Other person or bunch of people possesses, and that they were gained through the sycophantic attitudes of paid hacks in previous governments.
The right of immunity against tort action, although it is accompanied by a prohibition on taking tort action in certain circumstances, is something that would be very valuable to many other bodies.
The TUC makes the usual trite remarks about the Government's assault on unions' legal safeguards, but unions themselves have not the slightest compunction against "assaulting", often literally, workers' ;real rights, when those workers' don't agree with the party line.
Closed shops, fascist aggression, intimidation, kangaroo courts, withdrawal of workers' real rights (as in the prohibitions imposed by the 1976 Trade lUnion and Labour Relations Amendment Act), withdrawal of union cards, all these things are far worse than anything that that poor man Prior is trying to do with the unions.
Many, many sufferers from union intransigence wish that he would be a lot more ruthless with the gangster element, and put the whole weight of the Government behind retributive. action, rather than leave it to individual employers.
Prior has even enthroned that most obnoxious phrase "industrial action" into the Bill itself, in place of the correct expression "industrial treachery".
I believe that Mark Hall and his colleagues would earn much more respect if they paid heed to those laws with which they don't wholly agree, as most of the remainder of the population have to.
W. F. SHEPHERD Tunbridge Wells, Kent