[We reply to your letter of May 12…]

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We reply to your letter of May 12 as a newspaper which has supported the Grunwick strike from the outset, and which has fought to mobilise resources behind you at each stage of the strike.

We have at the same time set out to point to the policies needed to win the strike.

The attitude of Socialist Press to the leadership given to your strike by Jack Dromey and the leadership of Brent Trades Council has been consistent for the last year and a half.

We find it significant therefore that we should receive your letter the day before you stood on the platform of the Grunwick Conference and publicly accepted that the strike is effectively finished and that you are waiting now for Grantham to officially wind it up.

In our view this leads to the conclusion that in attacking Socialist Press and giving unqualified endorsement to Jack Dromey's role in the strike your letter signals a shift of position by your committee.

Direction

The main problem with the Grunwick strike was not and is not George Ward. Employers with powerful friends have been defeated before. The problem has always been the direction and leadership of the strike itself.:

The crucial point was to use the strength of the mass movement generated around the strike in order to force APEX, TGWU and the TUC to black all services-the only action that could. have won the strike.

We have never questioned the physical efforts and organisation contributed by Jack Dromey and the Brent Trades Council in the mass mobilisations and throughout the strike. political and direction they gave to the action.

It is not enough to say as you did at the May 14 Conference that the strike was sold out by the right wing.

Role of right Everyone who has ever been within a stones' throw of a strike knows that this is always the role of the right wing.

The question is always how the leadership fights the right wing treachery.

This cannot be done by general exhortations to the right wing to act in this case, to black supplies.

It can only be done if the strength of the working class is directed towards those who stand as an obstacle to victory.

Yet even at the height of its influence over a broad layer of the trade union movement, the Strike Committee made no calls for mass mobilisations' against APEX and TGWU, UPW, G & M and EEPTU officials or the TUC to force them to act on blacking.

The question of how this strike in which Dromey played such a key role remained completely under the control of right wing officials has never been answered.

Even at the biggest mass picket on July 11, Jack Dromey Arther Scargill and Strike Committee members could be seen personally to intervene-on the instructions-to disperse the picket da the gates and divert it onto the TUC demonstration.

General call At the Grunwick Conference in the Friends Meeting House prior to the crucial TUC Conference last September your Committee was prepared only to put forward a general cail for the TUC to implement a black Jack Dromey . actually shouted down those-including the TGWU Grunwick driverswho tried to propose that moves be made to demand Grantham move such a motion and Jones second it on behalf of the two unions in dispute, and also that the official TGWU and APEX spokesmen present at that meeting make a commitment to fight for this.

Then at the lobby outside the TUC, Tom Durkin attempted to prevent the WSL delegation from shouting slogans declaring that "Scarman means sackings!"

He argued that the slogan should be no more than "support the Grunwick strikers" The TUC, with their talk of a "secret plan" and their meaningless resolution did of course "support" the Grunwick strikers -while doing nothing to win the fight.

Hunger strike

When the Strike Committee attempted to force the TUC into action with a hunger strike outside Congress House, the action (though itself inadequate) offered the possibility of a turn to fight the bureaucracy.

Unfortunately it was not to be so. After APEX officials suspended and fined the participants the hunger strike was called off, and from then on there was no attempt by the Strike Committee to expose and fight the officials.

We argued at that point that the suspension of strikers should have been made the basis for calling a mass picket of the TUC, to focus the attention of the workers' movement on the bureaucrats who were preventing victory.

The strike leadership's attitude to the officials was parallelled by their attitude to the state.

On the 21 of June Callaghan established a Cabinet Subtary Rees. This body, which maintained close liaison with police chiefs, army advisers and TUC leaders, had a mandate to defuse the action at all costs.

The method they chose was to divert the strike into legal procedures.

Failure of the strike leadership to prepare an adequate response left them at the mercy of this new weapon-the Scarman Court of Inquiry.

verged. Dromey and APEX leader Grantham pledged their Socialist Press alone among the whole spectrum of political tendencies, argued for it to be boycotted.

When the Scarman Report was published, Jack Dromey on behalf of your Committee, went on television and called for its implementation-although implementation would not have secured reinstatement.

We alone called it what it was, a sellout and you should have done the same.

Your actions gave credibility to the very same legal processes which were being used to divert the strike into what you have belatedly called "legal morass"

'Glorious defeats'

This is our difference with Jack Dromey. We are not concerned with his personality, his career, his reputation or his ego.

If he feels it is to his advantage to boast of "glorious defeats' he will no doubt continue to do so. We would sooner take steps to ensure that he engineers no further such defeats.

We are concerned therefore with exposing the way in which his 'left' talk headed off any confrontation between strikers union officials.

It was not Socialist Press with articles critical of Dromey that helped the right wing. The strike was weakened by the misleadership given by Jack Dromey to the strikers, in his role of major spokesman and chief policy maker.

Formality

Unlike the WSL, both Dromey and the strike leadership now regard the strike as defeated and its winding up by APEX a formality.

As various obituaries to the strike begin to be prepared most without doubt, will take up the theme he voiced at the recent Wembley Conference-that the lesson is the predominance of the right-wing leaders over the 'left' within the trade unions.

This argument, the stock-in-trade of the Communist Party for every accasion will find a sympathetic respor columns of pape! such as Socialist Worker a Socialist Challenge.

This analysis is in our view a guarantee that' subsequent struggles, whether on basic democratic rights or other issues, risk meeting a similar tate.

For though the APEX and TUC bureaucracy, ACAS, the 'Labour' Government and the sinister and deliberate build up of police operations which they organised, conspired to sabotage the strikes success, no less significant was the total inability of the 'left' labour leaders, and first and foremost Jack Dromey, to provide an independent way forward.

Yours fraternally, Socialist Press Editorial Board

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Students demonstrate for higher grants The Department of Education and Science published on Monday a series of proposals to impose stringent controls on student union activities.

These came in the guise of a document on S.U. financing, which proposed that a new maximum limit of S.U. subscriptions should be imposed.

This will be between £15 and £20-about one third of the present level in the larger universities, and about £5-10 less than the average level for polytechnics.

At present this capitation fee is determined by negotihas been both predictable and alarming.

The Broad Left have progressively abandoned any pretence of defending autonomy over the past year.

By accepting that student unions must be "publicly accountable" for the way they spend their money, the Stalinist-led fee of £1.25, as a great advance for the weaker colleges.

No doubt, the smaller student unions who at present have no regular automatic income will be slightly better off with some money, but Slipman is forgetting that NUS's own original proposal was for a £15 minimum fee.

The outright racist measures being taken against overseas students shows the lengths even one-time Students must now call an emergency national conference of NUS to discuss S.U. autonomy in the light of these proposals.

They must be thrown out, as must the Broad Left NUS leadership, who have indicated that they are more than willing to see the existing political organisation of students destroyed.

•... him!

FOR F. E. STUI STUDENTS actingin QUOTAS FURTHER EDUCATION WHy SHouLD WE CONTINUE TO BE THE JECOND CLASS CITIZENS THE EDUCATIONAN SISTERS GHT IOS DETES GREN

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'Left' & right The left' and right con-

PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report SU

A FULL CRANT DEMONSTRATE