Hayward Defends the Labour Conference

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Delegates at last vear's Labour Party conference Labour Weekly, the house organ of the Labour Party, engaged in a desperate publicity campaign last week to promote the view that the stage-managed banalities to be heard in the Blackpool conference are really important. • General Secretary Ron Hayward penned • a major feature declaring:

"lt's no mere seaside jaunt as the party lays down its policy"

And the paper's editorial comment proclaimed the Blackpool binge "the most important conference for yoars" —pointing, signiticantly, not to political issues, but to the organisational debate over reselection of MPs and the election of the Party leader as the key questions.

"'Party conference is the right place to thrash out differences and to lay down party policy", it concludes.

This of course should be true, but, as every Labour Party member knows, the Labour conference has no impact whatover on the policies pursued by the Parliamentary Labour Party.

In this way the policies that are adopted at conference, whatever their strengths or undoubted weaknesses, are entirely subordinate to the problem of the leadership of the Labour Party itself.

As it happens, this year's conference agenda does not even offer any real choice.

There is no resolution pledging practical action to support those fighting against wage controls, unemployment or social service cuts.

There is no challenge to the Labour leaders' slavish support for British imperialism in Ire land, Africa and throughout the world.

Thare is not even the perennial futile Militant' group motion calling for parliamentary action to nationalise the "commanding heights" or the "top 250 monopolies" in Britain.

Every shade of the Labour left appears to have all but evaporated in the course of the Lib-Lab coalition deal.

Yet Hayward unashamedly claims that:

''Labour's annual conference controvorsial, sometimes noisy, often exciting, always interesting [!] and never dull"

No effect He tries to contrast it with the Tory conference, which self-confessedly "has no effect whatever on party policy' "Our annual conference is important. It is the only occasion at national level when each year the trinity of our movement meets, debates and decidas."

And the bureaucratic right wing Labour leaders listen, laugh, tear up the decisions, and proceed on their reactionary course of attacks on the working class!

"Not for us wheeling and dealing behind closed doors," claims Hayward.

But what about the publicly revealed moves to muzzle TGWU General Secretary Moss Evans in Wednesday's economic debate, lest he unleash a tactless attack on Phase 4?

Piling cliche on cliche Hayward wriggles towards his wretched objective-justifying the squalid record of four years of Labour betrayals:

... minority government. . legacy of Tory mismanagement. .: world-wide recession . . unpopular and unpleasant-but vital-decisions. . . The world does not owe us a living and we cannot live by taking each others' laundry."

The mounting heap of dirty laundry built up by the Callaghan-Healey leadership cannot be wished away by a few plat¡tudes from the podium in Blackpool.

Ron Hayward Those MPs that claim to stand opposed to the right wing Labour leaders must be called upon by CLPs and union branches to take up the long overdue campaign to remove Callaghan-Healey and to fight for socialist policies in opposition to wage controls, import controls, immigration controls, and in favour of action to force nationalisation, without compensation, of major industry, under workers management.

Insofar as any Labour left' takes up such a fight, he or she should be supported and pressed to go further. Those that refuse still stand revealed as accomplices of Callaghan.

In the course of such a fight workers can test out their supposedly 'left' leaders in practice and learn through their own experience the impossibility of transforming the Labour Party into the revolutionary socialist party which is necessary if the independent interests of the working class are to be defended.

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