Conceal Truth About Speke

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SWP The successful closure by British Leyland management of the Triumph factory at Speke, Merseyside, did far more than add another 3,000 workers to the dole queue in an area of chronic unemployment.

It marked a turning point for the employers' moves towards rationalisation and closures. With the aid of union officials, Leyland convenors and Speke stewards the entire workforce was held back from the slightest practical move to resist the closure.

No steps were made to prepare an occupation of the plant. No call was issued for the opening of Leyland's books to show the urgency of combine-wide action to defend jobs and conditions at Speke as part of the moves to stop the Edwardes plan dead in its tracks.

Derisory

• This was not because there was no mood of militant resistance among the workforce.

When Leyland announced their derisory planned voluntary redundancy payments thousands of workers, who had been held back and demoralised by weeks of bureaucratic haggling and deliberately created confusion, came to a mass meeting ready to follow any lead given by the platform.

They found none. Leyland Combine committee Chairman and Longbridge Convenor Derek Robinson, a leading Communist Party member tion, Part of the "participaSpeke closure, took the stage, and in a conscious display of completely hollow left' rhetoric on resisting the closure steered the meeting away from any practical action whatever.

Speke stewards, following Robinson's lead, omitted any call for occupation.

This lack of leadership at a crucial turning point proved the key to the eventual closure of the plant six weeks later.

At each point Socialist Press stressed the need to combat crisis ship.

But all of these lessons have been deliberately concealed by the Socialist Workers Party, whose members and supporters, in the guise of their front "Right to Work" organisation, failed at any point to take up the call for occupation, and whose paper Socialist Worker gave over its entire front page on April 22 to an uncritical eulogy of Robinson and the abortive mass meeting, describing it as 'A match to fire the Mersey'!

From that point onw ards as the sell-out took sh: ape, Socialist Worker virtu ally dropped the issue.

So wretched is the ! 3WP record in the Speke stru ggle that an article by J ohn Deason in the July 1: Socialist Worker had to atte mpt a cover-up.

Blaming the ruth. lessness' of the company; the activity of the media; the Prime I Minister: and the offers of redundancy pay for bringing about the sell-out, Deason nowhere even mentioned Robinson's role or the lack of any call for occupation!

Astonishingly, as if the closure had not taken place according to plan, Deason claims that:

"The most important thing it proves is the workers' strength"

And, hinting at opposition to the union bureaucracy (which was never shown by the SWP throughout the struggle), he writes:

"Nothing saps the workers' confidence more than blind faith in union

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CIALIST PRESS, Wednesday 80.