Concerns
While telegrams of congratulation continued to flood in to Colt, the British Productivity Council was sceptical of its effectiveness. The Council pointed to the difference between productivity and output, and stated that each individual firm must consider what would be appropriate in its circumstances depending on its "agreements between management and working people".
Trades Union Congress general secretary George Woodcock, while welcoming the "very good spirit" of the campaign, said that the trade unions would not foster it, and that some unions would strongly oppose it. The Amalgamated Engineering Union shop stewards at Colt's factory in Havant carefully said that workers could work the extra half-hour without pay, but that it would not prejudice any decision taken by the AEU national executive. Confederation of British Industry President John Davies thought the campaign could be a kind of window-dressing such as he had recently criticised, but thought it should be encouraged because of the effect it might have on peoples' minds.
Contrasting with the generally positive reaction from politicians, Conservative MP Enoch Powell described the campaign as silly and dangerous. He observed "I am not accusing the Government of having suborned those Surrey typists, but the Government could not have wished for a better reinforcement for their campaign to instil into the people of Britain the conviction that it is all their own fault".
Read more about this topic: I'm Backing Britain
Famous quotes containing the word concerns:
“A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History in the making is a very uncertain thing. It might be better to wait till the South American republic has got through with its twenty-fifth revolution before reading much about it. When it is over, some one whose business it is, will be sure to give you in a digested form all that it concerns you to know, and save you trouble, confusion, and time. If you will follow this plan, you will be surprised to find how new and fresh your interest in what you read will become.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)
“By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.”
—Frances Fitzgerald (b. 1940)