A Spectator's Notebook
THE BUS STRIKE seems to be creating new myths as well as strengthening old ones. There have been letters in newspapers complaining of bus strikers or their wives taking lifts in private cars, slashing the seats and leaving notes, like 'the Saint,' to explain who they were and why they had done it. But no such incidents have been reported to the police and none of the letters was written by the owners of the cars alleged to have been damaged. Mr. Gaitskell has pointed out that 'it is a 100 per cent. strike,' but this is much less remarkable than he seems to think. To walk through picket lines, work in a factory all day and walk out again is rela- tively easy. But to walk through the picket lines into a bus station and then to drive a bus out again through the picket lines is a very much more arduous undertaking, and I do not think it tells us much about the attitude of the busmen that none of them has tried to do it. Most sur- prising of all was the remark of the usually sagacious Cassandra that in giving people free lifts in a bus the People's League were doing some 'flagrant strikebreaking.' No doubt the People's League was primarily concerned with self-advertisement, but it is surely a long throw- back to the Thirties automatically to assume that blacklegging is necessarily wrong.
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