fight it out.
SETBACK This policy received a setback, however, when the Court of Appeal became frightened by the rail dispute and ruled that the unions were not legally liable for the actions of individual workers. i he State was forced into a situation that in order to make the Act at all legally enforceable it would have to move against these individuals. But now the law is right back where the Government wanted it; they can fine unions but do not have to'imprison individual workers. THE T.U.C.
It is the trade union leadership which again takes the limelight. They now have to make the The dockers were released not because they had purged their contempt or because of the Jones-Aldington report, or even because of the earlier House of Lords decision in the Heatons case. They were released because, in the words of Guardian legal correspondent Michael Zander, "there is a realisation that in the present climate the law cannot be enforced". They were released because increasingly large sections of the working class were beginning to reject the right of the capitalists to legislate in their name, quite literally taking the law into their own hands' and forcing the Government to beat a hasty The first response came within minutes of the announcement of the committal order made by the NIRC, when dockers in the Royal Group in London walked out. By the evening they had been joined by men in the other main London docks and in Hull, with Liverpool dockers already out in a separate dispute declaring that they would stay out until the five were released. And on Friday night newspaper production in Fleet Street was held up while electricians held a meeting about the jailings, although they finally decided to return to work. But in the next two (To nane
Below: John Weal explains how