Reds, Labor and War

One of democratic Great Britain's handicaps in war with totalitarian Germany is Britain's traditional democratic tolerance. She tolerates pacifists, conscientious objectors, Communists; also those liberal-minded gentlemen who see the war, not primarily as a desperate crisis demanding united will-to-win, but rather as an opportunity for social reform. Last week a group of liberals who put the war before social reform struck back at their Communist critics.

Last December hulking, grizzled Sir Walter Citrine, general secretary of the British Trades Union Congress (6,000,000 workers), and six members of his General Council flew to Paris on an Imperial Airliner, dined & wined with French Labor Minister Charles Pomaret, returned to England in state aboard a French destroyer. Subsequently Minister Pomaret clamped down on French labor with a set of drastic wage-&-hour decrees and Sir Walter Citrine agreed to a proposal by Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon that pay rises in Britain be stopped. These things caused the London Daily Worker to publish a series of articles accusing Sir Walter and his colleagues of "plotting with the French Citrines to bring millions of Anglo-French Trade Unionists behind the Anglo-French imperialist war machine." In the course of the articles the Worker's bush-browed crack writer, Ben Francis, called Sir Walter & friends such names as "lickspittles" and industrialists' "lackeys" who would "do down" the British workingman. The Worker was sued for libel.

Last week the Worker's, publisher, dormousy Edward Pountney, was in court to defend the suit. He pleaded "fair comment" under the British Press Law, but no sooner had the trial started than it became obvious that the T. U. C. leaders were determined to expose what they claimed was the Worker's Muscovite background. Sir Walter testified that in the first fortnight of the war the Worker suddenly changed its policy of supporting Labor against Hitlerism, began calling the war imperialistic. Who ordered the change? "Moscow," said Sir Walter Citrine. Who financed the Worker to the tune of -L-2,000 a month? "Moscow," said Sir Walter.

The trial brought into the open opposing working-class attitudes toward the war. The Worker's attorney, Denis Nowell Pritt, was recently expelled from the Labor Party for his anti-war views. "Have you ever considered," he asked Sir Walter, "whether there is any alternative to carrying on this war to a bitter conclusion?''

"Yes," retorted Secretary Citrine. "The alternative is to capitulate to Hitler and lose our freedom."

To onetime Electrician Citrine the opportunity to show British Labor where Communism stood, and vice versa, was far more valuable than the -L-300 damages he was awarded. "We realize to the full that probably we shall be whistling for our money." cracked his attorney, Sir William Jewett.

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