HC Deb 04 January 1916 vol 77 cc920-32

Where in a controlled establishment in which it was the practice prior to the War-to employ union labour exclusively nonunion labour is introduced during the War, the owner of the establishment shall be deemed to have undertaken that such introduction shall only be for the period of the War, and if he breaks or attempts to break such an undertaking he shall be guilty of an offence under the principal Act and liable to a fine not exceeding fifty pounds [but subject as aforesaid such introduction shall not be deemed to be a change of working conditions].—[Mr, Lloyd. George.]

Clause brought up, and read the first time.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Clause be read a second time."

Mr. HOGGE

Does the Minister of Munitions think that in the absence of the entire Labour party with the exception of one Privy Councillor (Mr. Crooks) we should go on with the Bill? Will it not be better to report Progress, and not discuss so important a matter in the absence of the Labour party?

Mr. LLOYD GEORGE

It is redeeming the promise I gave earlier in the afternoon.

Mr. KING

I am very glad that I took a part in preventing this Bill going through its Report stage a fortnight ago. I hope the Minister of Munitions has some gratitude left for me, because, unless I and other Members had done what we did, the right hon. Gentleman would not have been able to redeem his promise to the Labour party. What a difficulty he would have been in then! I congratulate the Minister of Munitions upon this Clause, and I am very glad I had a little part in enabling him to put it forward.

Question, "That the Clause be read a second time," put, and agreed to.

Clause added to the Bill.

Bill reported, with an Amendment.

Bill, as amended on recommittal, considered.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Bill be now read the third time."

Mr. PRINGLE

I wish to join my hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset in congratulating the Minister of Munitions upon having had the opportunity of doing all the good things he has been able to do this afternoon. We have been able to establish a record, for I think we have had three Committee stages and three Report stages. It is due to my hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset and myself that we have been enabled to see these interesting things. Before, however, the Bill passes from this House I wish, with all respect to my right hon. Friend, to? correct some misrepresentations he made to the House earlier in the afternoon regarding the condition of feeling on the Clyde, and which I think it very unfortunate should come out with his authority. He said that it was only a minority of Syndicalists there, and their attitude which I represented in this House.

Mr. LLOYD GEORGE

No, I did not say that.

Mr.PRINGLE

The right hon. Gentleman said that the opposition to the Munitions Act was confined to such a minority. I know pretty well the feeling of various sections on the Clyde. I know the Syndicalists and the Socialists. There is no man in this House who has fought both sections more than I have done, and sometimes when the right hon. Gentleman was inclined to say kind words of them. But my right hon. Friend is making a great mistake if he believes that at the present time the opposition to the Munitions Act is concentrated in the Syndicalists. They probably formed an unruly section at his meeting in the St. Andrews Hall. But the misfortune of the Munitions Act is that it has driven the majority of workers on the Clyde to support the Syndicalists. It is because of that unfortunate state of things that now, and on other occasions, I have appealed to the right hon. Gentleman to get rid of the penal Clauses of the Munitions Act. I believe it could have been done with perfect safety. I believe in this fight for freedom my right hon. Friend would have done best to have appealed to the honest hard-working free man. He would have got their support on the Clyde as nowhere else. I am concerned at the further remarks in which he spoke of dealing with the situation. I wonder if he quite realises what dealing with the situation means? If he intends to deal with it under the further legislation which is contemplated by the Government, I can assure him he will have a rude awakening. It is not simply munitions tribunals he will require; it is Divisions and Army Corps. When I supported the Government in going into this War on 5th August I supported it because I believed that a British Army was going to the Rhine, and not to the Clyde.

Mr. SHERWELL

I wish to intervene for only one moment to enable me to say that the truth to which my hon. Friend has just given expression is one which is capable of exact application to other of the industrial areas of this country beside the Clyde. I really have been forced to the conclusion that the Government are most imperfectly informed of the precise state of feeling among large masses of workers in this country who have, rightly or wrongly, conceived the deep-rooted conviction that the Government is prepared to ride roughshod over their feelings, over the traditions associated with their work, the conditions of their em- ployment, and over the most elementary privileges enjoyed by many of the citizens of this country under the impression that the workers of this country are negligible at the time of war. I will not attempt to anticipate the debates which will occupy the most serious attention of this House during the next two or three weeks, but I must give expression to my own deep concern that the Government seem to be attaching so little weight or significance the vast volume of indignation, of a deeply-rooted moral type, which is seizing the hearts and minds of tens and scores of thousands of our workers up and down the country. I know Scotland very well. I am constantly there. I can endorse much that my hon. Friend has said. I venture to remind the Minister of Munitions that in the industrial areas of the West Riding, particularly in my own Constituency and in the Colne Valley, there are conditions prevalent which, if much further incitement is given to them, will present to the Executive of this country problems of which they have now little conception. I do most sincerely appeal to my right hon. Friend to do what he can in the further stages of this Bill, and in any further speeches which he may address to his fellow-countrymen, to reassure the workmen that notwithstanding the anxieties involved in the conduct of a great War like this the country is still alive to the duty which it owes to its workers.

