The demand of the Shipbuilding Employers' Federation that the wages of the shipyard workers shall be reduced a further 10s. per week, raises once more the problem of how far are the employers to be permitted to go in their steady lowering of wages, before any united action taken to challenge their continual encroachments.

For sheer callousness and brutality the action of the shipyard bosses in launching this further demand at their workers is surely unparalleled in Labour history. First it was a demand for a reduction of 6s. per week immediately after the defeat of the miners last year. When this demand was made, the Press simultaneously launched a campaign to emphasise what reduced labour costs meant to the coal markets and how that factor would stimulate trade. The same arguments were used in reference to shipbuilding and the atmosphere created favourable to accepting the 6s. cut in two instalments.

When this was finally accepted without any resistance being offered, the employers soon worked for the 12½ per cent. to be taken off shipbuilders' wages. After lengthy negotiations a settlement was agreed on that the 12½ per cent. should come off in three instalments: again no effective resistance was offered and the very week that the last instalment was taken off, saw the shipyard unions in conference with the employers to discuss the demand of the latter that a further 26/6 should be taken off the shipyard workers' wages. This was the last straw, and on a ballot being taken there was a large majority in favour of refusing to accept this reduction and a lockout of all shipyard workers took place. This was contemporary with the engineers' lockout on managerial functions and, whilst it was known that all previous reductions had afterwards been forced on the engineering unions, and whatever terms were arranged so far as the 26/6 was concerned would afterwards be forced on the engineering unions, no attempt was made to combine these two forces.

Last November a notice appeared in an important capitalist newspaper, to the effect that Mr. W. M. Citrine, Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, was about to write a series of articles exposing the activities of Communists in the trade unions.

Shortly afterward, a series of articles commenced in "The Labour Magazine," entitled, "Democracy or Disruption," by W. M. Citrine. They are now being used all over the country as the basis of the attack on the Minority Movement. The articles have been written at some length with the purpose of putting "paid" to the Minority Movement.

We are sorry that Mr. Citrine has had all his trouble for nothing, for the representation at our annual conference, our increasing individual membership and increasing circulation of our various trade union papers, are all indications that in spite of Citrine's attack and his control of the trade union machine, the Minority Movement was never more alive.

The trade unionists who pay Mr. Citrine his £750 a year are, however, entitled to demand to know why all this time, money and energy, have been spent by the Secretary of the T.U.C. in attacking revolutionary workers (at the same time, of course, he was hand-in-glove with Mond and his associates), instead of using his position to help reorganise the trade union movement so that it may more effectively fight capitalism, and ultimately become strong enough to participate actively in its revolutionary overthrow.

The October Revolution in Russia in 1917 sent an electric thrill through the war-weary workers of the world. In our lifetime, the taunt of the capitalists, such as Churchill, that the workers are "not fit to govern" has been hurled back at them with a rebound that day by day is having its revolutionizing effect all over the world.

On the ruins and decadence of tsardom, out of a backward agricultural country, workers and peasants, under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by Comrades Lenin and Stalin, have built up a new, powerful Socialist country that has to be reckoned with by every capitalist government the world over.

This transformation has been wrought despite every conceivable obstacle and difficulty, from famine and ruin to carefully prepared wrecking, organized and financed by counter-revolutionaries from abroad. It has been done on the unshakeable basis of loyalty to revolutionary principles and faith in the working class.

It was but natural that the October Revolution should have exercised a tremendous influence on the world labor movement. The contrast between the revolutionary conquest of power in Russia, where alone the Bolsheviks, under Lenin's leadership, had a consistently revolutionary line against the imperialist war, was in such marked contrast to the policy of the reformist leaders in other countries.

The formation of Communist Parties out of the scattered revolutionary sects, the creation of the Communist International, giving for the first time a centralized leadership to the class struggle all over the world; impetus to national revolutionary struggles in the colonial countries - these were events of historic importance. But the influence of the Social-Democratic leaders was still strong, and their cunning and demagogy knew no bounds. Platonic references to the Russian Revolution were the order of the day, and always with the aim of dampening down and diverting the revolutionary struggle in their own countries into the safe capitalist channels of parliamentary democracy and the denial of the armed conquest of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Social-Democracy referred to the fact that tsarism was reactionary; there was no freedom, no legal labor movement in Russia; revolution was the only course for the workers to take. Not so in the western capitalist democratic countries. There, parliament stood waiting to be captured, and through this, Socialism could be built.

This "easy path" to Socialism prevailed with decisive sections of the masses who, at the same time, were undoubtedly ready to defend the Soviet Union. This was clearly seen in the "Hands-Off-Russia" movements that exercised great influence in the capitalist countries, in the strike of London dockers on "The Jolly George", and in the international solidarity displayed during the famine of 1921-22.

In the name of the Executive Committee of the Communist International it is my duty on its behalf to pay its tribute to the memory of one of our most devoted, loyal and brillant Communist leaders, and in equal measure to pay its tribute to those score of other British Communists, who have, with Comrade Fox at their head, so courageously distinguished themselves by their coolness, bravery and discipline in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming odds.

