Bringing the House down

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That age-old fake left rallying cry of the Labour leaders 'Abolish the House of Lords' seems certain to be wheeled out again in the next election.

The wails of opposition from Labour peers who claim that the Lords can be "reformed" and "democratised" are unlikely to prevent the Callaghan-Healey leadership adopting the call for abolition as their attempt to substitute for a complete absence of socialist policies.

Last week in Parliament Callaghan claimed that to dispose of the Lords had been the aspiration "of Callaghan • And it means outlining a programme whose objective is not reforming the capitalist state apparatus including the police force and the standing army, whose task is to preserve capitalist rule, but destroying them and instituting the dictatorship of the working class as the basis for the establishment of socialism.

Management

In decisively rejecting and opposing any such programme the Labour and trade union leaders 'left' and right alike must inevitably find themselves many of us" for many years.

Yet as everyone knows there has been no effort by successive Labour administrations to take steps to eliminate this tiresome expensive and anti-democratic relic of feudal rule.

Even when challenged by Thatcher, Callaghan insisted that the Lords was "indefensible, and lined up with talkative "left" Dennis Skinner who described the Lords as "the biggest quango of them all".

No trembling So the House of Lords joins hare-coursing, • foxhunting, beagling and deerhunting , on the Labour list for abolition. But the aristocracy will scarcely be trembling in their shoes.

While they already know that the new anti-blood sports policy will be excluded from the Labour manifesto, they also know that there is no prospect of a Callaghan government taking action to sweep aside their age-old discussion club.

They would all prefer to see Callaghan promise abolition of the Lords than any socialist policies adopted and fought for in the drawn into the management of capitalism, the encouragement of private profit, and direct attacks on their own members.

For all Labour's bleats and whimpers about the Tories' "foul' tactics, only revolutionary socialists can provide a decisive answer to unemployment.

Meanwhile, a trip to almost any of Callaghan's depressed areas could produce photographs of dole queues easily as striking as Saatchi and Saatchi's composite.

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Wiard (OTO: Andrew PHOTO: