Final sell out at Dunlops

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A month after the closure of the Dunlop Sp eke Plant, which resulted in the loss of 2,400 jobs, the company has announced the re-employing of 140 of the original workforce who had refused to accept the redundancy money.

In return for this tiny concession the Dunlop "action" committee has agreed to lift its picket of the Fort Dunlop plant, the Walton Footwear Plant and the golf ball factory in Speke.

This is clearly a face-saving cover for the final abandonment of any pretence of a fight to save the plant and the whole 2,400 jobs.

Throughout the long, protracted closure period since January of this year, the "action" committee, headed by TGWU Executive Council chairman Stan Pemberton, has skilfully manoeuvred to avoid an occupation to save all the jobs and have attacked demands to open the books to an elected trade union committee. .

The WSL was witch-hunted in two of the first mass meetings for raising these demands.

The Dunlop workers not only had to face the problem of a right wing led "action" committee, but were also presented with the spectacle of nearly every other left wing group acting as "left cover". for the "action" committee.

Misleaders From the beginning it was only the WSL that stressed in its leaflets that the key problem facing the Dunlop workers was their own mis-leaders who accepted that the "viability" of the company is more important than the viability of the members-that jobs had to be sacrificed for the sake of the company profitability.

The WSL argued that was a need for a new leadership which would represent the independent class interests of the members.

What was the position of the rest of the left?

The Communist Party was represented on the "action" committee by Tony Lane, Liverpool University sociologist and author of one book "Make the Union Strong"

He was co-opted onto the committee as public relations man and apologist for the rightwing "action" committee leadership-repeating the role played by Huw Benyon at the Triumph closure.

Lane was 100% in favour of the job-cutting, workers' 'viability plan' and enthusiasticaliy sold it to the workers on radio and in the papers.

He has consistently backed every cynical manoeuvre of the "action" committee right from the start.

CP District Secretary Roger • 'Hara also attacked WSL leaflets at a public meeting, defending Pemberton and demagogically calling for unity-the spurious "unity" which leads to the dole queue.

Boosting Pemberton The WRP did not produce a single leaflet throughout the whole closure and the only Newsline journalist to report a mass meeting in any way mildly critical of the leadershipStephen Johns-was subsequently expelled from the Party!

The Militant Group laid on a special LPYS public meeting in Speke to boost Pemberton and Loyden in their attempts to sellout the struggle.

Far from criticising them and calling for occupation, the tame cat "Marxists" of the Militant Group preferred to revel in their newly acquired "credibility"

To cap all, a leading spokesman for the Merseyside Militant Group, Richard Venton, had the gail to accost members of the WSL. during the May Day march in Liverpool and demand to know why we had "sabotaged" the struggle against the right wing at Dunlops by attacking Pemberton!

He apparently objected to our apt characterisation of Pemberton as a "con-man" and of Loyden as a "windbag".!

The IMG failed, similarly, to criticise or expose the witch-hunting "action" committee.

Their single leaflet put out at the plant during the "Socialist Unity" campaign at Edge Hill failed to criticise the bureaucracy at all, implicitly blaming the membership for the inaction and thereby tail-ending the "action" committee.

Grovelling

But the Socialist Workers Party have led the field in terms of uncritical and grovelling articles about how wonderful the protest stunts of the action committee were and how the whole campaign was:

"an example to trade unionists. The road blocks and occupations, the regular mass meetings, the excellent workers newspaper have built up the morale and confidence of the work-force to fight for every job"

To add the final irony to che whole charade of their intervention in this closure, the SWP have had the shameless gall to invite the action committee to their Rank and File conference where they will no doubt be put on a pedestal as an example to all of how to sell out your members.

Only the WSL, despite its limited forces in the area, has carried out a thorough-going campaign designed to expose Pemberton and the "action" committee as the betrayers of the Dunlop workers.