A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
MR. SCOTT HENDERSON was the chairman of a Royal Commission which a few years ago produced a most interesting and judicious report on cruelty to wild animals. Much of the alleged cruelty was inflicted in getting rid of animals like rats and rabbits which are inimical to the interests of farmers; but that is the nearest I can get to linking him, for the purposes of this paragraph, with the Agricultural Wages Board. The object of doing so is to point a contrast. It is being loudly if not widely urged (and not only by newspapers like the Daily Express which dislike being cheated of a circulation-booster) that Mr. Scott Henderson's enquiry into the execution of Timothy John Evans for the murder of his daughter should be held in public. Yet as far as I know no one has ever suggested that the meeting of the Agricultural Wages Board to consider the workers' claim for a rise in pay (their seventh in eight years) ought to take place in public. I should have thought that there was everything to be gained by the appropriate bodies throughout industry hearing all wage-claims in public. At least we should then know in some detail why it was neces- sary for every industry to cut its own throat at regular intervals.
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