TUG puppets

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IT In Mu.

Pat Ward, NUPE, former assistant secretary, was elected secretary defeating Peter Melntyre by 64 votes to 53, and another right wing nominee defeated Mcintyre for the position of assistant secretary 59-56.

Casey, the last President of the. former Trades Council i wound up by the TUC, was elected top of the poll as one of *the vice presidents, an election in which Alan Thornett (TGWU 5/293) picked up 45 votes.

The election was notable for athe sudden influx of new delegates into branches solidly behind the officers, in particular NUPE, which marched into the room in a solid phalanx of more than 20 delegates-many of them total strangers.

If the votes of those who have attended the Trades Rouncil at least once between GMs had been counted on their own, the officers would have lost by a street.

.The right wing/Stalinist alliance were so intent on making a clean sweep of the officers positions that they ousted Terry Snape (ASTMS) as treasurer, replacing him with Stalinist Gallagher, by three votes.

Snape has certainly . not broken from the bureaucracy The voted for many of the right wing nominees) but he has conRight wing officers of Oxford and District Trades Council with the full weight of the TUC behind them clung on to their positions by the skin of their teeth at the annual general meeting last week. dohn Power, witch-hunting president of the Council for the last two and a half years, was reelected by just four votes, defeating Gerry Casey UPW, 59 votes to 55 Casey:

sistently defended the democratic rights of all delegates.

As such he posed a threat to the ability of the right wing to plan their manoeuvres.

The officers are now left with a major problem.

The AGM was the biggest meeting since reconstitution in 1976 and the narrowness of the vote, together with the refusal of many of Power's supporters to show any interest in attending meetings of trades council Fower mean ti to be i ordinar!

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SOCIALIST ESS