Scottish workers' battles against 1930s unemployment

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Robert Duncan recalls some lessons from the past Duncan recalls some lessons from the past

The unemployed movement of the '30s-huge demonstrations, but a failure to link employed and unemployed on an adequate programme -Learning from Big Game for anything| FIFTY years ago this winter, the number of registered unemployed in Scotland climbed up to the 300,000 mark; in the industrial west of Scotland the level of male unemployed was 25% on average; and in some of the Lanarkshire towns, where coal mining and • heavy industry had collapsed in the slump, unemployment levels were unprecedented. being Motherwell area among the worst hit, with 48%.

In the October General Election, i a coalition National Government with an overwhelming Tory majority came to power, ready to carry out ruthless anti-working class policies.

By the end of 1931, the government had imposed a 10% cut in unemployment benefit and ordered the hated Means Test on family incomes.

Confrontations

They continued to give local Public Assistance Committees powers to decide their own rates of benefit, which were often pathetically low.

From September 1931 into the winter of 1932 there was a spate of open confrontations between police and unemployed demonstrators.

In Scotland during this period, Glasgow, Dundee, Kirkcaldy and Port Glasgow were scenes of pitched battles.

Conflict Starting in September and October 1931 Glasgow was the major centre of conflict. The National Unemployed Workers Movement, led by Meshane, Bob McLellan and Peter Kerrigan-all Communist Party activists-were holding regular demonstrations and marches into George Square.

On September 23, about 20,000 peaceful demonstrators were harassed by the police, but next day nearly 50,000 turned out, this time with a defence corps of 500 men, carrying heavy sticks.

The police left them alone.

On October 1, a rally was called in Glasgow Green, prior to a march on the city chambers. Before the unemployed could move off, the police attacked with batons. Running battles and skirmishes raged for hours afterwards.

Demonstration Significantly, Glasgow workers with jobs responded against this police brutality. Four days later, a united demonstration of 100,000 protested against government policies, the police, and unemployment. On the 9th, the day after the announcement of cuts in unemployed benefit, 150,000 marched in an evening demonstration, perhaps the biggest single protest in Britain during the inter-war years.

Strong-arm methods were

used again in Glasgow on January 12, 1932, when a police attack provoked a pitched battle; and on March 3, a monster demonstration in Dundee was violently charged down, many arrests being made, and a ban imposed upon all local marches and demonstrations.

In Motherwell and Wishaw, the police did not attack local meetings and marches outright but chose atrocity WHERE Graffiti leads the world follows.. well •• America's 70,000-strong National Council of Teachers of English, it seems, concur with our view of Alexander Haig's linguistic prowess. He wins their 1981 'double-speak' award for 'atrocities to the English instead to arrest leaders who did not observe bye-laws concerning permits for holding meetings in certain places.

In Lanarkshire alone, the National Unemployed Workers Movement had 22 functioning branches by 1932. They organised protest deputations to meetings of parish and town authorities to reuse to local ate the Means Test, increase allowances, and to reduce the rents in council houses occupied by unemployed families.

Experts Some members became experts in welfare rights legislation, and, as in Wishaw, Workers Rights Committees were set up, meeting weekly in the ILP Hall, for giving advice, and preparing cases to represent members before the boards dealing with means testing, insurances and pensions.

However, between 1929 and 1933 it must be recognised that the National Unemployed Workers Movement, under Communist Party direction had severe YOU CAN'T help feeling that there's a double standard operating over the withdrawal of the 'explosively funny' Bombshell game.

It's apparently not 'offensive' or 'bad taste' for kids to be bombarded with adverts for guns, tanks, and your very own Cruise missile. That is, after all, deadly serious, and not poking fun at our heroes.

Could the outrage be that political limitations which isolated both itself and the unemployed from the mainstream of the labour movement and especially from the workers in trade unions.

During these years, while it built up a following among the unemployed, the ultraleit and revolution-mongering policies adopted by the NUWM leadership had the disastrous effect of alienating. Labour supporters and the bulk of trade unionistswho were disgusted and alarmed at being called "social fascists', and, not surprisingly, would have nothing to do with either the Communist Party or the NUWM.

The ruinous political stance and posturings of the Communist Party also gave Labour and trade union bureaucrats all the excuses in the world to deny any cooperation with the NUWM, and in Scotland, trade unions and most trades councils consciously obstructed or otherwise did not help to organise the unemployed industrially or politically.

Thus, when the NUWM organised county marches across central Scotland to with Bombshell our heroes' risk getting killed, whereas everyone knows, that nuclear warheads are completely safe, hygienic,.

and not at all harmful to your health?

We're thinking of mark-, eting a game called 'Outrage', where characters such as Prince Charming, White Willie, etc, compete.

on the smirkometer for hypocrisy points.

Edinburgh in 1932 and

1933, they did so without the financial help, organisational and political support of these bodies, who boycotted the initiatives because of the association with 'communism' Undoubtedly, the dominant presence of right wing Protestant and Catholic direction of the Labour and trade union movements in the different Lanarkshire towns encouraged this strong anti-communist feeling and reinforced divisive tendencies.

If Hunger Marchers got support on their way to Edinburgh and thereafter on the route to London in these years, this was almost entirely due to local sympathetic gestures from coops and Labour Party and ILP branches who defied the 'official' attitude taken by Labour leaders, the TUC and STUC.

In 1933, the Scottish Hunger Marchers, having converged in Edinburgh, claimed a moral victory, all 1,000 of them camping down on the bourgeois precincts of Princess Street after backing up a deputaBrother STRAIGHT after the British Leyland sell-out, key union bureaucrats could be seen boarding planes for Eastern Europe.

Len Murray went to Hungary to discuss with the Stalinist hacks who head the official "trade unions' there. And a TGWU delegation headed for Russia to meet Brezhnev's top union bosses. On the delegation were Grenville Hawley, noted anti-communist Cowley body plant convenor Bill Roche, and the CP convenor of Longbridge, Jack Adams - whose plant was at a standstill through strike action as he climbed aboard the plane.

It might be argued that the exit of these people could only benefit the Longbridge strikers, sirice there were that many less struggling to sell them out. But there is a serious point to be made. What links these bureaucrats from East and West Europe is their hostility to the

1 MAA +n the Cerretar tion to the Secretary of

State. In order to get rid of them, the corporation was obliged to pay for their rail transport home.

However, such stunts on their own were not effective in bringing about any improvements in the material condition of the unemployed or in changing the policies of the National Government.

Not until 1936 was a common approach finally worked out between the NUWM, the Labour Party and the Scottish TUC.

The Labour Party in Scotland and the STUC gave their support and blessing to the 1936 Hunger March which set off from Edinburgh on an east coast route, joining with the Jarrow contingent on the trek to London.

By this time, the Communist Party had changed to reformist ideas.

Ultimately the 1930s

were a study in failure, but the fight for socialist alternatives and organising the unemployed here and now will proceed all the better by taking careful account of these past experiences.

Any 'dson strength and militancy of they see as a threat to their The British delegation's visits took place at a time of rising demands for inde.

pendent unions in the impact of the visits is te strengthen the hand the official 'unions' Accomplished fact The visits also confir that in recognising Polisd Solidarnosc, the TUC lead ers are simply accepting a accomplished fact rathe than siding with the Polis workers' movement.

After all, they kno which side their own brea is buttered. Grenville Ha» ley said in Russia that b realised the delegatio would only be shown wha the official unions (i.e. th Soviet bureaucracy) wante him to see. But when did Hawk last see the working cond tions on the shop floor British industry?