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On the same afternoon [ 22nd May 1942] an essential
regulation--known as Regulation 58A
– was made under that Act. This regulation “vested in the
Minister of Labour and National Service the control and use of all
labour by empowering him to direct any person in the United Kingdom to
perform such services in the United Kingdom as might be specified in the
direction.” In plain English, this means that the Minister of Labour
was given the power to order most of us about on a grand scale. If next
morning he had decided that it was in the national interest that five
thousand people in Kensington should go to Perthshire to fell trees,
then they would have to go and do it. Up to 22nd May we were
a free-and-easy democracy, much too free-and-easy to fight a total war.
On 23rd May it looked as if we had taken a jump into a
totalitarian regime. Our services were now, it seemed, at the disposal
of the State. The Minister of Labour and his National Service officers,
who were now authorized by the Regulation to issue directions, could
tell us what to do and where to do it. We have often been told
that Britain is the country of gradual and almost imperceptible
revolutions. But there was nothing gradual and imperceptible about this
revolution. It had happened in one day.
By passing the emergency Powers (defence) Act,
1940, and making these various Regulations, Parliament on behalf of the
country, which was solidly behind it, had said in effect to the Ministry
of Labour: “We want to fight this war with everything we’ve got. Go
ahead at full speed and mobilise the manpower of the country for the
Forces and for war industry.” Our situation was desperate, and the war
had to come first. Nevertheless, we were still the democracy and not a
totalitarian country. We were fighting as a democracy, and we wanted to
destroy Nazism and not imitate it. Therefore, no matter how desperate
our situation might be, no matter how much power might now be vested in
the Minister of Labour and his officers, we still hoped that the
elaborate checks and safeguards of our pre-war system would not be swept
away for ever, that the rights of the individual would not be completely
forgotten, and that the democratic spirit would not vanish.
One of the First things that all the dictators had
done was to smash the organised working-class movements, to break the
unions. But though or Government had assumed the wide powers of a
dictatorship, in order to meet the terrible emergency, there was to be
no smashing and breakdown here. Instead, the co-operation of the
employers and trades union was sought so within the framework of these
new vast powers the old democratic spirit should survive. Britain, in
fact, was seeking a new compromise, and once again making political
history.
In the very shadow of invasion, with half Europe wrecked before
it, Britain was acting as a political laboratory again.
Thus, while Mr. Attlee was telling the House of
Commons that the situation in France was so critical that the Government
must seek powers to take control over persons and property, Mr. Bevin
was explaining the National Joint Advisory Council the nature and scope
of the Bill, and the general direction of labour he proposed to follow.
This was a body, consisting of representatives of the Trades Union
Congress General Council and the British Employers’ Confederation,
that had been set up at the out break of war to advise the Ministry of
Labour on matters of common interest to employers and workers. And now
this Joint Advisory Council, recognizing the gravity of the situation,
agreed wholeheartedly to co-operate with the Ministry. They also decided
to appoint a Consultative Committee to advice the Minister on all
matters arising out of this war-time legislation.
Again, if war industry were to be speeded up, it
meant that a great deal of new and comparatively unskilled labour would
have to be introduced into the factories. By careful organisation, the
splitting up of jobs, and the use of machine tools, skilled labour can
be considerably diluted. Given some preliminary training and a machine
with the proper jigs and tools, a woman can turn out a part for an
aircraft or gun that formerly demanded the service of a highly skilled
man. Therefore, on this same day in May, agreements were arrived at
between the Engineering and Allied Employers’ National Federation, the
Amalgamated Engineering Union, the National Union of General and
Municipal Workers and the Transport and General Workers’ Union to
provide for the temporary relaxation of existing customs so as to
permit, for the period of the war, the splitting up of skilled
jobs and the extended employment of women in the engineering industry.
This opened a door through which have since streamed hundreds of
thousands of women and girls, to make aircraft, guns, shells, and all
the munitions of war.
Three days later, on the 25th May, 1940,
the executives of all the trades union in the Trades Union Congress
endorsed their leaders’ action in supporting the Emergency Powers
legislation and registered a pledge that all unions’ resources should
be used to provide the Fighting Forces with arms and ammunition.
Organised labour, representing millions of workers, gave the signal to
Go Ahead. The position, therefore was that the Ministry of labour and
National Services now had full powers to mobilise the labour resources
of the country and these powers had been given to him with the full
consent and active co-operation of all sections of the community. And
not before time. On the 28th May the Belgian Army
surrendered. Two days later the evacuation from Dunkirk began. Then,
under the blazing sun of the memorable June, the great bastion of France
suddenly collapsed, all western Europe came under the control of the
Nazis, and Britain stood alone. Our great Navy might be still
unchallenged, but we had only a division and a half of fully armed men
and a small if superbly trained Air Force against Hitler’s two hundred
heavily armed division and the terrible armadas of the Luftwaffe.
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