Halo, Halo

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VE : 1i DIS SHE Sor 2i5: L°? iniser 23 92:0dle Life. Lont A LETTER in last week's Socialist Organiser pointed to the role of the monarchy as a pillar of class oppress. ion. Well, now you've got another reason to aboliah them as soon as possible.

Prince Andrew in being trained to drop nuclear bombe from helicopters. It seems like a case of get rid of them before they get rid of us! MEMBERS of the Russian Orthodox Church are reportedly incensed at a novel decision of their generally lugubrious patriarchs.

They have chosen 1981 to canonise Czar Nicholas II of Russia, together with his family and personal retinue - in all some 8,000 reactionaries who fell victim to the socialist revolution of October 1917.

Among the new 'saints' to be worshipped are the Czar's former footman, cook and maid - who no doubt little suspected that their menial labours would be so fulsomely (if belatedly) praised.

The decision seems to be a firm break from any old-fashioned notion that saints should lead particularly self-denying or moral lives.

Indeed, there nOW appears little reason to confine the list to Christians at all: why should Czar Nicholas' equally bloodthirsty fellow-despots be excluded?

A provisional list of worthy additions should include at least the Emperor Bokassa, Mussolini, Hitler and & Chinese saint, Chiang Kai Shek: and let's not forget Joseph Stalin, whose brutal persecutions did more than almost anything to promote the survival of the Church in Russia.

20% consternation asthetattered troops sat down amongst them, but, much impressed, the Dean and Chapter took up the plight of the unemployed with the City Council.

This incident was typical of the imaginative tactics used in the 'Right to Work' agitation by a young member of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, Ernest Bevin.

Harsh

He was a firm socialist. As he gaid of unemployment at the AGM of the Bristol Right to Work 'Committee that year, "nothing but a complete social and economic revolution is going to solve the problem. We must feed the people in order that men (sic) may be strong enough physically and mentally to carry out that revolution which will come at no distant date:"

Such • admirable views were the product of a tough upbringing in the harsh conditions of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As Bevin himself said, "I had to work at ten years of age while my employer's son went to the University until he was twenty. I was taught to bow to the squire and touch my hat to the parson; my employer's son was not"

"All these things produced within me an intense hatred, a hatred which has caused me to organise for my fellows and direct my mind to a policy to give my class power to control their own destiny and Anathema 1981 is the centenary of the birth of this young socialist agitator. It has already been celebrated by a television documentary, this book specifically commissioned by Britain's biggest union and the unveiling of a plaque by James Prior and William Hicks a she Departhonour Berin.!

Such glorification of a socialist trade unionist might seem strange. However, as this book which details "the amazing story of the unskilled labourer who became a great trade union leader and world statesman", points out, the young Bevin changed a little bit in the process. As they say, he worked his passage.

By the 1930's his earlier sentiments were anathema to him. The man who had wanted to give his class the power to control society was determined to ensure that they would not even control their own unions. The man who had believed in revolution insisted that within the TGWU communists should be treated in the same way as Fascists.

To a journalist who pointed to the discomfort of the public in a bus strike, Bevin barked, 'They've got to walk but I'm fighting for my life and the life of my union and I'm not going to stop until I've crushed them once and for all flat finished".

"'Them" referred to the strikers, the workers who paid Bevin's salary, the people on whose backs he had clambered to power.

It had ben a relatively short but brutal and actionpacked ride. In 1911, at the age of 30, Bevin became a full-time official. He clambered up the ranks in the Dockers' Union, becoming no.2 to Ben Tillet.

In. 1914 Bevin was still enough of a socialist to oppose the war, but by 1919, as he nudged the Triple Alliance away from confrontation with Lloyd George, the Daily Telegraph could commeht, "Hitherto he has been regarded as an extremist but he has played a great part in bringing about a settlement of one of the most threatening industrial disputes the country has seen "

Beris mas a brilliant ised defic.

FOES I IT SETE IS 1921 he played an mmportant part in the desertion of the miners on the infamous

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Socialist Organiser, Thursday22nd October, 1981 Page 11

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