Word: britisher
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Britain's Labor government and British labor were heading for a showdown. For more than two years, the trade unions had grudgingly gone along with the government's policy of virtually freezing wages & prices. But when devaluation of the pound thawed out some prices and sent them climbing upwards, the unions' rank & file rebelled. Britain's T.U.C. (Trades Union Congress) presented new demands: higher wages, more government subsidies to keep food prices down, additional taxes to cut down business profits...
...T.U.C. leaders ruefully gave in, agreed to a freeze of wage levels for one year. The T.U.C. has no authority to make its decisions binding on its members, but it looked as if most of its unions would stick to the agreement. British labor was still learning the hard lesson that Britain's Socialist government could be a good deal tougher than the bosses with whom Ernie Bevin bargained in his trade-union days...
...only show of strength which Great Britain had staged to impress China's Communists, whose armies had swept up to Hong Kong's borders. Across the harbor from Hong Kong island, on the flinty, weatherworn mountain of South China's Kowloon peninsula (which the British rule under a 99-year lease), men of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry and the King's Own Scottish Borderers were training to the peak of battle efficiency. Said a brisk regimental commander: "We know our enemy, and we are ready...
Delicacy & Common Sense. This did not mean that the British, who are determined at all cost to carry on trade with Red China, wanted to pick a fight with the Communists if they could possibly avoid it. "We don't want to provoke the Communists," said a political adviser to the Hong Kong government. "We are delicately balancing many factors and trying to exercise common sense...
...rocky island which the Chinese contemptuously called a "penguin's nest" has become a traders' and tourists' delight. Despite civil war on the mainland and the Nationalist blockade of China's coast, Hong Kong's trade this year may reach an alltime high. Daily, British and American ships slip into Hong Kong's harbor; nightly, huge motor junks, heavy with Western merchandise, weigh anchor for the ports of Red China...