On Tuesday the Labour members were back in their places
in full force. The discussion of exactly what kinds of sympathetic strike would be legal was perplexing enough to prove the impossibility of complete definition. The chief guiding principle laid down by the Attorney-General was that sympathetic strikes would be illegal if the men were not striking for bettering their own conditions. To help their friends by holding up the community was not a tolerable form of strike. The Attorney-General has been driven by the logic of facts to the discovery that sympathetic strikes of any magnitude will have to be regarded as illegal. But this is not really what the Government originally proposed or intended. The Attorney-General said over and over again at the second reading that the Bill was aimed at the general strike and that sympathetic strikes as such would not be touched.
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