Socialist Unity: no answers and no response

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Edge Hill-pockets of 34% unemploymen Key figure in Dunlops closure fight, Stan Pemb ing TGWU Conference: Socialist Unity failed to With thousands of protest votes floating around against the Labour leadership's wretched record on jobs, wages, housing and social services, it might have seemed that Socialist Unity would have been on to a good thing in the Edge Hill by election.

But while political confusion abouńds within the working class-as reflected in the bizarre turn-round from a 6,000 Labour majority-the task of directing workers into revolutionary struggles is much harder than simply raising a banner and dishing out sufficient election leaflets.

Practical work

It is necessary patiently to build basic support for a revolutionary programme within the working class through interventions into workers' struggles designed to expose in practice the inadequacy and treachery of existing reformist and Stalinist bureaucrats, and offer a clear alternative at each point.

Socialist Unity-the opportunist electoral front promoted by the International Marxist Group -not only dodges the necessary principled struggle against the bureaucracy but also fails to spell out a satisfactory programme.

In attempting to short-cut the process through "mass" ballot-box campaigns. therefore fails either to win significant' numbers of votes-in Edge Hill a weedy 127-or to offer workers the political clarity that they need in the struggles to come.

Edge Hill is a clear case in point. The area contains few immigrant workers, and is situated next to the heavy immigrant population in the Toxteth area.

Unemployment

And while unemployment in the City of Liverpool is now a staggering 24%, this percentage tequai to the worst periods of the depression in 1932-is exceeded by pockets in Edge Hill where the figure rises to 34%.

The area is peppered with rotting slums and tenements. Of the remaining local industry two more key factories-Dunlops and Plesseys with a total workforce of 3,200-are the latest facing closure.

As might be expected in this wasteland of Labour government policies, the area has become a breeding ground for racist thugs and a recruiting pitch for the National Front.

Threadbare:

Yet it is precisely on the key issues of the struggle against unemployment and the fight against racism and fascism that the hotch-potch programme presented by Socialist Unity was at its most threadbare.

The main demand on unemployment is Moss Evans' and Len Murray's favourite: the simple reformist call for a 35hour week.

But the manifesto makes no attack on the miserable betrayal of this demand by every sector of the TỤC bureaucracy over recent years.

And it avoids any call for the Trotskyist demand of a full sliding scale of hours--the division of the work available among the whole workforce without loss of pay-which could weil mean a working week of less than 35 hours.

Dunlop leaders.

Instead the manifesto goes on piously to call for firms which propose redundancies or closures to be "nationalised under workers! control"-but spelling out no concrete steps through which workers' can act independently as a class to force such nationalisation, such as occupation of threatened plants, or the opening of the books of the employers to reveal the full extent of their plans and profiteering.

It is particularly important that a revolutionary election manifesto should stress this aspect of the demand for nationalisation if it is not to appear as simply a vague demand for parliamentary action.

Nothing to offer

On the struggle against racist violence, the Socialist Unity Manifesto has nothing whatever to offer. In a predominantly white populated community it calls limply for support to "the right of black and Asian people to defend themselves"

Since, with or without Socialist Unity's "support" these communities are already forced to detend themserves, erton, chair• criticise this takes nobody inch forward.

The issue to be confronted in Edge Hill is the fight to mobilise the white working class through the trade unions and other working class organisa. tions, in joint workers' defence squads alongside workers and youth from the immigrant community.

Class response

Only this policy offers a class response to fascist and racist attacks and genuinely fights to break down racial dvisions in the labour movement.

While the Socialist Unity election campaign therefore offered little to the workers of Edge Hill, it appeared to make a small development with the Liverpool IMG, which suddenly discovered the struggle against closure at Dunlops and produced their firest leaflet into the Speke plant.

But this, too, failed to the key questions.

Though calling correctly for occupation of the plant, the leaflet failed to make the slightest criticism of the plant convenors whose main efforts since the closure announcement have been directed towards preventing an occupation.

Blaming workforce

As a result the leaflet winds up implicitly blaming the Dunlop workforce for the lack of action!

With the declaration of the General Election, no doubt large numbers of Socialist PRESS Unity candidates will be distributing large quantities of equally bankrupt election material in various areas.

But without a principled fight for the full programme of demands necessary for the working class at this point of the struggle and a ruthless exposure of every section of the trade union bureaucracy, this activity, for all its good intentions, will do little to advance the struggles of the working class and nothing to educate the forces necessary to construct a revolutionary party. Neave's murder as the pretext for advocating a sudden change in what is. fundamentally bipartisan policy will not neec much resisting because it will not seriously arise.

Bomb to power

Indeed the only paper to put the bombing in a party context was the Daily Mirror, which lines up behind the reactionary Labour leadership on every issue, and which pointed to the bombing as an attempt to "bomb the Tories to power"

The Daily Mail called for identity cards for anyone travelling into or out of Ireland.

The Telegraph called tor capital punishment and the reintroduction of internment.

But the dominant theme was unity between the policies of the Tories and those of the Labour leadership.

The Daily Express said: "Policy is not affected by this murder. The tough, brave, unyielding line taken by Mr. Roy Mason will be taken by any other possible successor of either party.

"We are in Northern Ireland, that sicily of the Northwest, because it requires a firm, stern hand if it is to stay within the civilised world. We are Northern Ireland's guardians."

The Daily Mail: "Nor Socialist Ünity candidate Alan Walker (0L1 Mrs. Thatcher alone who will, as a result of this atrocious act, be more than ever determined to deal firmly with what looks like the beginning of a new wave of terrorism.

"At this time, when the parties are shaping up for a hard political fight in the forthcoming General Election, their will not be divided in revulsion and their resolve that those who are responsible for this shameful act will be brought to justice, and that their goal which is to establish in blood a sort of Marxist Cuba in John Bull's other island will be resisted."

And the Daily Telegraph, in a frank admission that Neave's policies were already implemented by the Labour Party, said: "The policy he espoused is working. With the passage of the legislation to increase Ulster's representation in the Commons, the IRA is further than ever from its objective, of severing the constitutional links between Britain and Northern Ireland." .

It is a mark of the deepness of Labour government reaction that in calling for vengeance for the death of one of their favourite sons, the Tory press feels it necessary to make no criticism of Labour ministers or Labour policy.

The entire Labour Cabinet, from Mason to Benn, stands condemned by this silence.