Mr. KING

I only intervene to say with regard to the Debate we have had upon the Motion of the hon. Member for North-West Lanarkshire to repeal Clause 7 of the original Act that I listened most intently to it, and I expected, in view of the speeches of the hon. Members for Gorton and Dundee, to have had a very different reply to that which the Minister of Munitions gave about his visit to the Clyde. I must confess, in view of the way in which the hon. Member for Gorton (Mr. Hodge) has practically supported the Minister of Munitions through thick and thin, I was extremely impressed by what he said. I was even more impressed by the speech, to which the right hon. Gentleman did not listen, of the hon. Member for Dundee (Mr. Wilkie). I think it is a very unfortunate thing. Possibly he has had private opportunities of learning the opinion of the hon. Member for Dundee, but, if he has not, I do hope for his own good, as well as for the smooth working of the Munitions Act, that the speech of the hon. Member for Dundee will be read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested by the Minister of Munitions. We cannot hide from ourselves that in the greatest industrial centre of munition making at the present time things are not going smoothly.

I have great hope that this Bill, in which many of us have taken interest— and, with all our suspicion and dislike of a good deal that has been going on, we have done our best to make it a workable and useful measure—will greatly assist the national cause, the output of munitions, and the smooth and harmonious working of labour with the fighting forces, and—may we say also?—the ruling forces in this land. If that can be done, we have done a good day's work. We have done this work at some leisure, not hustling through the Bill as we were implored to do again and again from the Treasury Bench; but I believe we have stood for fair and full discussion, and even delay, in regard to this Bill, and have done service to this country, and the workers of this country, of which we need not be ashamed. Although we have withstood appeals to let the thing through, I, for one, am not sorry that this matter has been brought up before the House again and again, and that we have had full and fair discussion, not only in Committee but on the Report stage. I am perfectly sure that if the Minister of Munitions wants to get his work done well by as many and as heartily and as devotedly as possible, it will not only be by going to the Clyde holding private meetings and then only allowing a very partial and an imperfect account to be given of those meetings, but it will be by taking this House and the workers of the country into the fullest possible measure of confidence and giving the fullest information he can. It is only by fully and fairly telling the country what the difficulties are, where the danger lies, letting us see what friction there is, and appealing to all men fairly and sympathetically, I am convinced, will this great work, he has in hand be carried through with the greatest success.

Mr. LLOYD GEORGE

Perhaps the House will permit me to thank my hon. Friends for the way in which they have met the Government in this, the final stage of the Munitions Bill. I have certainly, nothing to complain of either in the substance of the criticism or in the tone of the criticism. My hon. Friend the Member for Lanark took a very strong view as to the general principles on which we ought to proceed on this and other matters, and I take a different view. He is entitled to express himself strongly on one side, as I am on the other, and I know perfectly well that in all he said he is inspired by the best of good feeling to myself personally, and to the work of the Ministry of Munitions in so far as it relates to output. There was one word which fell from an hon. Friend sitting behind me, which I really must take this opportunity at once of correcting and repudiating. I do not know whether he meant to suggest that either I or any other member of the Government thought that the opinion of the workers of the country was negligible. It was a most extraordinary phrase to use in anything, and it ought least of all to be applied to the work which I have done during the last twelve months. I have done more consultation with the leaders of trade unionism than any man in this House. I have not taken a single step without taking the most elaborate precautions to ascertain their opinion. I have met them times out of number. I have conferred with them before I introduced any Bill. I conferred with them before I took any step. I did not always take their view upon everything. It is not involved in a controversy of this sort that you are always bound to take the view of one party; but I can venture to say that, so far as the vast majority of their suggestion are concerned, I accepted them; and I should like the hon. Member who talks like that to look at the Amendments they suggested and the Amendments I have embodied in this Bill. I think he ought to have done so before saying I treated the workers of this country as negligible. Even the fact of my going to the Clyde shows I was not treating them as negligible. I went there to see them; I went there to talk with them. I am a fairly busy man, and I used such little holiday as I had to take the opinions of the workers. I was there for three days, and there was nothing more pleasant than to meet the shop-stewards in Parkhead by way of spending a Christmas. Undoubtedly a very merry Christmas it gave me. I do not complain. I did not always understand the interruptions. I would have done so if I had been a Scotsman instead of a Welshman, and I missed a good deal of the fun for that very reason. At any rate, I went there merely to ascertain the opinions of "workmen whom I am suggested as regarding as negligible. My hon. Friend taunted me that some of the workmen did not think fit to come to express their opinions. That was not my fault.

