Harold J. Laski

For in any meeting of church and state, the latter will assert its paramountcy; and a church has no alternative but to deny that assertion.

Whenever, for example, it has interfered with the claims of churches to lead their own life, conflict has been the inevitable outcome.

I have denied the right of the state to control the internal life of such bodies; and I have sought to show the limits of liberty where that life has ramifications outside their membership.

Such a discussion of the relation of trade unionism to the state, illustrates, I think, the general problem of the approach to freedom of association in the political sphere.

Any such Procrustes’ bed of definition as this principle suggests seems to me, therefore, a quite wanton and foolish interference with freedom.

In 1914 the unions would never have deemed it their business to concern themselves with the bank rate and credit policy; today they realize that these matters lie at the heart of their problems.

A generation ago, this would have been dismissed as “an insolent interference with the rights of management”; today it is obvious that upon no other terms can the function of the trade union be fulfilled.

Many matters are regarded today as normally and naturally within the sphere of the trade unions which a generation ago, even a decade ago, most men would have insisted were in nowise their concern.

A trade union, moreover, is a living body; and no law has ever been successful in coping with the growth of living things by legal promulgations upon the fact of growth.

You cannot exclude any part of the economic realm from the trade union sphere.

You cannot say that trade unions ought not to concern themselves with foreign policy since this is intimately bound up with economic policy which, in turn, is the chief factor in the determination of the conditions of employment.

The state, therefore, is entitled to define that sphere and to limit the activities of trade unions to matters that come within it.

We should resent it if a football club passed resolutions upon the foreign policy of a government; and it is in the same way illegitimate for a trade union to deal with matters outside its sphere.

I cannot, therefore, agree that the community is entitled, on any terms, to put its convenience first, and the workers’ freedom afterwards.

The community never gains, in the long run, from work performed by men who labour under a sense of injustice.

An electrician cannot suddenly become a barrister, as the latter can suddenly become a journalist; and if it is a matter of hundreds, or even thousands of men, the compulsion upon them to continue in the vocation for which they have been…

The number of those in any society who have a genuine choice, at any given time, of alternative occupations is notably small.

It seems to me quite definitely a denial of liberty for which no justification can be found to say that men shall work on terms they think utterly unjust; and the argument that, if they do not like those terms, they can find other work…

We respect freedom of association by leaving it at liberty to insist that the proposed solution is unjust, while we protect the public interest in continuity of service by insisting that the right to strike shall not operate until the…

It can be done, first, by limiting the profits private ownership can make in any industry of vital importance, either absolutely so that the owners are debenture-holders merely, and not the residuary legatees of any profit made, or…

The business of the state, therefore, is not to prohibit, but to find how best to make the use of the strike the final and not the first instrument in conflict.

It is, I suggest, obvious folly to attempt legislation which cannot be enforced at the critical point of urgency.

I should, further, urge that a strike to secure a national agreement for uniform conditions in a particular industry as against a variety of local agreements was a justifiable enterprise if that end could not be attained in any other way.

Again, a body of miners might, in my judgment, justifiably strike if they believed that some part of a pit to which they were to be sent was in fact too dangerous for coal to be hewed there without an alteration of the physical conditions…

So, also, I should argue that the Seamen’s Union would be justified in striking, to see to it, if it could, that every vessel putting to sea carries with it wireless equipment.