GWU Region 5 climbs down

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-Callaghan plays the EEC ht the SUS law!

Hackney march against the SUS law last month card Is Callaghan really out to upset the Common Market apple-cart?

Or is he just grasping for handfuls of rotting fruit to throw at the Tory leaders?

This question arises from a spate of anti-EEC rhetoric from Callaghan during last week in which he even threw in warnings that Britain might refuse to pay its full EEC budget contribution from 1981 if there was not extensive reform of its policies and expenditure.

In true tub-thumping style he denounced the well-known fact that three-quarters of the EEC budget is allocated to agricultureincluding the subsidising of the notorious food mountains, wine lakes and olive oil puddles.

Alienated support

But his remarks have a good deal more to do with seeking to regain alienated Labour support in Britain than seriously wanting any changes in the Common Si The continued upsurge of the masses in Iran is producing new tensions in the camp of the country's new would-be rulers, new betrayais on the part of would-be leaders of the working class and a new urgency to the task of building a revolutionary Trotskyist leadership.

Khomeini's Islamic committees have continued to impose summary justice on many agents of the old tyranny, including military officers and the Shah's secret police SAVAK.

This terror, however, which Valer Market-which has changed little if at all since Callaghan and Wilson in 1975 toured thể country jointly with Tory leaders campaigning for. a 'yes' vote in the referendum on membership.

Presumably preliminary soundings on the June 7 European Assembly elections have revealed massive hostility to the EEC among workers, who foot the bill for membership of a of is in no way controlled by the mass movement, is being increasingly redirected by its reactionary Islamic leadership into violence against the democratic rights of women and other groups.

The violence is an embarrassment to the government of Bazargan and Sanjabi who desperately want to rebuild a bourgeois state apparatus in Iran and to mend the country's fences with the imperialists.

Immense obstacle

The armed Khomeini committees and the other workers' and factory committees are an immense obstacle to this aim.

Workers' committees ' have launched a wave of wage claims ry-I'm so worried about Jim capitalist club which benefits only the bosses.

Sick to the teeth of trying to pay Common Market prices with British wages, the working class would undoubtedly respond to a principled campaign designed to pull Britain out the EEC and to fight for a Socialist United. States of Europe.

But Callaghan of course offers neither that nor any it. in capitalist Bazargan government are not so central to Khomeini and his more fanatical Islamic forces and there is increasingly open bickering between the two.

Bazargan has even pointedly stopped talking of the "Islamic republic" which is due to be voted on in a referendum on 30 March.

But Bazargan . has publicly welcomed the increasingly abject support being given to his pro-capitalist regime by leaders of the "Marxist-Leninist' and left-wing Islamic guerrillas.

These "left" leaders are playing an increasingly treacherous role.

They have tried to stop the mobilisations of women fighting Khomeini's orders for them to wear the veil, arguing that these demonstrations might provoke reaction.

And the same leaders have given support to the reactionary other kind of socialist or internation is persevere instead ment stumbles around in the wreckage of the devolution fiasco-offering buy offs to irate bourgeois nationalists and squalid political deals with reactionary Ulster Unionists-he looks certain to end up leading the Labour Party into an enforced early General Election unable to offer even a shred of a policy to benefit the working class.

With inflation climbing back into double figures (and big increases in petrol and food prices to come), mass unemployment, and millions of workers still waiting to challenge the remnants of government could hardly seem election La less attractive prospect for Callaghan.

Chin up

The one consoling factor that must keep his chin up Opposition to police use of the SUS law, especially against young blacks, is growing within the labour movement.

The SUS law, a section of I the Vagrancy Act 1824 gives the police the power to arrest someone "being a suspected person Hoitering with intent to commit an arrestable offence"

Police have the power of arrest in such cases without a warrant on "reasonable suspicion"

No independent witnesses need be produced in court; trial is before a magistrate, not a jury; and the defendant will almost certainly not have committed any crime.

"The SUS law is one of the main ways in which police harass black youth. In 1977 'L' division of the Metropolitian Police which includes Brixton, made 244 arrests for SUS.

178 of these were of youth. Hundreds of other The Midlands Regional Committee of the TGWU acted out one of the final scenes of the long story of the Cowley 9 in Oxford last Friday.

The Committee took the is the fact that even under these conditions there is no sign whatever of any challenge to his leadership from the so-called left' within the Party.

The so-called 'alternative manifesto' drawn up by 'lefts' on the Party's liaison committee does not even mention nationalisation, and confines itself to pathetic generalities and gestures such as abolition of the House of Lords.

• Principled fight Only if a principled fight is waged within the ranks of the Labour Party for the removal of the Callaghan leadership and a socialist, internationalist programme can there be any prospect of changing this situation, exposing the left' fakers and driving out the right wing.

Such a struggle is crucial. Socialists must take it up at once.

ScS youth would have been stopped by the police and questioned but not charged.

The Scrap SUS Campaign was recently formed by immigrant organisations to fight for the repeal of the SUS law and Students Unions are increasingly taking up the fight against SUS which poses a threat to black students. • Demonstrated Only last month a student from South London College was arrested on SUS while walking with a friend in Portobello Road on a Saturday afternoon. Fellow students later demonstrated outside Notting Hill Police Station.

Now the question is being taken up within the Labour Party. A resolution went to the last Labour Party Conference from Lambeth Central CLP and 50 Labour MPs have signed a Commons motion on the subject.

UNITY IS STRENGTH

decision at its February meeting fo find eight of the nine members from Leyland's Cowley Assembly Plant guilty of a breach of union rules-but to take no action against them other than ask for assurances that in future those involved will work within the rules of the union..

The Committee adopted this position having been faced with the probability of a strike in the BL plant if the original recommended sentences of expulsion from the union in the case of Alan Thornett and banning from office in the case of most of the others had been carried out.

Last Friday the . eight appeared in front of the Regional Finance and General Purposes Committee-who carried out the disciplinary hearing-and were asked to give the assurances required.

Completely innocent:

Whilst giving the assurance (since working within the rules of the union is a condition of membership anyway and every member signs to that effect when he or she fills in the application form to join) they made it clear they they were and remain completely innocent of all the allegations made against them.

All the eight intend to appeal against the decision that they were in breach of rule 11covering general conduct.

The other member of the nine-Frank Corti, secretary of the 5/293 branch is to appeal to the Final Appeals Committee against the decision of the General Executive Council of the TGWU. to uphold the recommendation from Region 5 that he be banned from holding all office until the GEC so decides otherwise.

The Greater London Regional Council of the Labour Party has also passed unanimously a resolution condemning the law. The LPYS háve now called a demonstration against the SUS law for April 7 in Brixton.

The failure of the Labour government to repeal the SUS law comes as no surprise from a government whịch has strengthened police powers; extended the arming of the police; used the strike breaking thugs of the SPG against pickets and is even today using the police and army as scabs against the ambulancemen.

That is why the fight to end the SUS law and all these other reactionary moves must be taken up by every trade unionist and Labour Party member as part of the fight to remove the right wing Callaghan-Healey! leadership and defend the democratic rights of the working; class.

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