In the case of Comrade Fox there was no economic reason why he should join our Party, the Communist Party. He came from a deep sense of intellectual conviction, and from the moment he took out his Party card, his life was dedicated to the cause of Communism. Whether as an author, a journalist, or as an instructor of. our factory groups in various parts of London, Comrade Fox has undoubtedly influenced the thoughts of thousands of working men and women, and also a big section of the professional classes of this country.

Comrades, we do not meet here as mourners for whom all is darkness and grief. We meet here as comrades in arms of those comrades whom we knew so intimately and so well, who have given that most precious thing that man can give - life - to the cause they believed in, and for which they were prepared to make the supreme sacrifice. We pledge ourselves to their families, their wives, their sweethearts, and in many cases, unfortunately, their children, that we will avenge their death, that we will show ourselves worthy of their trust and of their remarkably high example.

Friends of Spain in this audience who are not members of the Communist Party will pardon me if I refer with pride to the achievements that have been carried out by all Sections of the Communist International in support of the Spanish government. Without the existence of this International of steeled and. disciplined revolutionary fighters, the material and moral forms of aid sent to Spain would have been impossible of accomplishment. The dream of Marx and Engels has been realized - that dream which dominated them when they formed the First International - that one day there would arise a really single world party, that could mobilize the best of the people in every country to come to the assistance of comrades in other lands fighting a deadly enemy.

Comrades, the International Brigade, now covering itself with such honor and glory in Spain, is a real people's army. It is an army composed of the best anti-fascist fighters of all countries. We are proud tonight to declare that 750 young men from this country now form a British battalion of the International Brigade, and we pledge ourselves that within the course of the next two or three days the 750 will become a thousand.

The 750 boys who have gone from this country have gone without any fuss; it has all been done very quietly, no press photographers to see them off, but they got there, and when they got there they went to Madrid where the fighting has to be done, where the real danger spots lie. In going they have been fortified by the knowledge that they take with them the good wishes of every sincere and genuine anti-fascist in this country. Labor men and Socialists, Communists and liberals, doctor and writer, docker and intellectual, have all found it possible to sink certain of their own party and political aims in a united endeavor to defeat the common foe - fascism.

It would be a crime against the whole future perspective of working class advance, a crime against the whole future perspective of peace, if that single idea now dominating men who, in thousands, look death in the face in Spain - to bring about the defeat of fascism - did not also become the driving force of all our efforts to build up a united labor movement and fighting People's Front of all the democratic British people.

Comrades, we take legitimate pride in what comrades like General Kleber, Ludwig Renn, Hans Beimler, André Marty have said of the work of the British battalion in the Brigade. General Kleber has declared that when there is a particularly tight corner calling for coolness and courage, he has only to ask for the British Section, and men go immediately to that tight corner; and when that happens he feels safe that the objective they are to defend will be held to the very last. Their coolness and bravery have endeared them to all who have come into contact with them, and especially has the British Brigade inspired the Spanish militia who fight alongside them in a way that in life itself - in all to many cases death - has shown that international solidarity is not a First of May slogan, but a living reality for the best of our people.

The British Brigade has retrieved the honorable traditions of the British labor movement; it has upheld the fine democratic traditions that have characterized the fight on behalf of liberty. When the great poet Byron went to Greece to fight for liberty; when in a later period Comrade Brailsford fought for liberty in Greece - these are the examples our British comrades are following today in the conditions of our time.

The dispute began when Battalion political commissar Walter Tapsell claimed that the promotions of Scots George Aitken (to Brigade Commissar) and Jock Cunningham (to Battalion commander) had left the two men isolated from regular Brigaders. Tapsell wrote that, "Aitken's temperament has made him distrusted and disliked by the vast majority of the British Battalion who regard him as being personally ambitious and unmindful of the interests of the Battalion and the men." Meanwhile, Cunningham, "fluctuates violently between hysterical bursts of passion and is openly accused by Aitken of lazing about the Brigade headquarters doing nothing." Assistant Brigade Commissar at Albacete, Dave Springhall, weighed in, claiming that the Battalion's entire leadership structure had collapsed under the pressures brought on by defeat at Brunete.

With an amicable resolution impossible in Spain, all parties involved were summoned back to London for a meeting with CPGB leader Harry Pollitt. At its conclusion, Pollitt told Aitken, Cunningham and Bert Williams (a political commissar with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion) to remain in Britain, while Fred Copeman (commander of the British Battalion) and Tapsell were to return to Spain. Aitken and Cunningham, though barely on speaking terms themselves, were apoplectic at the decision, and the former wrote a 10-page letter of "emphatic protest" to the CPGB, in response to this monstrous injustice".

Within a matter of months, both had resigned from the Party, and the leadership of the British Battalion had been radically reshaped. As part of its restructuring, the Battalion became an official part of the republican army, meaning popular six month terms of service were now prohibited. Disputes at the top of the hierarchy had undermined soldier morale and damaged the reputation of the Brigades on a level that the smattering of desertions at the bottom never could.

The Communist Party supports the war, believing it to be a just war. To stand aside from this conflict, to contribute only revolutionary-sounding phrases while the fascist beasts ride roughshod over Europe, would be a betrayal of everything our forebears have fought to achieve in the course of long years of struggle against capitalism.