La union at the turn of the century most people can be permitted to vote for are candidates once verv five vears for Parliament - and a little more for local government.
Of the things that most directly concern the course of their lives - their job, their wages, neighbourhood is organised - people have no democratic right whatever. This is despite the fact that whether a person has a job or not affects them far more than the abstract right to decide once every five year which Party will misgovern them and which will ignore the Manifesto they were elected on.
If people were entitled to vote on their jobs, their wages, or the functionang of the economy, then necessarily the rights of capital would eliminated. You can have democracy or you have can have the private ownership and control of the means of production. You cannot have both.
Trade unionism has been savagely resisted by capital not only because it affects protits and production. It also has to be resisted because it represents beginning extension democracy out of the realm of pure politics into the field of economy and Support unionism terresents necessarily and inevitably a challenge to the 'right of management to manage' or more precisely of the right owners of capital to dispose of it as they will and regardless of the effect or those who work for them). That basic fight has been going on for over six centuries.
As early as 1351 the Statute oj Labourers denied any workers the right to join together to pursue their common aims. In 1721 it was reaffirmed that 'conspiracy to raise wages' was a criminal offence.
The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 prohibited any collective ¿organisation of workers. The supposed relaxation of these acts in 1824 and 1825 was shown to be meaningless in the famous case at Tolpuddle in 1834.
But the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs shows not simply the brutality of the law but its chiefly arbitrary character. The actual crime involved at Tolpuddle was organising agricultural workers' benevolent fund.
Lne charges technically brought under not simply Common Law but the 1797 Mutiny Act was not directed against trade unions at all but against members of the armed services!
The same patterns continued during the latter part of the nineteenth century by which time the become too powerful to be banned. Acts of Parliament in 1859, 1871 and 1875 specifically gave immunity from LSCU prosecu for Taose peaceful pickets. These laws were then vote in practice overturned by court decisions which declared that while those "imparting information' had the right to do so, anyone alempung to persuade' someone not to cross a picket was acting illegally.
The famous Taff Vale judgement of 1901 solemnly declared that union activity was legal... unions must pay the losses sustained by employers during any strike.
be The right of trade unions to have political funds was ruled illegal by the 1909 Osborne case, 1913 Trade Union Act, changed from 'contracting out' to 'contracting in' by the 1927 Trades Disputes Act, reversed by the 1945 Labour government, and is now under attack again by the Tebof - which bit/King laws.
unions had labour and capital.
organising took away force, not law, always decides proletariat'.
but that dictatorship of capital.
clearest expressions of that reality.
Democracy and capitalism legalisca vy compatible.
today, into of a man like MacGregor.
Police confront strikers during the 1926 general strike
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