New leaders needed to defeat Tories

180 delegates and visitors, representing a wide range of unions, cuts campaigns and Labour Parties, attended Saturday’s Birmingham conference of the Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement.

“Moss Evans is brought into friendly chats with BL boss Michael Edwardes because he starts, like Edwardes, from the need to preserve capitalism”.

In this way Tony Richardson from the organising committee of the Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement opened its one-day conference on July 5 by highlighting the role played by the reformist trade union and Labour leaders.

“The crisis is not some kind of natural disaster in which we are ‘all in it together’. It is a crisis of a specific system of production for profit”, he went on.

Opposed

A society organised on the basis of exploitation and private profit cannot be planned. And the interests of the exploiters and the exploited are not united but opposed to one another.

To drive up the rate of profit for the employer means to drive up the rate of exploitation of the working class. This is why:

“There is no difference between arguing for import controls and arguing for speed-up on the lines. In each case it means fighting to increase employers’ profits at workers’ expense”.

Richardson went on to expose the twin attacks embodied in the Tory policy of high interest rates.

“Money does not make money: only the exploitation of workers increases capital. The 17% interest rate must be extracted from the working class”.

On the other hand the Daily Telegraph among others had underlined the Tory strategy of using the interest rate as a means of forcing employers to hold down wage settlements and attack their workers in order to survive.

Resistance

Echoing this, Michael Edwardes was now forcing the pace of attacks in BL’s component suppliers—Lucas and Adwest.

But even with unemployment rocketing towards two million the Tories were meeting growing resistance from the working class, whose readiness to fight runs time and again into conflict with the timidity of union leaders in Steel, BL and the public services.

The CDLM conference, concluded Richardson, was designed as an arena within which workers could discuss the independent programme and what kind of new political leadership that are necessary to lead the struggle to defeat the Tories.

Debate on policy

The line of the main conference resolution was challenged by two counter-resolutions from the Workers Power group, and by an amendment from the Socialist Labour Group, British section of the Parity Commission.

The speaker proposing the Workers Power resolution “For a Revolutionary Rank and File Movement” declared that the CDLM programme was “wrong and inadequate” on the question of women, in demanding nationalisation under workers management, and in calling for a General Strike to kick out the Tories.

Rank and file

Pointing out that “reformism saturates the working class at every level”, he moved a document that pinned the blame not on the bureaucracy but on the “crisis of political leadership amongst the rank and file—at the level of shop floor militants”, and which while in general simply echoing CDLM demands, specifically restricted its general strike demand to the objective of defeating the Tory Employment Bill.

A second Workers Power resolution, moved by Dave Jenkins, called on the CDLM to fight for a “national rank and file conference” sponsored by labour movement bodies including the Stalinist-led LCDTU and the SWP front “Defend Our Unions Campaign”.

These resolutions were opposed from the platform as diverting from the struggle against the bureaucracy in the unions, and offering what is in many instances a utopian and abstract organisational solution to the political problems facing the working class.

The Socialist Labour Group amendment was argued in the context of welcoming the CDLM conference and endorsement of the preamble of the draft resolution.

But the resolution was “abstract”, claimed SLG speakers, because it failed to include the demand of “Labour to power”.

Failing to raise this demand, they argued, let the Labour leaders off the hook.

Responding to this, Alan Clinton (Islington N. Labour Party, personal capacity) pointed out that while of course favouring a Labour victory over the Tories, to raise the unconditional slogan of “Labour to power” without coupling it to the struggle for new leadership and for independent struggles left open the prospect of yet another Callaghan-Healey government.

“We do not demand simply a Labour government. We must fight to take up the question of the working class taking power. This means taking up the question of government in a dynamic way,” stressed Clinton.

Returning to the same question in his summing up, Tony Richardson quoted from the Transitional Programme Trotsky’s insistence that Marxists should not simply demand reformist leaders form a government independent of the bourgeoisie, but develop agitation for those demands which should form the programme of such a government.

This, argued Richardson, is the content of the CDLM demands to bring down the Tories, remove the Labour and trade union leaders who won’t fight, and fight for a workers’ government.

Both the Workers Power resolutions and the SLG amendments were defeated by the conference, which overwhelmingly carried the draft resolution.

Contributions from the floor

Peter McIntyre (Oxford NUJ) described the fight at both national and local level for supporting action by journalists during the recent NGA dispute.