Mr. PRINGLE

It was the fault of the Munitions Act.

Mr. LLOYD GEORGE

It was not my fault. It was not that I considered their opinions were negligible. Although I knew perfectly well their opinions were hostile, and hostile opinions were expressed in a very forcible manner, I did not shirk it, but I did my best to ascertain their views, because I thought their opinions were very important and not negligible, and I will not have it said that at any stage of these proceedings I regarded the opinion of the workers of this country as negligible. I have done my very best to secure their co-operation. I have entered into several agreements with them. It is no fault of mine if those agreements have not been carried out. Although the Munitions Act only passed in July, agreement was entered into in March. I feel it incumbent upon me to make that perfectly clear. I have always consulted the trade union officials, and one of the difficulties has been not that there has been a lack of consultation between me and trade union officials, but that there has been a lack of acceptance of decisions of trade union leaders by those who are in the shipyards and in the various localities. That has been the trouble. If I had known exactly what the demands of the workers were and by what demands they would" abide—that is the point—then I should have been in a better position to make a clean bargain at the outset. One of the complaints made against me was that I did not go behind the backs of the trade union leaders to the men. They said to me, "Why do you not go straight to the men?" Supposing I had done that they would have turned round and said that I was endeavouring to get behind the trade union organisations.

Mr. PRINGLE

You went down last week to do it.

Mr. LLOYD GEORGE

The hon. Member is referring to the shop stewards, who were elected by the men themselves. In that case I went to the works with the full assent of the trade union leaders and on the advice of the advisory committee which represents the trade union leaders. If the leaders said, "You had better go off to the men themselves," that is quite another matter, but to go behind the backs of the trade union leaders is a thing that I would not do. It is just as much the trade union policy as it is the Government policy, and there is no man in the trade union movement who does not know it. This is not a mutiny against the Government, but against the whole organisation of trade unionism. I saw it at the beginning, when I was President of the Board of Trade. We found that agreements entered into by the trade union leaders were not carried out, and there is no doubt the trade union leaders have been fighting for their life. This is a fact, and every man who has to deal with organised labour knows it, and it is far better to say it. The trade union meeting in Glasgow was organised by the trade unions.

Mr. PRINGLE

Some of them.

Mr. LLOYD GEORGE

Their representatives were present, and they agreed to organise the meeting. I agreed to extend my visit in order to get an opportunity of talking to the stewards. It is true that some of the representatives from the unions did not turn up. I had absolutely nothing to do with the issuing of the tickets and the meeting was arranged by them, and I have taken every precaution to deal with organised labour through its reputed leaders and representatives, and no Government can do anything else without absolutely breaking up the whole organisation of the skilled labour of the country, and that is a very serious thing to do, and a matter in which I shall take neither lot nor part. It is much better to deal with responsible leaders who, from experience, know what the purport and effect of a decision is than to deal with sporadic bodes of men who put forward demands without having that experience or knowledge which enables them to decide what particular relation their action has with something that has gone before or some thing that will arise in the future.

Mr. WILKIE

With regard to the meeting on Thursday night on the Clyde, the difficulty was caused through the postponement of the meeting.

