Workers Socialist League

Socialist Press, Trotskyism Today and the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, 1975–1984

Deeper into the EEC mire.. Fight needed fo socialist United States of Europe

Socialist Press no. 126, 22 November 1978 · scan p. 5 · about 1,087 words

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forced through a referendum vote for entry under the Wilson Wine lakes 70% of the EEC's budget goes • TO preserving the scandalous 'Common Agricultural Policy" and financing the continental butter mountains and wine lakes.

Precious little of it will find its way back in any form of PRESS As Aubrey, Berry and Campbell walked free from court last week, the warning of the Judge, Mr Justice Mars-Jones must have rung in their ears.

In reply to counsel's claim that Section 2 of the Cfficial Secrets Act would be unlikely to be used again, the Judge remarked that he doubted whether that was true.

He also warned John Berry, the ex-soldier, that if anyone else came up on a similar charge, he or she would be certain to be sent to prison.

In that sense, Aubrey, Berry and Campbell have not won their case. What is much more obvious, however, is that the State has lost.

The collapse of the serious charges, the public admissions of jury vetting, the discharging of a jury headed by a former SAS man and the Judge's remarks that the Section 1 charges were 'oppressive' have made a mockery of the £250,000 political show trial. The state has strained every fibre to give birth to a badly maimed mouse.

The capitalist press has lost little time in pointing this out. Long articles favourable to the defendants, or at least critical of Sam Silkin and his anonymous advisors, have appeared in the Guardian, the Sunday Times and the Observer. benefit to the British workers, who by 1980 will be taxed to provide the lion's share of the cash, which is then handed out to employers and small farmers in the supposedly "needy" capitalist states of Europe, such as Belgium, Holland, France and Denmark.

But proposals are going full steam ahead to draw the British economy further into this chaotic mire.

Carter with In what sense then do these papers oppose the power of the state to control the disclosure of information about its activities?

John • Berry described SIGINT and other secret organisations as a 'state within the state' This description is not stretched in the slightest to encompass the D notice system, which the editors of every single capitalist paper support.

Nor have the capitalist papers who now congratulate the defendants, shown the slightest interest in defending them during the trial.

It took "gratuitous journalistic gossip" on a TV programme to reveal that the first jury had a foreman committed in advance to return guilty verdicts on all charges.

Every single national paper was aware of this fact. Far from exposing it they took a dim view of the method used by Christopher Hitchens to reveal the truth.

To have revealed these facts in print during the trial would have been to invite contempt charges. That is always and invariably put first by these self-styled defenders of civil liberties.

In the same way the national papers first used the opportunity of Parliamentary privilege to name Colonel Hugh Johnstone (Colonel B of the commital proceedings) and then The • planned, European Monetary System, which is widely acknowledged to prompt a new round of public spending cuts, detlation and unemployment in. Britain, is being aggressively pressed by Callaghan's reactionary German Social Democratic "comrade" Helmut Schmidt.

German capitalists and their reformist errand boys believe that tying the British pound 1 Schmidt as soon as the Director of Public Prosecutions stated that the cloak of Parliamentary privilege had just been torn up deleted his name from later editions, and in the case of the Times and the Telegraph attacked the MPs for naming him.

It is clear that capitaiist papers in a bourgeois democracy have a self-interest in holding the censorship laws at bay.

"Reasonable"

They are equally committed to ensuring that no-one be allowed to go further than the 'reasonable' friends of the state who edit the national papers are prepared to go.

The Sunday Times concluded its long article on the trial (Sam Silkin's Whitehall Farce) with complete complacency in the immunity of the capitalist press from repression, because of its willingness to practice moderation.

"What everyone in Old Bailey Court Number One had now realised, however, was that if Berry had phrased his letter to the Defence Campaign more sensibly, and if Campbell and Aubrey had been on the staff of a large newspaper with access to good legal advice and a training in more prudent interviewing, the case would never have been brought." sterling into a fixed relationship with the strong German Deutsch mark would force the Callaghan government to implement the further attacks on the British working class to see.

One-time minister-now Roy Jenkins voice to the cl leaders insist should sign up Pressing for the EMS-Giscard from the outset.

The driving force behind the pell-mell dash to establish the EMS is the : renewed moves towards recession and trade war in the crucial US economy.

Employers in the European nations fear that individually their economies do not have the strength to withstand the pressures of such an international confrontation.

But they also cherish the absurd illusion that simply by providing a stabilised European currency they can open up a new period of economic expansion.

The reality is that even if the EMS proves viable in the short term, it can only lead in the longer term to a further collapse of the dollar as the main international reserve rurrency, and a major lurch towards a breakdown of farld trade.

And none of the cosmetic deals to cover over the weakness of paper currencies can help tackle the root problemthe continuous fall in the rate of profit.

The only way out of this dilemma is an unprecedented rationalisation of capital through wholesale closures, drastic speed, up and further attacks on living standards.

Which ever way the European heads of state move on the EMS and the European budget, such attacks-foreshadowed in the planned sackings in British Leyland and British Shipbuilders--are inevitable.

No worker should imagine that the Callaghan leadership or supposed 'left' critics can offer an answer to this. A revolutionary leadership is crucial.

A centrai plank of policy of such a revolutionary leadership must be to ensure the break up of the European bloc of capitalists within the EEC, and the struggle in every country for the overthrow of capitalism and the formation of a Socialist United States of Europe. they are longing Labour cabinet top 'Eurocrat*has added his orus of European ng that Britain for the EMS 16,1:11,1.

← Contents of Socialist Press no. 126, 22 November 1978