The right to picket took another savage blow in the Court of Appeal last week. With the Shrewsbury pickets still languishing in jail, the Court of Appeal upheld by a two-to-one majority the cecision reached by Justice Forbes last November to restrain members of the Islington Tenants Crusade from picketing the offices of property "developers' Prebble's.
The Crusade was launched against the housing rackets that have 'winkled! hundreds of working class families out of the area over the last few years. Now tenants have been restrained by an interim order (interlocutory injunction) from continuing to picket Prebble's offices-and the actual trial will probably not take place for two years. By then, of course, Prebble will have been able to do what he likes.
The grounds on which the Court of Appeal upheld the decision are of particular concern to the labour movement. The Court backed away from the Forbes ruling which made all pickets not directly parts of a trade union dispute illegal. But the effects of the Court of Appeal ruling is that anyone not involved in an industrial dispute who pickets a supermarket, or a government department, or even joins a picket outside a factory in which he/she is not employed, could beradvised' by police to move along on the basis that the owners could get an interim order against them for committing a 'private nuisance'-without any trial taking place, In this case the judges simply decide that the likely outcome of the trial-profit from property speculation vs. workers homes-will be in Prebbles This new attack on picketing seriously undermines a common form of action taken by students and tenants or even housewives who want to pıcket a supermarket over inflated prices. Instead of acting in the interAPPEAL BY ELDON SQUARE ests of the workers who elected it, the Labour Government detends capitalist "legality' to the last dot and comma while the hard won rights of the working class are whittled away. james Drake allowed threshold deals to lapse in November 1974. Since then many groups of workers have included threshold-type demands in their wage claims but most of basic offered.
left over from their last pay settlement. With inflation running at an annual rate
LUCAS
Workers at Lucas Aerospace, Wolverhampton, occupied their factory on 12 May fol lowing management threats of a lock-out if sanctions by 900 despatch workers in pursuit of a monthly indexing system to defend the value of wages against increases in the cost of living were not called off. These were first applied by nearly 16,000 Lucas workers employed in 13 different plants four weeks ago. A national meeting of the Lucas combine shop stewards committee in Birmingham on 14 May pledged Lucas workers to a national strike from 21 May if the attempted lock-out was not withdrawn The Lucas struggle is one of the most militant to break out around demands for the automatic protection of wages against inflation since the Labour Government these have been used simply as "bargaining counters'-being dropped from the claim as soon as existing threshold payments were consolidated and an increase on the But now the Scottish TUC have adopted the demand for a sliding scale of wages based on a cost of living index calculated by the organisations of the working class. And the miners are thinking of re-submitting a claim for a threshold deal that was