Mr. LLOYD GEORGE

I was not aware of that, and I am sorry for the inconvenience caused to the trades unions. I thought it would be far better to stay two or three days in order to make myself thoroughly acquainted with the conditions of labour. It seems that what I did was inconvenient to individuals and I regret it, but that is not a point of substance. I again want to emphasise that I take every trouble on every conceivable occasion to ascertain the views of the men. The trouble is that when I have ascertained those views at the proper quarter there is always some repudiation behind, and often there is an attempt made to overthrow the official organisation. There is opposition in trades union circles as there is in political circles, and just as there are critics of the Government there are critics of trade unions, and consequently it is very difficult to carry them with you. I agree with my hon. Friend that it is desirable that you should ascertain their view and that we should take a full measure of their confidence in working through a difficult situation like this. When I asked those gentlemen who were interrupting at one of my meetings, "Whom do you trust?" they called out, "We trust nobody." Even when I got to the minority I wanted to know to whom; I was to appeal and there was no man present who could make a bargain for the minority, and my hon. Friend knows that as well as I do. It is true that there were two or three men there representing certain people, but there was no man there who had the authority to say, "I will agree to such-and-such a policy or such-and-such terms." I doubt very much whether there was any two or three men who could have carried the whole body of the minority with them. It is a distrust and suspicion of trade union leaders and official trade unions, and when you get lower down they are very suspicious of each other. I found they were divided into Syndicalists and Socialists, each having a great contempt for the other. It is almost impossible under those conditions to make bargains, and consequently you are driven back to the law. I infinitely prefer to make arrangements with the men, and for that reason the Prime Minister and I, on Friday, although there were very serious objections to the new Clause inserted to-day, came to the conclusion that if we could make an arrangement which could really be carried out it would be better. We very properly concluded, although there were serious objections to the Clause being inserted, that it was worth while paying the price in order to secure the co-operation of labour. There has been an understanding and an agreement from the first, and we shall have to see whether it is possible to carry out that arrangement or whether a fresh arrangement can be made. I think I have now dealt with most of the points that have been raised, but I would like once more to point out that in this Amending Bill, from beginning to end, the many concessions we have made to labour show that at any rate we are not deaf to the representations made by labour, that we do not consider them negligible; on the contrary, we have listened to their appeals and suggestions, and although the hon. Member for Leeds may smile, that is a fact. The mere fact that we have taken the trouble to pilot this Bill through the House when the pressure of other work is enormous is a proof that we are doing our best to meet every grievance labour complains of in the munition factories. Whatever my hon. Friends may say to the contrary, I believe there is a time coming when the Munitions Act and the Defence of the Realm Act will be regarded as tremendous leaps forward in the social and industrial world. The power which I took to take control of the workshops and to regulate what work should be done, the power to organise our industrial system, the power to limit profits, and the two Clauses in this particular Bill to declare a minimum wage in over 2,200 controlled establishments, with 1,250,000 and very soon 1,500,000 workers, and to see that there shall be no sweating—I repeat to my hon. Friend that all these things will be regarded one day, in spite of two or three things which may be considered as blemishes in the Act, as landmarks in a great industrial revolution. Things have been done under the Munitions Act which it would have taken a generation for either labour or Parliament to have achieved under peace conditions, and the man who will then stand up and say, "I opposed the Munitions Act; I was against it," will, I think, be scarcer than he is to-day. I ask my hon. Friends to look at this Act as a whole, and not to concentrate upon and talk about certificates and Clause 7. That is an unfortunate necessity in a time of war, which my hon. Friend himself recognised when he said that you must impose some restraint in a time of war. That is only one part. It is one of the conditions which has enabled us to get concessions for the working classes of this country which appear in an Act of Parliament, and contain principles which they themselves can develop, and which, if they are wise, they will insist upon being adhered to by the State.

