TI-IF PRESS
Strike me pink
BILL GRUNDY
I lay on the lawn in the summer sunshine and dozily drifted across into dreamland. It was a strange place; a place where the Daily Sketch supported unofficial strikers; a place where Peregrine Worsthorne, clad in white smite, mystic, wonderful, and every bit as mediaeval as his name, bore a banner with the strange device: 'An irres- ponsible working class is essential to a healthy industrial democracy'. I wandered, wondering, through this Land of Nod, marvelling at everything I saw until, wakened by the dog licking my face, my eye fell on the front page of the Daily Mirror. STUPID, STUBBORN, TRAGIC, it said in its biggest type, and I realised that I was back in our workaday world again, and that everything had been a fancy. But just as the insubstantial pageant started fading, I began to realise that it hadn't been a dream after all. For there was a leading article in the Sketch starting 'It isn't often that the Daily Sketch finds itself on the side of the unofficial strikers'. And there was an article in the Sunday Telegraph, headed 'Strikers: the power and the glory', in which Mr Worsthorne used exactly the words I had seen emblazoned on his faery banner.
The Port Talbot strike. if it can produce reactions like these, is clearly an unusual one. I began to read the papers with a little more interest, and found them a little more interesting. The Daily Mail, for in- stance, sees the strike mainly as something to clobber the Government with. After a leading article analysing the situation, it was back again the next day, sniffing at the sub- ject like the little dog that'll neither do it nor leave it alone. Headed 'Fiddling and paddling', the article started 'We all know how Nero fiddled while Rome was burn- ing'—didn't Nero do anything else, for Heaven's sake?—and went on 'It is different now. Today some of the top brass paddle while the wheels.stop turning'. This some- what complex concept turned out to be an attack on the fact that one or two people are on holiday whom the Daily Mail thinks shouldn't be. The Prime Minister, predict- ably enough, came in for a slap: 'The last straw would be if the big shot himself, the man who is largely responsible for it all, should depart for the Scillies, leaving this frightful mess behind him—MR HAROLD WILSON'. As if we couldn't have guessed.
The Daily Express has likewise taken the chance to point out that 'the blastfurnace- men have utterly destroyed the TUC's claim to be an all-powerful referee. Nothing now remains of its "solemn and binding pro- mise" which Mr Wilson used as an excuse for avoiding action on labour relations'. The Daily Telegraph had a cartoon by Garland of Mr Wilson saying to a chastened Mr Feather 'When you said you'd produce measures as effective as our proposed legislation—this isn't exactly what I had in mind'. And so on, and so on. It was in- evitable, I suppose, and therefore barely worth discussing. What does seem worth discussing is the Mirror's outburst and Mr Peregrine Worsthorne's rebuttal of it. The Mirror devoted the whole of its front page and most of its biggest type to fulminating about the stupidity of the strikers in saying 'No' to everybody. 'Sit back in anger and observe the consequences. The Labour party could be destroyed by the working- class forces which created it.' The Mirror is certainly angry. It was, of course, the chief barker for the ideas of Mrs Castle's Bill. Out of loyalty it then found itself saying that perhaps Mr Wilson's dropping of the Bill was inevitable. Now it begins to feel that it wasn't so inevitable after all, but as yet it can only resort to sad sighs and a strong desire to say 'We told you so'.
But the Mirror is wrong in one essential, according to the Guardian. In a leading article it argues that 'you cannot get men back to work by bludgeoning them but only by persuasion, and persuasion must start from recognised facts'.
The Guardian must have been delighted, if a little surprised, to find itself robustly supported by Peregrine Worsthorne, in the article referred to already, pointing out that even blastfurnacemen are human, in an enormous burst of understanding that I found most refreshing. I have no space left to quote Mr Worsthorne. Indeed, it would be a shame to quote him. Read the whole article in full. It says something that has needed saying for a hell of a long time, if I may be permitted to adopt the style of the Mirror.
Which reminds me. The Mirror could do well to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest what Mr Worsthorne says. For two reasons. One; it would help them under- stand the situation more clearly than they do at present, for all their much-vaunted knowledge of the Common Man. And, therefore, two; it would mean an end to those SERMONS IN HUGE TYPE ABOUT OUR STUPIDITY, STUBBORNNESS AND CONTINUING BLOODY-MINDED DETERMINATION TO BE HUMAN BEINGS AND NOT ECONOMIC FACTORS.
And that would be something of a gain, I reckon.
From Saturday's Financial Times:
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