[As a postscript to your article on the…]
Socialist Press1978 1978-07-19Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 4 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 4
As a postscript to your article on the role of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at Speke (Socialist Press 108) let me add a few facts.
Two years ago in October 1976, ten members of the South Liverpool branch of the SWP were expelled in a most bureaucratic manner because we refused to drop our work in the Speke area around Triumph and devote our energies to recruiting unemployed for the Right to Work March from London to Brighton.
We had sent one member only to the march-he being the only unemployed member-and for this we were accused of sabotaging the Right to Work Campaign.
We had felt that since we were all employed, our main contribution should be devoted to organising resistance to closures and public spending cuts from within the organised labour movement.
Delegate This we had done by our work around the Speke Area Trade Union Committee for the Defence of Jobs and the Liverpool Action Committee for Education Expenditure, both being delegate trade union bodies which have done a lot of campaigning in the area.
The fact that we had helped to initiate these bodies which were the only bodies fighting to organise resistance to unemployment from within the labour movement was totally ignored.
So was the fact that we'd got both to affiliate to the Right to Work Campaign.
Totally failed Since our expulsions it is fair to say that the SWP has totally tailed to do any work around Triumph for the whole of the two year period and have been quite content to carry out the type of pathetic publicity seeking stunts that have become the hallmark of that organisation.
Needless to say when the crunch came at Triumph they did not have one member in the plant and it was too late.
The final grisly comedy was enacted by them as the SWP vultures circled the fatal mass meeting after Robinson had sold them down the river.
PHOTO: John Sturrock (Report)
They rubbed their hands with glee as they contemplated the many recruits they would now have for their funeral procession to London!
"Public" meeting
While it gives me no great satisfaction to have to recount all this I feel I must also mention the "public"
Right to Work meeting which they held in the Vines Hotel a few weeks prior to the mass meeting which my wife and attended.
As we entered the meeting room our way was barred by the burly shape of the Merseyside SWP "organiser" who informed us that we "were not invited to the meeting"
Pushing him aside we entered the room and called over to Tony Ryan, the only Triumph steward at the meeting, who had told us about the meeting previous day.
After Ryan had explained to the bemused doorman that he had invited us and that I was. from Vauxhalls, we received a muttered apology and were begrudgingly allowed into the meeting.
Throughout the meeting John Deason, Secretary of the Right to Work Campaign, never once made Deason any attempt to argue the case for occupation and seemed quite content to accept the fact that the closures would happen and that we had to get on with the job of organising the march.
The important-point, he said, was to get trade union sponsorships because while it would be perfectly possible to get 50 or so kids "wound up" for a march and have a good "protest" it would be better to try and make "some connection" with the trade union movement in the area by means of sponsorships.
The fact that this would be only a token gesture and that no shop stewards committee could ever refuse to sponsor such a march was not questioned.
Yours fraternally, Chris Erswal Liverpool SITE attempt-with whatever tions-to draw out such and advocate a struggle imperialist rule.
In 'H' Block of the Long Kesh concentration camp over 300 Republican prisoners remain held naked in conditions of indescribable filth and brutality as a result of their refusal to accept 'criminal' status.
In May of this year the entire officer board of Belfast Sinn Fein was arrested and