[Seven years ago on 30 January, 1972 a…]

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Seven years ago on 30 January, 1972 a Civil Rights demonstration of approximately 20,000 people marched from the Catholic Creggan estate towards the centre of Derry.

The march was banned from the city centre and was stopped by troops on the outskirts of the Bogside.

When a minor riot developed the troops, the 1st Parachute Regiment, responded not with the usual rubber bullets and C$ gas but with real bullets.

They killed 13 unarmed civilians, including children and old men-most shot in the back as they fled.

It was a brazen and premeditated attempt by the British Tory government to intimidate the Catholic working class off the streets.

But the response was the opposite. All over Ireland the Catholic community was outraged. There was a three-day strike in Derry and a one day strike all over the North.

Workers downed tools and demonstrated in Dundalk, Cork, Galway, Limerick and in Dublin, where the British PHOTO: Derek Speirs, IFL Butcher Mason Embassy was burned down by a 30,000 crowd.

A week later a march in Newry drew 60,000 people. And new forces began to filter into the Provisional IRA which, for all its inadequate political programme, offered a fight against British imperialism.

This coming Sunday Provisional Sinn Fein will mark the anniversary of Bloody Sunday' with a march starting at Speakers Corner, Marble Arch at 2.30 p.m.

This demonstration takes place in the year of the tenth anniversary of British military intervention in the six counties -ten years in which countless republican and socialist militants have been harassed, interned, tortured, imprisoned, beaten and murdered.

In solidarity with the anti-imperialist struggle that has continued in Ireland since that date a contingent of Workers Socialist League members and supporters will join this march, though our political disagreements with the programme and methods of Provisional Sinn Fein are well known.

We urge Socialist Press readers to join the march behind our banner. Our slogans will be:

*Restore PoW status to political prisoners. Support the gallant blanket protests in Long Kesh and Armagh jail!

*Support the war of liberation in Ireland, Self determination for the Irish people!

*Troops out now! An amnesty for political prisoners *Kick out butcher Mason and the Callaghan cabinet! For an Irish workers' republic!

On the same day that Aberdeen picket Robert Watson died under the wheels of a scab lorry, BBC's PM programme conducted an interview with the chairman of the employers' association in which he urged the 'public' to attack picket lines with umbrellas and handbags.

The Sunday Telegraph carried a front page picture of a woman carrying a placard which said "Death to the secondary pickets". Most of the gutter press have also carried favourable reports of attacks on picket. lines.

It is becoming clear that the press is preparing-should all else fail-to throw their weight behind bands of fascists and petty bourgeois supporters and direct physical attacks on picket lines.

The press is the whip which drives on the Tory wagons. Half their pages resound with calls for the weight of the law to be used against strikers-the others with the more savage sound of calls for all kinds of repression, whether legal or otherwise.

In running on ahead of their Tory masters, the editors often make themselves look ridiculous. But they remain a powerful focus for the NAFF leadership of the Tory party.

The targets will change. Already as talks began between TGWU officials and the Road Haulage bosses, the focus switched to the one day strike by public sector workers, and in particular the refusals of the London ambulance drivers to provide emergency services. Both the Express and Mail found the same headline-No Mercy!

The task for the press is to create the conditions for a decisive shift in the balance of forces-whether through legal repression or fascist pogroms.

To do that any amount of lies and distortion are justified. Last week the Daily Telegraph gave the text of the leaflet they alleged had been left by 'Socialist Workers' in transport cafes.

The leaflet, clumsy enough to be comic, declared that they should not worry about the pensioners and that if prices went up they could always "slap in another claim' The Sunday Telegraph under a headline "How Leftist groups took control of picket lines" complained that the strike had been taken over by the rank and file of the union.

The strike committees "who include members of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party" were accused of such criminal acts as calling mass meetings without the knowledge of the officials and issuing instructions on official union One 'official in the north' told the Telegraph:

"We have no control at all. Only today I took in three instruction sheets from head office to the strike committee and not only did they tear them up they told me to 'Get stuffed'."

The Sunday Telegraph also quotes Derrick Hornby, president of the Food Manufacturers' Federation, as saying:

"This strike was carefully planned and orchestrated six months ago. Who by? The SWP. I have no doubts about that."

By the end of the article the Socialist Workers Party (which in reality has little strength in the TGWU) has become socialist workers (small letters) on picket lines.

By whipping up violence against Trotskyists' and then equating all pickets with Trotskyists, the Sunday Telegraph and its friends aim at stoking up the flames of

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Stage o SUCIALISI TRESS ONE OF THE unions whose collaboration in the next few months is essential to the preservation of President Carter's wage control policy in the USA is the two-million strong International The IBT has become an international by-word for mobster connections and corruption, and is a classic example of a workers' organisation which has become entirely run by a reactionary, utterly, On these pages we are reprinting two articles from a 1977 issue of Convoy, paper of the rank and file opposition grouping Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which run through the record of For all their lack of a clear political perspective these articles provide a useful insight into the kind of apparatus to be fought if the US working class is to break from its alliance with the parties of US capital and enter the road of revolutionary struggle in defence of They also show the lack of any democratic channels through which the demands of the IBT membership can make themselves But the strategy of using court actions and writs which the TDU have adopted in their fight against the Fitzsimmons/gangland leadership is one which carries enormous dangers for the US labour At a time when politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties are simply longing to get their hands on the organisations of the working class and render them totally impotent, any call on the state to intervene in the union's affairs is highly TDU presidential candidate Pete Camarata has established a murky record over the last two years, time and again invoking the machinery of the US capitalist state to assist his struggle against the Camarata himself is a man of considerable courage. Ho has endured physical beatings and countless threats in his fight to oust Many of the TDU's several thousand supporters are also militants with the courage to face up to savage threats.

But in fighting such a bureaucracy there is no substitute for the patient, principled mobilisation of the union's membership independently of the capitalist state, its courts and its police.

This fight must also be combined with the fight to break the union from the two capitalist parties and for the building of a Labour Party based on the trade unions and on a programme of Brotherhood of Teamsters.

parasitic, bureaucracy.

two major Teamster heads.

its living standards.

felt through the union.

movement.

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Fitzsimmons. socialist policies.

" 271a Hoffa in 1946: he worked i