Labour's costly Euro davrude

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PHOTO: Andrew W The counting will not start until the voting is finished everywhere. The announcements of the results as they emerge from each country will make an exciting Euro-night on television.

Get your swingometer ready now!"

This nonsense is part of Labour Weekly's desperate effort to whip up some interest among Party members in the conference sterile ultra-leftism which characterised the early history of the British C.P.

The actual letter applying to affiliate in 1923 contained the stirring phrase 'we intend to destroy you' Great Yawn elections-the June 7 poll for the impotent and ludicrously extravagant European Parliament:

Hacks A seemingly. unending line of careerist hacks, fake lefts' and crypto-Tories have made their way through Labour's bureaucratic selection procedure in hopes of winning a well paid Euro-jaunt in June.

All that is lacking is any enthusiasm within the working class for this elahorate annt Pe ehe Ante d alla wvniP.cia. M..: right to discredit the and its fellow-travellers.

Ernest Bevin even told one Labour Conference that 'The only united front we need is the Labour movecostly charade. Even Labour Weekly's special supplement on "The Big Euro MPs Battle': is forced to admit the futility of the Euro Parliament:

"We are voting to elect a Parliament which will analyse and expose what is being done or suggested by the powers that are in the European Community"

Clearly, then, one power that isn't" is the Euro-Partiament! Labour Weekly blunders on:

"The European Parliament is largely consultative. It has little power-and Labour's policy is not to give it any more."

So there you have it! Turn out and tramp the streets to fight for the election of a panel of anti-socialist Labour place seekers to a body which nobody believes should have the power to do anything anyway!

But as an added lure-to prove how hard and rewarding is the "work" of a Euro MP, the Labour Weekly supplement gives a rundown of a month's work of one of them.

Lavish In a series of lavish expenseaccount jaunts, this unnamed but no doubt tireless servant of the working class managed to cover eight meetings of impotent bodies, spread between. Rome, Brussels, Bordeaux, Brussels (again), Lille and Luxembourg!

Among the highlights of the Labourite involvement in the February proceedings were a debate initiated by George examples, Ken Coates was expelled the middle 1960s from the Nottingham Labour Party, only to win a long fight for reinstatement and to poll nearly 100,000 Euro-fat cat Jenkins Cunningham on textile imports, and a question by Lord Kennet on tobacco consumption.

The supplement must confirm the worst fears of many Labour Party activists-that the June elections will be a costly fiasco for the Party, laying the basis for an even more costly fiasco as Callaghan steers the Party into a General Election without even so much as the pretence of a socialist. policy.

Only, one thing is offered as consolation. With European funds oozing from every pore, the Euro Parliament's socialist group has coughed up enough cash to pay for the supplement.

Thus their political bankruptcy can be. hidden behind a screen of apparent affluence.