I want to say a word about industrial relations in this industry. This takes my mind back nearly 20 years when, fresh from the University, inexperien… - Hugh Gaitskell
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I want to say a word about industrial relations in this industry. This takes my mind back nearly 20 years when, fresh from the University, inexperienced but keen, I started my earning career by lecturing in a small mining town... That was in 1927 just after the end of the coal strike. I do not know that I taught the miners much in the way of economics, but they taught me a great deal. They taught me what economic feudalism was. They taught me what the naked exercise of arbitrary economic power meant. They taught me what it was to be victimised... They taught me what was the reality of economic life.
I was a witness of two civil wars and their ghastly and tragic consequences, and I learnt, as never before, to value the freedom of British political traditions.
[T]he fundamental objective and criterion by which policy must be judged [is] the achievement of Economic Equality... [W]ithout it Labour policy becomes merely opportunist, distinguishable only from the policies of other parties by the suggestion of attractive means to 'Prosperity', a greater humanitarianism, and, as some would have it, far less favourable circumstances in which to take action... A failure to advance in the direction of that ideal [of social justice] is bound to appear little short of betrayal.
While prepared to fight for the democratic ideals as such and for the ideal of collective security as such there is little to attract us in fighting merely to preserve the territorial integrity of the British Empire.
