22 NOVEMBER 1946, Page 3

The Closed Shop Again

The British trade union movement has been built on the assertion of working-class rights and maintained by the defence of those rights. There is now a danger that its hard-won skill in defence will be employed to maintain not rights but wrongs. There was no doubt- ing the skill of Mr. Isaacs's technique of defence in Tuesday's debate in the Commons on the closed shop. But the very perti- nacity with which he avoided the fundamental issue of individual liberty which is involved in this controversy argued that he was unwilling to face that issue. Throughout the dispute which began with London Transport's decision to employ only members of the Transport and General Workers' Union, in the discussion of the position of that union, and of the other unions which have since enforced a similar veto in other industries, all the real attacking has come from outside the T.U.C. hierarchy. Mr. Isaacs in the House last October, then the T.U.C. leaders at Brighton, and now Mr. Isaacs in the House again, have done everything but face the case of an honest man who wants to work, but has not been reasonably con- vinced that he should join a particular union The many definitions of a closed shop have been aired. A few new ones have been invented. Dissenters from the extreme view demonstrated in the case of London Transport have been labelled malcontents and splinter groups, and it has been assumed throughout, on the union side, that they could not possibly be anything else. Mr. Isaacs has even argued that trade union officials are powerless to do anything about union members who refuse to work with non-union labour, which is at once a dangerous and a disingenuous admission. It is time that the unions, and some of the unions' opponents as well, ceased to vie with each other in dialectical refinement and faced the stark fact of interference with fundamental civil liberty.