Workers Socialist League

Socialist Press, Trotskyism Today and the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, 1975–1984

Ur Fight Against Tories!

Socialist Press no. 157, 4 July 1979 · scan pp. 10–11 · about 493 words

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Returned to office after five years of Labour betrayals, the Tory government has immediately begun wielding a sharpened axe on jobs, conditions and social services. Trade Union rights face imminent legal attack. Prices are already beginning to rocket upwards.

Plum sectors of state industry will be handed to the Tories' profiteering big business backers; and the pay rises to police and armed forces mark only the prelude to increased state violence against pickets and anti-fascists, and an intensified army crackThe Callaghan-Healey leadership has made it clear that it will opppose any perspective other than settling down and meekAnd, though they have once more dusted off their near-forgotten "socialist" speeches, Labour's "left-wing" MPs have continued to duck away from any fight to remove Callaghan.

TUC leaders, too, have set out to establish a basis for collaboration with Thatcher and the Tory cabinet, parallelling their anti-working class alliance with Wilson and then Callaghan.

But the working class has experienced and overcome such betrayals before-to topple Heath's union bashing government in 1974, and smash through Callaghan's reactionary Phase 4 of wage controls in a series of monumental pay battles last winter.

These experiences are not dead. They point to the way that jobs, social services and hard won union rights can be defended But a principled, revolutionary leadership is needed if the Labour traitors, the TUC collaborators and their hangers-on in the Communist Party are to be exposed and pushed aside, and the mass struggles mobilised that can defeat and remove the Such a leadership must fight day in and day out for a programme of transitional demands which, starting from today's conditions and today's consciousness within the working class, lead workers to grasp the necessity for socialist revolution.

And in taking up democratic demands-such as an end to racial and sexual discrimination, it must show the crucial role that must be played by the working class as the only consistently revolutionary class capable of leading the struggle for the And it must fight on an international basis-mobilising solidarity for anti-imperialist and anti capitalist struggleswhether in Ireland, in Southern Africa or elsewhere throughout the world, and drawing strength, and political lessons from revolutionary upheavals such as that which ousted the hated This means fighting for the reconstruction of the Trotsky.

This method of approach, rejecting any descent to simple Pil struggle against trade union militancy, or concessions to any wing of the labour The next period will see major class struggles in Britain. A principled, Marxist leadership is essential. Our movement though and redundancies strong in programme remains small in numbers.

JOIN US and take forward the struggle for socialism! ET SOCIALIST A35S lead óf Socialist Press. I enclose . Name. .

Address Send to Socialist Press, Hill, London NWS 1HR. down in the occupied North of Ireland.

ly accepting five years of Tory devastation. against renewed Tory attacks.

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bureaucracy, is the method fought for by the Workers Socialist wage controi, cuts

← Contents of Socialist Press no. 157, 4 July 1979