The trade unions were reminded in the Court of Chancery
on Monday that they are not a law unto themselves. Mr. James Walton, the Member for the Don Valley, was a working miner and a member of the Yorkshire Miners' Association for many years. He stood at the General Election as a candidate of the National Democratic Party and defeated an Independent Liberal and a Labour man. For venturing to differ in politics from the Socialists who control the executive of his union he was marked down. When, in the exercise of his rights as a free citizen, he ventured in 1919 as a unionist miner to oppose the Socialist leaders' demand for a strike, he was expelled from the union to which he had belonged all his life. Mr. Justice Russell found that the resolution expelling Mr. Walton was in breach of the rules and void, and ho granted an injunction against the union to prevent the executive from depriving Mr. Walton of his rights and privileges. The Labour Party's attempt, contrary to all our traditions, to turn the trade unions into political societies and to persecute all trade unionists who are not Socialists has thus been checked—and none too soon.
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