Eighty years ago this week the Labour Party moves right and the Bank of England moves left
After the crippling coal strikes and in the midst of a strike by 20,000 Belfast shipyard workers over the imprisonment of five men, who had organised a sympathy strike of aircraft workers, the Labour Party leaders spotted the need to distance themselves from workers who put their own interests ahead of the war effort. Ernest Bevin, the minister of Labour, announced that "incitement and fomenting" strikes would be made a criminal offence under the wartime Defence Regulations. The TUC supported this fully and denounced unofficial strikes as blows, "struck in the back at their comrades in the armed forces who are now steeling themselves for a life-and-death struggle on the European Continent." The police raided the offices of Trotskyite organisations across Britain including the Fourth International and the Revolutionary Communist Party. None represented any material threat to national security, but the operation had the double benefit of further flagging govern