Mr. HOGGE

Surely the Minister of Munitions is making a mistake when he says that any of us will take up the position that we opposed the Munitions Act. I do not think that either my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Lanark (Mr. Pringle) or myself have opposed the Munitions Act. What we have done has been to assist the right hon. Gentleman in drafting such an Act as will meet the exigencies of the situation. It is not fair of the right hon. Gentleman to draw that contrast as if he and the Government were setting up landmarks which will be looked to in the future and as if some of us, who have assisted him in making the Acts better and improving them, will be branded as men who opposed the Munitions Act. We have only objected to the penal Clauses. May I put this point finally to the right hon. Gentleman? I got a letter from the Clyde after I had made my speech this afternoon. I will read a sentence from this letter which puts the whole of the Clyde situation in a nutshell. This man, who knows what he is talking about, says: These workmen are working for the same directors, the same managers, and the same firms in the same atmosphere, and undoubtedly these men have helped to make the Act unpopular by the way they have invoked its powers for all sorts of petty offences.… Then, perhaps, the right hon. Gentleman will just listen to this one sentence:— Those men in ordinary circumstances, if they had not been making munitions, would have been in the trenches, but in the trenches those men would have been fighting for an ideal. That is the whole difference in a nutshell The man who is out at the front, the Scottish soldier, and for that matter the British soldier, is fighting for an ideal which he lives up to. In the factories, very dark, dismal, dreary places, men are being subjected to an insidious kind of tyranny which is wiping the ideal out of their lives. All we have done to-day—and I think the Minister of Munitions ought to be perfectly fair to us—is to try and induce him, from our personal intimate acquaintance with our fellow Scotsmen on the Clyde, to obviate that difficulty and to give them that ideal by removing, or as far as possible getting rid of, the penal Clauses in the Munitions Act. If he could do that I think there would be no objection.

Mr. LLOYD GEORGE

Does my hon. Friend want to get rid of the penal Clauses for the employers?

Mr. HOGGE

No; as my right hon. Friend knows, we have never taken up any other position than this one. If you make the conditions equal for both, we are perfectly satisfied, but we are not satisfied if there is an inequality. Do not let us get on to that question at the end of the Third Reading. We have had a very pleasant day and a pleasant fight, and I do not think the Minister of Munitions ever objects to a fight. I wish to express to him the honest, sincere conviction that it is the absence of that ideal in the big workshops on the Clyde that is making all the difference. I think he himself will now admit it was rather unfair when he put it that his work and the work of the Government would be regarded as landmarks, and that ours would be regarded as opposition. Our work is equally as effective and constructive as that of the Minister of Munitions.

Mr. C.DUNCAN

I am confident that the greater part of the difficulty has arisen in this way. The whole of the working men of this country have been brought up under the old Manchester school of the ideal of individual liberty. I suppose in war that has got to be sacrificed to some extent. One can understand a certain amount of resentment among men when they see that take place, but by far the larger part of the resentment has been created by senseless people in office who, in a blundering, stupid, wooden-headed fashion, have made the Act stink in the nostrils of the workpeople by using the authority given them under this Act, an authority which they could never have hoped to have achieved under ordinary circumstances. They have got the workman by the throat. He cannot strike. They have fixed and anchored him in the establishment, and some of these people have set to work off some of their old back scores. There is no doubt about it. Therefore one need not be surprised that some feeling has been created. One case has come within my own experience. An employer employed a number of Belgians. There was difference between these men and their employer. The Belgians found out that the ordinary engineer got time and a half for his overtime and double time for his Sunday work. These men are strangers in this country. They did not want to do anything against the traditions of trade unionism here, and therefore they asked for the same rates. What was the answer of the employer to the man who made a request on their behalf? It was that, in order to punish him for daring to raise the question, he would report him to the Belgian authorities in order that he might be shifted to the trenches in Flanders! These are the kind of things that happen and they raise a very difficult situation indeed. As the right hon. Gentleman has said, the work of an officer of a trade union is by no means a feather-bed job when this kind of thing occurs. As far as the overwhelming number of trade unionists in this country are concerned, they are just as anxious as any man in this House to do their duty and see that, as far as lies in their power, munitions are produced in such quantities as will enable this country to win success over its enemies. I am sorry this feeling has existed. I hope that the Amendments embodied in this Act of Parliament will allay those doubts and suspicions which, to some extent, many of the papers have gone a long way to increase and embitter and in some cases even to create. I believe, too, that the Amendments we have succeeded in putting into this measure will at any rate allay some of the evil spirit which is afloat and bring us to the position in which we shall get what the Minister of Munitions wants as much as any man in this country, namely, an active co-operation between the men in the workshop and those who are responsible for the production of munitions, so that the work may go on smoothly, without the need for martial law or for force, but on the principle of good will. If we can get the men to work with good will there will be no question of objecting either to the productions of France or any other country, and the people of this country will triumph over all.

Question put, and agreed to.

Bill read the third time, and passed.

The remaining Orders were read and postponed.

Whereupon Mr. SPEAKER, pursuant to the Order of the House of the 3rd February, proposed the Question, "That this House do now adjourn."

Question put, and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at Thirteen minutes before Ten o'clock.