While the NUJ right wing argued for a position where each individual should follow their conscience, NUJ members fighting for action at the Oxford Mail and Times had battled successfully for a united policy of support for the NGA.

Gerry Casey (Union of Communication Workers, personal capacity) pointed to the continuous role of sabotage played by the union’s right wing leaders.

During the Grunwick strike, it had been not the courts but the UPW leadership that halted supporting blacking action and actually fined those that had led the action.

And this year the same leadership had ignored a 6-1 ballot rejection and a clear conference majority in order to railroad through a productivity deal.

The fight for alternative policies means a fight for union democracy against Jackson and co, stressed Bro. Casey.

Dave Pinnington (TGWU, Cowley Assembly) explained that the latest pay negotiating structure agreed between Edwardes and top union bureaucrats means that no BL worker will have a voice in the annual review.

The whole of the BL workforce is now represented by a handful of full-time union officials!

Annie Pile of the Oxford Steel Strike Support Committee spoke of the struggle to force TGWU officials to give an explicit instruction that would stop lorry drivers crossing steelworkers’ picket lines.

At first steel pickets at BL’s Cowley plants had used Moss Evans’ directives to halt long lines of lorries: but local TGWU officials had then intervened, and eventually National Organiser Ron Todd called for a halt only to supplies of raw steel, oil and gas.

As a result no major industrial plants had been halted by the steel strike.

Joe Quigley (GMWU, personal capacity), stressed the dangers of the new Tory Employment Bill. It is not true that this is any less dangerous than Heath’s Industrial Relations Act, he argued.

“Coupled with the new Social Security Bill and the Assemblies Bill now before Parliament, it amounts to a combined anti-working class strategy”.

The divisions between employers on the Bill were based on the fact that it destroys a long established framework of collaboration between bosses and union officials.

Pat Lally (TGWU) pointed out that even before Prior’s new Bill is passed through Parliament the Tories have spearheaded attacks on the shop stewards’ movement (BL) on the closed shop (NGA dispute) and on the right to picket.

Andrew MacDonald (Socialist Youth League), speaking on youth unemployment, apologised for not being able to deal with the topic adequately in 5 minutes—because “it’s a bloody big subject”.

Labour movement

With 157,000 more school leavers joining the dole queues last month alone it is clear that the bosses’ cannot control their own system.

There is no way out for youth through individual rebellion and protest. It is vital that a lead is given to draw young people into the labour movement in the fight to defeat the Tories, he said.

Roland Sheret (Stirling Trades Council, personal capacity) referred to the bureaucratic moves by the Scottish TUC to repress earlier moves to establish a Scottish conference of the CDLM, sponsored by Stirling Trades Council.

Welcoming this conference as one that set out to establish a clear Trotskyist programme for action, Sheret added that it was disappointing that the International Marxist Group had now ceased to support the CDLM.

He went on to point out the high level of militancy in the working class as reflected in the recent ballot of the Scottish teachers’ union, the EIS.

Offered a choice of three options on the next step in their struggle for an improved pay offer, the teachers had voted overwhelmingly to reject arbitration and to continue the strike action that last term hit Scottish schools. (See p.11).

Sacked for fighting bonus deal

Victimised shipyard electrician Arthur Pearse told the conference of his struggle to mobilise opposition to management’s Value Added Bonus scheme at the Vosper Thorneycroft yard in Southampton.

We must oppose all productivity deals on principle. We must fight instead for workers’ control—with a management elected and answerable to the workforce, he said.

“I put out a leaflet opposing the VAB scheme. And despite a £100,000 publicity campaign, management lost the vote in the ballot”.

“Because of this, I was sacked. I didn’t expect promotion!”

Pearse went on to explain the way in which EETPU union officials intervened, and while admitting that Pearse had been victimised, persuaded the electricians in the yard that it was not necessary to strike in his support.

Instead there had been an industrial tribunal—in which the evidence of 16 witnesses was brushed aside: and an external conference, whose “impartial chairman” accepted by EETPU officials proved to be an ex-Vosper manager!

Now, with the first two stages of the VAB scheme having been imposed, Vosper workers are beginning to pay the price of this betrayal by the EETPU.

The third stage involves complete flexibility of labour and a war on hard-won conditions. And the British Shipbuilders pay date had been delayed to prevent joint action alongside the steel workers.