Labourites back racist 'ghetto' policy

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The Greater London Council is instituting policy of maintaining special blocks of flats, in the Spitalfields area of Tower Hamlets, for Bengalis only.

They will only be moving Bengalis into them, and will be offering to move any of the present white tenants out.

The reason for this policy according to the Council's Director of Housing is because of 'physical attacks on Bengalis in areas of East London away from Spitalfields.!

PHOTO: Dave Evans, IFL those unions whose rule books do allow unemployed membersnip inose unem- Alana •uru ployed who attempt to join are fobbed off or discouraged by local bureaucrats.

It appears to me that a They need to live in mainly Bengali area to obtain the protection which a large group of their people can provide.' 'Realistic' This policy is backed as 'rea!istic' by the Labour leader of the ILEA, Sir Ashley Bramall Labour's housing development spokesman Ken Livingstone has described how some Bengali families had been physically stopped from taking up residence in other estates which were mainly white. useful step would be for Socialist Press to publish the names of those unions whose rule books do allow for the unemployed to join, plus, if space allowed quoting the relevant rule or its number in the rule book.

This would then enable WSL supporters and others to guide unemployed youth contacts towards those particular unions.

In the, quite likely, event of youth being refused admission by local bureaucrats one could approach The Council had backed down from moving them.he because it would have need to use the police to force them in, and they couldn't be guaranteed protection by the police afterwards.

Tony Judge, Chairman of the Housing Management Committee, also defended the decision, saying:

'Over the years these people have been subject to growing abuse and persecution amounting to pretty widespread physical violence.:

They have felt unable to help themselves and was Birmingham march against racists ations being repeated indefinitely?

• Thirdly, I am unclear as to your attitude on the Labour Party. John Plant appears to think that building a 'new leadership' in the Labour Party is both desirable and possible.

The implication is that Socialist Press agrees with this. I would appreciate a further explanation of your attitude to the Labour fraternally, F. Davis: getting increasingly worried about their setting up self-help groups to defend themselves.' This last sentence says it all. Rejecting any call on the labour and trade union movement to organise workers defence squads to protect black workers, Labour councillors join hands with the Tories in conceding to the racialists.

Unemployment

Having implemented the policies of mass unemployment, housing cutbacks and immigra: tion controis that have fuelled the racialists, these reactionary councillors have agreed to the racist plan of excluding black workers from 'white' estates and driving them into ghettoes.

This segregation is now official council policy!

But playing up to the racialists won't solve anything, because, encouraged by this success, the racists and fascists will go on to turn their policy into one of wholesale pogroms against the new ghetto areas.

There must be a fight in the labour movement to oppose the reactionary ghetto policy and to kick out those labour counciIlors who support it.

At the same time, workers defence squads, set up through the trade unions, should be fought for to protect the immigrant community. fight for a Trotskyist party as the organisation for such a leadership is the only way the historic crisis of working class leadership can be resolved.

When our article stated that the proletariat's victory is 'inevitable' it was based on our firm conviction that it is possible to construct Trotskyist revolutionary parties to lead workers in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

This is the task the Workers Socialist League has undertaken. We do not