PTA-no civil rights' issue

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Litterick's "humanitarian"" view of the evils of the PTA ran completely counter to a strong speech at the close of the morning session by Provisional Sinn Fein member Dave Simpson.

Simpson, an Oxford student, had been arrested the previous week and held for four hours under the PTA for selling Republican News in the centre of Oxford.

Harass opponents

Showing how publicity for his case and local pressure had forced his release long before the permitted seven days' detention were up, Simpson pointed out that the PTA was not intended for use against the IRA but to harass opponents of British imperialism in Ireland.

'What would have happened if I had not been an Oxford undergraduate, but simply a working class republican sympathiser-and arrested not in Oxford but in Belfast?" asked Simpson.

The picture would have been very different. Such victims all too often wind up on the "Long Kesh conveyor belt." , which begins with brutal army interrogation, leads on to RUC torture at Castlereagh, a forced confession, a no-jury 'Diplock' Court, and a prolonged sentence in Long Kesh.

"Don't oppose the PTA on the basis of civil rights. Civil rights don't apply Simpson stressed.

"To fight the PTA means to fight to get British troops out of Ireland"

Speakers from the floor of the conference included a delegate from Leicester Trades Council who drew applause as he reported that his Trades Council had adopted a three point stand on Ireland: Troops Out Now; Political status for republican prisoners; and Repeal of the PTA.

To further applause he stressed the importance of the struggle for the restoration of political status to the prisoners still on their three-year blanket protest at the Long Kesh concentration camp.

This fight, he argued, challenges the right of British imperialism to ruie in Ireland and to proclaim its opponents mere "criminals"

Thatcher has made it clear that she wants to "criminalise' picketing and anti-fascist marches, just as Mason set out to "criminalise" republican fighters in Ireland, he said.

Abstentionists

Other floor speakers included RCT/RCG speakers who defended their position of abstention in the last election, which tail ends the similar stance of the Provisional Sinn Fein.

This was challenged by a WSL speaker who stressed that what was needed was a fight for new leadership in the labour movement.

"The answer is to vote Labour, but kick out Callaghan, kick out. Healey, kick out Mason", he said, to applause, and challenged Litterick to say where he stood on such a fight.

Sectarians of the Spartacist League tried to defend their eccentric call for "self-determination" to the Loyalist oppressors in the North of Ireland and made their position clear by leaving the conference before resolutions mapping out a campaign to take the issue of the Irish war into the labour movement were moved and voted on.

A WSL speaker argued the importance of seeing the connection between the struggle to force the troops out of Ireland, and the mounting struggles of the working class in Britain.

Mason

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PART TWO BY JOHN LISTER ER