28.03.1996

World for workers only

From 'The Workers’ Weekly', paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, March 26 1926

More than a million workers were represented by the 883 delegates who attended the Minority Movement’s Council of Action in Battersea last Sunday.

It was, despite many difficulties, so much the largest conference ever held by the Minority Movement that it must be seriously reckoned with in the forthcoming crisis.

Resolutions were adopted formulating plans for the improvement alike of the organisation, the unity and the determination of the working class movement.

These included the setting up of factory and pit committees, the organisation of Workers’ Defence Corps, and a demand that soldiers and naval ratings should be given the right to refuse strike service ...

S Saklatvala MP greeted the delegates ...

He declared that British trades’ unionism had no hopes while British imperialism lasted.

British imperialism, he said, means 16 million coloured human beings exploited and worked under slave conditions in mines, iron and steel works ... of the British Empire, and the Minority Movement will have to take action to stop this exploitation.

“In these eastern territories where coloured labour is hopelessly exploited and literally starved to death, when through slave regulations natives are working a 10-hour day for 6d or 8d [about 3p] a day, I say the Union Jack to these victims is nothing but a symbol of robbery and murder” (loud cheers).