'SEVEN BRAVE MEN' the Evening News called the members of
the Electrical Trades Union who appeared on Panorama the other evening : 'They have defied the grim little Communist oligarchy which controls their Union.' And the next day Mr. Woodrow Wyatt, who interviewed them on the programme, told the readers of the Daily Express that Monday night was a 'Beacon night' because it showed that men were prepared to risk their livelihoods by criticising their union leaders. This seems to me to be an extraordinary, humili- ating attitude. These seven men did not even dare to show their faces, or speak in their natural voices, for fear of reprisals. Have we really reached the stage here that we used to deplore in America in Mr. McCarthy days, when men can be so intimidated that we praise them for speak- ing their minds? The lesson of this Panorama is surely not that the men are brave, but that the Electrical Trades Union membership is cowardly, allowing itself to be terrified by a bunch of little bogey-men. The Prime Minister may be right in insisting that the ETU, or failing that the TUC, should put its own house in order, with Govern- ment intervention only a threat in the background; but I hope that the Government's tenderness for TUC susceptibilities is not going to be carried on too long. The kind of intimidation which makes men too frightened to speak openly is intolerable.
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