The Guerrilla War

In spite of the scandals kicked up by Atomic Scientists Alan Nunn May and Bruno Pontecorvo, and by Diplomats Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess, most Britons still find it hard to take their home-grown Communists seriously. Party membership is down to fewer than 30,000 and falling; the Communists lost their only two Members of Parliament in the general elections of 1950. One reason for this state of affairs is that the Communists themselves have shifted from electioneering to getting a hold on industry. Last week Britain was learning what Communists could do when they had firm control of a major union.

The union is the 201,000-man Electrical Trades Union, whose top three executives are card-carrying Communists. President Frank Foulkes, 49, is a genial little Communist with a fatherly manner, who came back from a 1950 trip to Russia reporting that "the whole atmosphere there is one big smile." Assistant Secretary Frank Haxell is a tightlipped, dedicated party man and a member of the party's executive committee. He provides firm guidance from headquarters for his union superiors. Even at press conferences, Haxell will interrupt Foulkes or General Secretary Walter Stevens with, "What you really mean is . . ."--and tell them. Foulkes and Stevens hastily agree.

Fatherly Chat. The huge British Electricity Authority, which employs the vast majority of the electricians in Britain's power plants, recently agreed to give the union a pay increase. But the private electrical contractors balked. They offered to arbitrate, but the union's President Foulkes refused. He announced a policy of ''guerrilla" strikes--one-day surprise strikes throughout the country. One local working on a steel plant at Scunthorpe rebelled. Foulkes hustled right up there "just to have a fatherly chat." Grumbled one of the workers: "We talked for half an hour about democracy. Then Frank ignores it all and orders us out." They went--under threat from Frank to lift their union cards. In the tightly organized industry, that meant probable loss of their jobs.

For two weeks Foulkes waged his guerrilla war. Last week he topped the campaign by calling out 35,000 employees of the private contractors for a one-day strike, halting some construction work (among other things) at six of Britain's eight atomic establishments. Employers retaliated by giving every striker a "one-day unpaid unholiday" the following day. In return, this week Foulkes called out 7.000 electricians in the London area.

Danger by the Dozen. Foulkes's activities were giving many Britons a new awareness of Communism in the labor movement. The general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers is a Communist, Arthur Horner. There are three Communists on the 15-man executive of the National Union of Railwaymen. The Communists are under heavy attack from the powerful and conservative Trades Union Congress, and have lost strength in recent years. But as one railway unionist warned: "They'll always be a danger, even if there are only a dozen of them, because wherever there's a pimple, they'll scratch it into a rash." And it is not so much their numbers as their strategic placement and their high-handed use of power that gave cause for alarm. Comrade Foulkes, had he wanted to, could have called out the entire E.T.C. from every power station, plunging the country into darkness, halting trams and subways, paralyzing docks and factories.

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