for the Liberal Party, Darby attempted to break a 24-hour tram and bus strike in his electorate, seeing the Tramways Union as part of Labor's "servile state". Although denounced by strikers as a "strike breaker", most commentators supported Darby's efforts. A further bus and tram strike in January 1947 brought Darby's Manly Emergency Services Committee into operation and there were physical conflicts with communists from Sydney. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, seven public transport strikes occurred in Sydney, but each strike was weakened by the many individuals who responded to Darby's appeal for motorists to offer lifts to stranded commuters. Breaking strikes won Darby approval in his electorate and among his parliamentary colleagues, acts that he increasingly saw as fighting the enemy of communism within. Darby's preoccupation with the communist menace, and success of his "interventions", encouraged him to mount 'Operation Potato' in March 1947, after 6,000 Sydney waterside workers "refused to convert to a 53-hour week again", and he used volunteers to unload food ships under police protection. That helped Darby to return with an increased majority in that year's state election. As the Cold War conflict intensified, Darby began to make his mark as an anti-communist, believing that the "Free World" was threatened "by Soviet Communist tyranny and its agents worldwide". His contacts with European émigrés escaping communist regimes in the postwar period led to him becoming the founding president of the Captive Nations Council of New South Wales in 1959. From the late 1960s until the late 1970s Darby attended of conferences of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in Bangkok in 1969, Tokyo in 1970, Manila in 1971 and Rio de Janeiro in 1975. In 1982 he attended the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations conference in London and a Captive Nations Committee meeting in Washington DC in 1983. After losing pre-selection for Manly in 1961, he resigned from the Liberal Party. He successfully contested the seat in the 1962 and 1965 State election elections as an Independent, and was readmitted to the Liberal Party in August 1966. Darby also campaigned against juvenile hooliganism, poker machines, and the fluoridation of Sydney's water supply. He campaigned for the introduction of daylight saving, and the development of Bathurst as the new capital of New South Wales. From 1960, support for Taiwan became another of Darby's causes, along with support for the Australian role in the Vietnam War. By 1973 he