Sedgemore's smokescreen

Scan page 5

Sedgemore There is seldom a retreat by Labour's left' without a covering smokescreen. Last week was no exception.

Callaghan and Healey carried a vote on the anti-socialist proposals of the Queen's Speech with the aid of the lefts' who voted alongside Ulster Loyalists including Enoch Powell.

This vote has ensured that the right wing Labour cabinet will continue to uphold the 5% pay limit in the face of bitter strikes by "Normally Friday is a bonanza for shopping in Dagenham, but yesterday many of the wives of the 57,000 Ford workers look taut faced and pale as they shopped for bargains"

It would be of some interest to learn how reporter Ann Morrow distinguished between the taut faces of the wives of Ford workers and the taut faces of other workers who were trying to make an ordinary week's pay packet match up to the prices in the shops.

"For the men the strike has meant depression, inactivity and boredom. But for the women, many oi them young, it has been a frightening worry with a build-up of debts and each week a greater inability to pay mortgages and hirepurchase instalments."

No evidence is presented Ford workers, bakers and others, and the open hostility of the entire trade union movement.

But rather than take a stand on this issue and refuse to vote for the continuation of such policies; the so-called left' Labour MPs found a new, hitherto untapped source of diversion.

Tribunite Brian Sedgemore-until now notable only for his nationalist call for import controls to protect British capitalist industry-went for this division of labour between boredom and worry.

Even in their descriptions of the financial hardship the women interviewed give the lie to Ann Morrow's fiction of a life of plenty disrupted by the strike. One says "We don't have holidays much anyway"

Another "We don't go out, we never have done because we cannot afford . Another 'We don't ask for a lot and we only very occasionally go out to play Bingo."

Far from enjoying a usual Friday bonanza before the strike, the wives of Ford workers know what all working class men and women know:

The standard of living of the working class can only be defended by strike action over wages. into battle against the proposed European Monetary System-EMS.

He quoted a confidential Treasury document which spells out the disastrous consequences if this, the latest fiendish invention of the EEC bureaucracy, were introduced, on top of the existing mountains of wasteful and expensive legislation from that source.

Embarassed

In doing so he annoyed and embarassed Denis Healey, who was being questioned by the Commons Select Expenditure Committee.

For this "crime' Sedgemore was summarily sacked by Callaghan from his post as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Energy Secretary Tony Benn.

Benn himself is chairman of Labour's Home Policy Committee which has just produced a paper condemning the EMS out of hand.

But did he defend Sedgemore against Callaghan?

Not on your life! He has a cabinet post to protect!

PHOTO: Chris Davies, Report Benn PHOTO: Chris Davies, Report In a touching display of opportunism and backstabbing, he wrote personal letter to "Brian" laying the blame for the sacking at Callaghan's door and wishing him all the best.

It took Labour's new boy on the NEC Dennis Skinner to voice an empty defence of the doomed Sedgemore; he pointed out that if Sedgemore had been a shop floor worker sacked for such a "misdemeanour" then there would have been a walk out.

No walk out But of course there was no walk-out. On the contrary, while the press played up this "rebellion" by Sedgemore every single 'left' including Skinner himself walked loyally into the government lobby in the vote on the Queen's Speech.

It is "opposition" like this within the Labour Party that enables Callaghan to proceed with his vicious anti-working class measures.

In demanding that left' MPs take up a fight for the removal of Callaghan and promising them support should they do so, trade unionists and Labour activists can force such positions out into the open, and see in practice the utter spinelessness of their present supposedly "socialist'' leaders.