Word: seamen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Prime Minister Harold Wilson had promised to disclose the names of "the tightly knit group of politically motivated men" responsible for prolonging Britain's crippling seamen's strike. Last week he did, but it was a bit anticlimactic. Everyone knew he had Communists in mind, but it turned out that they were Communists everybody knew about: eight prominent labor spokesmen of Britain's Communist Party who, admitted Wilson, had behaved in an entirely legal fashion throughout the six-week dispute...
...margin in the March elections. Right-wing Laborites began criticiz ing him for failure to halt inflation or push toward the Common Market. The party's left wing hacked at Wilson for not nationalizing steel, for taking too tough an attitude toward the seamen's wage demands in Britain's five-week-old dock strike, and for backing the U.S. in Viet Nam and continuing to maintain Britain's large contingent of troops "east of Suez" in Southeast Asia. A broad middle-of-the-road band of M.P.s chimed in, too, complaining that Wilson had hardly...
...sirloin in London's working-class neighborhoods was up from 98? to $1.05 per Ib. - a sign of the slow but steady pinch on imports. And Harold Wilson's Labor government, moving deliberately but diplomatically, took two steps to cope with - but hardly end - the merchant seamen's strike that, in its second week, was slowly strangling Britain's vital commerce with the outside world...
...state of emergency, under laws invoked only five times in the past 50 years.* The proclamation enables the government to impose price controls and to clear congested ports-presumably by using Royal Navy tugs and crews-and allow foreign ships, which are unaffected by the striking National Union of Seamen, to dock and unload essential food, raw materials and medical supplies. Well aware that the use of the Royal Navy could provoke sympathy strikes by dockers and truckers handling imported goods, Wilson's government later in the week announced that an independent four-man court of inquiry, headed...
Extreme Positions. The dispute might never have come to a strike except for the internal tensions within Britain's National Union of Seamen. The present crisis dates back to 1960, when a group of Communist renegades from the union succeeded in pulling off several wildcat strikes against British shipping. Figuring that it would be better to have the Communists back in his union where he could keep an eye on them, Union Chief William Hogarth invited the troublemakers into his union's inner council. They have pushed him into increasingly extreme positions. To the Labor government...