Scab kills picket: ca a nationa strike!
Socialist Press1979 1979-01-24Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 1 →
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Amid one of the most frenzied and coordinated witch-hunts ever conducted by the British press and mass media, 28-year old Bob Watson was run down and killed last Friday by a scab lorry driver who refused to stop at an Aberdeen picket line.
Two days earlier a mob of workers at Cadbury's Bourneville factory in Birmingham had been worked up into a hysterical and violent attack on a peaceful picket of striking lorrydrivers-to loud applause from the press and employers.
The gutter press coverage of the present round of pay disputes, and in particular its onslaught on picketing has been calculated to provoke outbursts like this from the most reactionary and confused layers of the working class and, most especially from the middle class.
But rather than take the obvious step of defending and strengthening the picket Strike official Kitson ines against such attacks, last week saw TGWU leaders retreat under pressure, to the point of issuing the now famous "code of practice" through Regional offices.
This represents an attempt by TGWU officials to impose conditions and limitations on strike committees which have until now run the strike with an extraordinary efficiency and discipline.
But the impact of this step lies more in the fact that it tacitly concedes that picketing is a "problem " to be "tackled" than in the provisions contained in the code itself.
The death of Bob Watson and the attack on the picket line at Bourneville are matters of concern to the entire trade union movement and the TGWU in particular.
The TGWU leadership must be pressed to call a national strike of its entire membership in protest against the killing and to make it absolutely clear that control of the movement of supplies for the duration of the lorry drivers' strike remains in the hands of the strike committees in each area.
Meanwhile the fact that the Road Haulage Association continues to refuse to concede the TGWU demand for a £65/35 hour week highlights the criminal exploitation of haulage drivers by these cut-throat cowboy firms.
The TGWU must be forced to take up a serious fight to force the nationalisation of these firms, without compensation under workers' management as part of a planned, nationalised transport system.
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SOCIALIST PA 'ESS, Wednesday 24 January, 1979