WRP's squalid cover-up attempt

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turns to adventure Newsline s own picture shows the numbers that joined the mass picket Under the scandalous heading 'Solidarity Turns to Adventure', the opportunists of the Workers Revolutionary Party attempted last week in their daily paper Newsline to conceal their abject failure to lift a finger against the TGWU bureaucracy in the Garners strike.

When the 12 WRP supporters, led by actor Corin Redgrave, and standing in scowling silence alongside the Stalinists of the Communist Party, watching hundreds of workers march back to mount a mass picket on Garners' restaurants, they merely put the seal on their whole history of passivity and abstention in this crucial strike.

Bitterness

But their bitterness at the success of the picketing and their own isolation led the WRP into a vicious, lying attack on the move which most clearly demonstrated the isolation of the TGWU Region 1 bureaucracy:

LIE No. 1: The Newsline article claimed that the mass picket was a breakaway by "a group of revisionists and renegades". Yet anyone present on the day knows that the majority of the trade union contingents on the march followed the call to turn back and picket Garners.

If the mass picketing was really done only by "revisionists and renegades", then the WRP has to answer 1 why they only turned out a dozen people on the march-none of whom joined the picket.

LIE No. 2: The Newsline claims that the mass picket "clashed with a well-prepared cordon of police at Whitcombe Street"

This is "illustrated" by a photograph taken only after a series of police charges had finally broken up the mass picket itself.

In fact, WSL members had checked beforehand and verified that there were no police at all at the Whitcombe Street restaurant when the mass picket arrived.

And the arrests that took place nearly all came later in the evening when normal picketing had been resumed.

LIE No. 3: The Newsline, anxious to minimise the defeat suffered by Region 1 officials at the hands of "renegades and revisionists" claims that the mass picket took place only after the march was over.

Yet they refuse to support the very demands fought for consistently by the Strike Committee in the teeth of vicious bureaucratic opposition-mass picketing; full blacking of Garners and its suppliers; and a TGWU Regional levy to finance the strike.

Instead, like the passive WRP contingent on the march, the Newsline offers no fight against the bureaucracy, and simply urges farners strikers to adopt the call for a "general strike" to bring down the Labour government.

Refusal

These lies are combined with a conscious refusal by Newsline to point out the minimal level of support by the TGWU Region 1 bureaucracy-who mobilised only a couple of token banners among the 25 labour movement contingents present, despite their 500,000 membership.

The whole article adds up to a brazen defence of the bureaucracy against the strike committee and the trade union contingents that showed in practice their willingness to fight for a successful conclusion to the strike.

Such is the price to paid for the WRP's 'left' •talking opportunism and conscious Because while this miser-. able rag gives its cynical endorsement to their treachery, hundreds of trade unionists and Solidarity

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