fellow Labour MP opposed an order which allowed the Government to choose which jobs the unemployed should take; he look forward to further orders "dealing with rentiers and spivs". Capital punishment On foreign policy, Daines joined a group of left-wing Labour MPs in opposing the ending of the British mandate in Palestine without creating independent Jewish and Arab states in line with the United Nations partition plan. He supported a moratorium on capital punishment, and broke the whip to insist on disagreement with the House of Lords after the Government conceded to Lords opposition; he was later to be a sponsor of Sydney Silverman's bill to abolish the death penalty. Daines was a witness in a 1948 libel action brought by Bessie Braddock over a story in the Bolton Evening News claiming she had "danced a jig on the floor of the House" in "a sorry degradation of democratic government"; he said that Braddock appeared to cross the floor of the House reluctantly (Braddock lost the case). He asserted that he was speaking for the Co-operative movement in April 1949 when he opposed the Agricultural Marketing Bill, which he described as 'capitalist-syndicalist'. Daines supported an amendment to remove the veto of the Parliament of Northern Ireland on eventual reunification of Ireland in May 1949, against the Government whip. Dock strike With a constituency near the docks, Daines was brought into the 1949 unofficial dock strike. He denounced the strike as the product of a "wicked conspiracy cleverly rigged up", making it clear that the conspiracy was the work of the Communists. A week later he named the Communist secretary of the stevedore's union as using the power of the strike to further the claims of the Communist-controlled Canadian Seamen's Union. Resale price maintenance In June 1950, Daines seconded a motion calling for an end to resale price maintenance, arguing that price maintenance stopped the consumer benefiting from reduced production. He was an early supporter of reform of Parliamentary hours, speaking in July 1951 of how "fantastic and stupid" it was to discuss essential legislation at 7'o'clock in the morning. He faced a determined opponent at the 1951 election in the shape of Dundas Hamilton who had been an amateur boxer and wore boxing gloves to his adoption meeting. However, Daines was re-elected with his majority reduced to 7,359. In October 1952 he had some negative publicity when his wife obtained