Unofficial Strikes

Unofficial strikes in certain war factories recently have done more than German bombs to hold up production.

So last week reported the London Daily Express, owned by Aircraft Minister Baron Beaverbrook. Next day the British censor passed a dispatch in which Chicago Daily News's Helen Kirkpatrick noted: "It is significant that districts where unofficial strikes (that is to say, strikes not organized by the trade unions) have cropped up happen to be districts where the Communist Party is most active. Communist agents have been found circulating in factories and among dock workers trying to stir up trouble."

This news brought into sharp focus the fact that Adolf Hitler, soon after his Berlin-Moscow Deal (TIME, Aug. 28, 1939), obtained a reversal by Joseph Stalin of the policy of the British Communist Party. Out as secretary of the British Communist Party went Harry Pollitt, who up to the day Moscow's orders were received had been urging British workers and Communists to help win the war. "The Communist Party supports the war, believing it to be a just war," had been Secretary Pollitt's policy. On the orders of Stalin, Pollitt made a complete recantation, swore allegiance to the revised British Communist Party line, which declares: "The present war is not a just, defensive war, but an unjust and imperialist war in which Britain and Germany are fighting for . . . colonies and world domination."

Typical German propagandist broadcasts designed to shake British morale contain minute details of what goes on inside individual British aircraft factories, tidbits of shop gossip which it would be easy for British Communist workers to pick up. Six-foot Rajani Palme Dutt, who succeeded Harry Pollitt as secretary of the Party (Pollitt is still a working member), is an Indian who has spent his life in Europe as a political agitator, stands well with Stalin and Molotov.

Last fortnight big Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labor and strong man of the British trades-union movement, rushed to Scotland for a string of speeches against Communism. The working-class districts of Glasgow and Edinburgh are the noisiest in Britain, and there Orator Bevin was fiercely heckled by workers, who jumped up at his meetings and gave the Communist clenched-fist salute. In his roaring rebuttals Big Ernie went further than any other present British Cabinet member to speak his mind about Communism.

"I know that orders have been issued--preparatory to Hitler making a peace offer --to the Communists of the country to disturb meetings," said Minister Bevin. "I know very well that you have been instructed to try to create the impression that the working class of this country is disunited. You have started it--but I don't think it will work.

"Some Reds are just unfortunate tools. The Government has got to face the issue as a matter of war strategy. . . . Working men and women in Scottish industry, don't you allow any minority to create a condition to force the State to take action it doesn't want to take [i.e., suppress the British Communist Party]. . . . I am not going to be a party to punishing 99 per cent to stop one per cent, but if there are some subversive elements trying to interfere with the war effort, I will deal with that one per cent."

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