Labour's First 'lame Duck'

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UNITY IS STRENGTH WRP COINS Hard on the heels of the government's decision to refuse further aid to stricken Norton Villiers Triumph, management has already declared the liquidation of the subsidiary Norton Villiers Ltd. threatening the jobs of over 1,000 workers at the Wolverhampton plant -not to mention those in components industries.

The Tory press has been full of praise for this example of the government's conscious moves to increase unemployment over and above the million mark and hold down public spending in defence of capitalism. In the Midlands unemployment is already way above the national average. Many of those made redundant through Varley's decision could be unemployed for years.

It is clear that the timing of Varley's announcement to coincide with the annual holidays, was - a conscious attempt to minimise opposition from those threatened with loss of jobs.

As long ago as June 30th the Export Credit Guarantee Department refused to renew a £4m. line of export credit.

"SLIMMING DOWN"

Dennis Poore, NVT chairman, has said that the future situation depends on the attitude of the unions. An intensive speed-up and de-manning exercise, like the one carried out at Meriden, is projected for NVT.

It is hoped that with drastic "slimming down" of the labour force to a "realistic' level of 50% and greater productivity an annual production of between 15,000 and 20,000 units will be possible.

There must be no redundancies. If insufficient work is available then a programme of work-sharing with full pay, across all factories, administered by trade union committees must be fought for by the unions. This must involve all three factories including Meriden.

The NVT management have blamed loss of sales on "foreign OR imports" and tried to lay the basis for an appeal to workers to save the firm.

Their argument for restrictions on imports is reactionary. It ties workers to defence of "their" firm and "their" nation against other workers and diverts them from a struggle to defend jobs.

Poore, posing as a friend of the workers, has even hinted at support for a sit-in.

A further sinister aspect has appeared in the shape of the Tory Heseltine and his demagogic appeals for a "full public inquiry"

THE BOOKS Together with a carefully orchestrated press attack on Benn the Tories, (who have been clamouring for just such savage cuts in public expenditure, along with the management, seek to turn attention away from the real cause of the problem - an increasingly crisis ridden capitalist system.

Yes, there must be an inquiry, but one organised and run by the Anxious to cover their own complete absence from the T&GWU Conference (where they had neither a single delegate nor a single resolution passed at any one of the T&GWU's 9,000 branches), the Workers Revolutionary Party has launched a double page attack on Alan Thornett, a delegate to the Conference, who is a member of the WSL.

Their reporter Stephen Johns, writing in Workers Press (22.7.75) conveniently omitted the fact that Thornett was the only opposition to Jones and the bureaucracy, and that it was because he refused to composite any of the resolutions from 5/293 branch on which he was mandated, that they were discussed at the Conference.

The motions moved by WSL members in the branch, declared opposition to the social contract and defence of free collective bargaining; the demand for a sliding scale of wages; and the call to fight unemployment through sliding scale of hours along with official support for factory occupations.

DISTORTIONS

Johns' article is stadded with breathtaking lies (such as: "Thor nett echoed a familiar defence of the social contract") and the usual WRP distortions, but concludes on an issue which is of great importance to those who, unlike the WRP, see Marxism as a science.

Johns writes: "The two roads are cleary mapped out. The one leads to workers' power through the building of the WRP, the other road leads to the bureaucracy and the corporate state.

Thornett and his followers have workers. The government and NVT must be forced to open the books to trade union investigation.

The fighting spirit of the NVT workers is high. Already a 24-hour picket has been put on the Wolverhampton factory with instructions to let nothing out.

UNITY

There has already been talk of a sit-in. What now remains is the need for a clear policy on which to fight. Along with work-sharing on full pay, the remaining 49.9% of NVT (now owned by Manganese Bronze) must be nationalised without compensation and programme of state contracts opened up to guarantee jobs threatened by the shrinking capitalist world market for motor cycles.

The opening of the books by workers must lay the basis for trade union committees which can begin to draw up a planned development of the factories into the future.

Only in this way can the unity omic form of organisation imposed by monopoly capitalism after the physical liquidation of the independent organisations of the working class. To impose it, the tradé union leaders and militants are shot or imprisoned and state unions are imposed on the working class.

"Corporate state" is therefore the correct term for Mussolini's Italy, for Nazi Germany, for Franco's fascist Spain, or for Portugal before the coup which ousted the Caetano dictatorship, and present-day Chile.

To say then that Thornett and the WSL have opted for the "corporate state" is to say they have become advocates of fascism. Is this what the WRP intends to say?

But : the question goes further than: this. It is not merely the WSL who are accused of being fascists. The WRP has coined the term 'corporatist" which clearly means an advocate of the corporate state, or linked with the bourgeois drive to fascism.

This term has been applied for several years by the WRP indiscriminately to class-collaborators and reformists in the trade union and Labour movement. This not only looks back to the extreme ultraleftism of the Stalinist movement of the 1930's which branded Labourites and union leaders as "social fascists" but avoids all distinction of th e degree of the betrayal.

Thus in his article on Thornett Johns describes the social contract (which was a voluntary agreement by the TUC leaders to cut their members' living standards) as "COIporatists" but is then without the means to differentiate between this betrayal and their present collaboration with state imposed pay laws.

Worse still he is even incapable of seeing the difference between laws against the unions, and the destruction of trade unions through and job security of the worke Meriden, Small Heath and Wc hampton be established.

The intervention of the La 'lefts' over the past months graphically illustrated the role play in delivering workers u the right wing.

Nuneaton MP, Leslie Hucki in the forefront of the camp for a co-op at Meriden, now inguishes himself by writing an explaining the need to sup Labour's anti-working class laws. Benn's promises to the workers stand exposed.

Such leaders can only den ise a working class fightin defend its standard of living.

ACTION Now Renee Short o forward with tales of "depressed" she is at the go ment's decision.

The working class needs ar not tears. These so-called La leaders must fight for the po outlined above or make wa! those who will.

T&GWU Confere course the WRP notion that fa could in some way be intror peacefully into Britain, si through the trade union le joining with the employers.

It is an absolutely revis and reactionary conception 1 has not only held the WRP from any mobilisation to di the labour movement against f (in the form of National | provocations) but which of c separates the WRP from trad ionists who, though they dail! ness the class collaboration of leaders, correctly find it hal see them as fascists.

Trotsky was clear on the of the bureaucracy and of fa when he wrote: "monopoly capitalism is les less willing to reconcile itself 1 independence of trade unio demands of the reformist bu cracy and the labour aristor who pick up the crumbs fro banquet table, that they be transformed into its political | in the eyes of the working clas But here Trotsky is ta about the trade unions still ex on their old foundations - as 1 ers' organisations, though b hand and foot by • the class o oration of their leadership therefore goes on to say: "If that is not achieved, the li bureaucracy is driven away replaced by the fascists. Inci ally, all the efforts of the l aristocracy in the service of in ialism cannot in the long run them from destruction" [Marxism and the Trade REVISION 1SI The WRP has long mai their revisionist position os poratism" which is fatty op to the whole of Trout!'s on fascism.

It is importame the FSL represemite do paini in the saggie is