TELEVISION is already beginning . to add an extra dimension to
some news stories; I would have been sorry to miss a couple of strike incidents caught by Independent Television News—still far ahead of the poor old BBC news team. One was an interview with Mr. Ted Hill, secretary of the Boilermakers' Union, on the platform of a strike meeting. It exactly reflected the meeting's atmo- sphere, solid but not fervid, and it revealed Mr. Hill at his silliest. The other was also intended to be an interview : with Mr. F. G. Braby, President of the Engineering Employers' Federation, after the breakdown of the talks on Monday. This was the Mr. Braby whose statement last June—that the employers were rejecting wage claims in advance—is now generally conceded to have been the original cause of the trouble. But by last Monday, the employers had so far receded from their decision to yield not an inch that they were offering a 5 per cent. ell—only to have the humiliating experience of hearing the offer, which would certainly have been accepted had it been made earlier, turned down. For this humiliation Mr. Braby, and those few of his colleagues who have tried to treat the dispute as if it were a private joust, are mainly to blame. You might have thought, therefore, that he would come out of Monday's meeting in a chastened frame of mind. Not a bit of it : he bounced out, radiant with self-esteem, and stopped to talk to the ITN inter- viewer only long enough to make it clear, in a succession of breezy variations on the `no comment' theme, that what had been happening was none of the public's business. With bad logic on one side and bad manners on the other, I am not surprised it has been found so difficult to reach a settlement.
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