TUC and Ben Tillett Betrays the Dublin strikers.
But syndicalism was no answer to the treachery of class-collaborating TU bureaucrats. A rejection of corrupt leadership with no strategy to replace them meant no leadership at all, no political perspective and no solution to the question of the state and its unbending allegiance to the capitalist class. On this rock the Great Unrest foundered and sections of the British ruling class welcomed WWI because of (probably unfounded) fears of its revival. Matters were different in Ireland.

Two more cases that illustrate the treachery of the British TU leaders are Ben Tillett and Arthur Henderson. As Laurence Humphries noted in his review Rebel City by John Newsinger: With Many Dublin workers locked out and their families starving, there was support from British workers who sent £50,000 worth of food parcels to the ITGWU and its supporters. The leadership tried to secure a compromise settlement, but as Newsinger observes, the Dublin employers led by Murphy “did not want to inflict defeat on the ITGWU, but to completely destroy it”. Larkin came to Britain. There was tremendous solidarity support in Manchester. 130 NUR rail union branches called for action. In South Wales, rail workers and dockers went out on unofficial Strike.

The response of the TUC leadership was to head off the movement and they called a special conference. Newsinger criticises Larkin for agreeing to the TUC conference and feels that unofficial action would have resolved the situation. He says: “The union leaders would have been carried along by the momentum of the movement.” But he produces no evidence to back this assertion.

On 9 December 1913 the TUC Special Conference met and predictably there was a sell-out and betrayal of the Dublin strikers. As Newsinger comments, talking about the reason for calling the conference: “In reality it was to decide what was to be done about Larkin.”

Ben Tillett, the dockers leader who Larkin had considered a fellow supporter, “wielded the knife that struck the fatal blow”. This final decision not to support the Dublin workers led to defeat and intimidation with the full weight of the state used against the ITGWU’s members. [2]

Tillett went on to support WWI and denounced those Labour leaders like Keir Hardy and Ramsey McDonald who opposed the war and failed to as act as recruiting sergeants for the killing fields of France, showing his essential Empire loyalism. So the treachery of the left bureaucrat should come as no surprise. Arthur Henderson was another matter, no one expected him to do any other as a right winger but what this former trade union leader and now leader of the Labour party did astonished even his closest followers. He entered the cabinet in 1914 under Asquith, precisely to act as a recruiting sergeant for the war, then became a member of the small War Cabinet under Lloyd George in 1916 and approved the death sentences on the 1916 Easter Rising leaders, including on fellow socialist and trade unionist James Connolly. Reportedly he led the cheering in the House of Commons when it was reported that the executions had begun.Griffiths argued in favour of a dual monarchy for Britain and Ireland.