Lawrence Daly's Speech at the Scottish T.u.c

The Scottish Miner reports: "Only eight of the 450 delegates at Congress voted against the Scottish miners! resolution which called for an immediate halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and for the withdrawal of all foreign troops. Delegates were hushed as Mr. Daly declared that trade unionists had the moral duty to denounce again and again the brutal inhumaity being inflicted by the Americans, ‘After all the cosy explanations have been made, after all the appeals to political expediency are exhausted, the simple fact still remains: The armed forces of the greatest capitalist. power on earth are committing the most fiendish, bestinl atrocities since Auschwitz, Belsen and Buchenwald. But unlike the German people, none of us can claim that dwe did not knowe "'The evidence has been absolutely clear from pictures on press and television of prisoners being dragged by the feet behind American tanks, of children being roasted alive by napalm bombs, of Americans instructing their troops on the use of torture.’ Mr. Daly said that the foremost leaders of a country which has the capacity to destroy us all several times over were obviously incapable of realising their crimes. He recalled that only a day or two ago, the American Secretary of State for war, ex-Fords' boss, Robert McNamara, had spoken with ‘unusual heat! before a committee of the U.S. Congress, McNamara had revealed that the U.S. had dropped nearly three times more bombs in Vietnam in one month than in the whole of the Korean war. ‘His unusual heat! was engendered not by moral indignation - but by the suggestion that the U.S. Air Force wasn't dropping enough bombs,‘ said Mr. Daly. "Of America's offer of ‘unconditional negotiations,' he declared: 'How would the people of London, Coventry, Greenock and Glasgow have felt if Hitler had suggested we should go to the conference table while bombs were dropping on their towns and cities? We can't blame the victim of the atrocities in Vietnam if they react in the same way as we would do ourselves.’ And he added: 'The Buddhist challenge has indicated once and for all that the puppet regime in South Vietnam would not last for a single day without the support of American military power.' He ended to thunderous applause: 'We mst speak up against what is being done in our name.!"