We have written fully elsewhere about the Report of the
Court of Inquiry on dock labour. Although we want dockers to get as high wages as they possibly can, we feel strongly that if the recommendations of the Report were put into practice they would be a short cut to upsetting the present wage settlements all over the country. Incidentally, though undesignedly, the effect would be to help the plans of those subversive Labour leaders who are trying by successive demands for increased wages to kill private industry altogether. We could have no better authority on this subject than the New Statesman, which concerns itself largely with Labour politics. On March 27th the
New Statesman said that the demands of the South Wales miners for an advance of £2 a week irrespective of the more modest national claim for 3s. per shift was not, as some papers had represented, a mere piece of sectional selfishness :—
" It possesses much more considerable significance ; for it 18.1‘ deliberate move of policy, a move which has been persistently advocated for many years past by the extremist loaders in the South Wales coalfield. .. . This industry is nothing else than the deliberate bankrupting of the Industry by successive wage demands which it will finally be unable to meet—a policy pursued with signal success by the extremists under the Kerensky regime in Russia."
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