The Angry Ones

HEY NONNY NO ! trilled the Tory Daily Mail one morning last week. After the bitterest winter in 50 years, daffodils were blooming in London's parks, and government officials reported with relief that the unemployment rate had dropped, from 3.9% to 3.1%, for the first time in more than six months. Their jubilation was short-lived. In a rite of spring such as Britain has not witnessed since the Depression, more than 5,000 jobless workers converged on London to protest their plight, touching off an ugly, rock-throwing battle at the very door of Parliament.

Raising the Flag. It all began peacefully enough with a banner-waving parade toward Westminster,, where workers' leaders were determined to carry personal protests to their M.P.s. Awkwardly at first, many fingering the cloth caps that are the traditional badge of the British workingman, they stood talking until the House of Commons' big Central Lobby was jammed, while a surging mob of workers still outside jostled impatiently to get through St. Stephen's doorway.

When 500 hastily summoned foot and mounted police tried to force them back, the protest demonstration exploded into a savage, three-hour melee provoked partly by Communists in the crowd. Crying "Fascists" and "Gestapo,'' the workers dropped lighted cigarettes into police horses' mouths, tried to drag the cops from their mounts, hurled horse manure at them. Some young workers climbed onto the stone figures around the entrance, and one Communist agitator even hauled up a Red flag. When a police cordon forced them away from the buildings after six charges, hundreds of demonstrators staged a sitdown strike in the road.

The crowd included kilted Scotsmen and old-age pensioners, apprentices, mill girls and grizzled steelworkers. Most came from the northern shipbuilding and steelmaking cities of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, where the misery of the 1930s is not forgotten. Last week, by contrast with the hunger marches of that era, most arrived by train or bus; some even came by plane. Said a Scottish miner: "We are not hungry men asking for food. We are angry men asking for self-respect." Getting into Politics. They pointed out that though warm weather has boosted employment in homebuilding and heavy construction, the actual total of unemployed (702,000) in Britain was still 250,000 higher than in the previous March, and was actually rising in the worst-hit northern areas. Another rally next day by some 5,000 teachers demanding a wage raise showed that disenchantment with Harold Macmillan's Conservative government is even more widespread. It was far too early to predict the impact of all this on the coming elections, which will probably take place next year. But Macmillan hardly welcomed the demonstrations on top of all the other recent bad news: three by-election reverses in a fortnight, and a new Gallup poll report on voter preference showing that the Labor Party holds a record 16.5% lead over the Tories.

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