Labour Partv Conference: CLEAR OUT THE CALLAGHAN GANG

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"We will work like the devil to ensure that votes are cast against the reforms."

So spoke AUEW President Terry Duffy in the midst of a flurry of furtive manoeuvres and armtwisting as Callaghan's right wing Labour mafia seeks desperately to knife the introduction of any form of Party democracy at next week's conference.

Callaghan's undisguised contempt for the decisions of the Labour Party conference and for the interests of the working class was shown clearly during the last Labour government. It is a position he shares with Wilson and with Labour leaders ever since the party's formation.

Amazing

But the lengths to which his reactionary supporters are now prepared to go in their efforts to preserve rigid right wing control of the party were demonstrated in the amazing events at the AUEW National Conference.

Duffy knew that if the conference debated the issue of Labour Party democracy the outcome would certainly favour the reform proposals.

But he wanted to be free to pressurise the AUEW delegation without any definite policy decision having been made.

Accordingly Duffy and Boyd instructed conference chairman Harold Robson to refuse to accept a Standing Orders Committee decision to discuss the matter and refuse to take a motion of no confidence in the chair.

As soon as the delegates objected to an agenda without the emergency motion, the conference was summarily closed down!

But with workers by the thousand, even by the million, clearly on the move in pay struggles (engineering, ITV, carworkers, and many others) on jobs and against the Tory spending cuts there are few union leaders prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with AUEW bureaucrats in using such brazen dictatorial methods.

The - nine-union "Trade Unions for a Labour Victory', headed by GWU leader David Basnett has stood back while Callaghan's mobsters knife the opposition. Even veteran witchhunter Frank Chapple has declined to become involved.

Only steel union bureaucrats Bill Sirs and Hector Smith, (who have lifted not a finger to prevent the Tories' wholesale slaughter of jobs and working conditions in the steel industry) have come out openly in support of the Callaghan/Duffy manoeuvres.

But the reluctance of union leaders to align themselves against the left wing proposals are not simply due to embarassment or to a growing conviction that Callaghan is bound to lose out.

They also recognise the totally inadequate and basically harmless nature of the proposed reforms.

Councillors

The compulsory reselection of MPs by constituency parties, for instance, while it might the problems of the workers who elect them, will in itself do nothing to resolve the crisis of principled leadership within the After all, Labour councillors are already subjected to a compulsory reselection procedure; yet hundreds of them up and down the country are even now showing their contempt for the membership by willingly implementing first Labour and now Tory government spending cuts, shutting down schools, nurseries hospitals and social services and throwing thousands out of work!

Indeed dozens of councillors who are actually engaged in slashing public services in their own constituencies will no doubt be sat in next week's conference voting for reselection to make Labour MPs "accountable"!

Similarly a change in the method of electing the Labour Party leader, separated from the development of a principled leadership prepared to fight for the removal of Callaghan and the adoption of a socialist programme-including mass action to bring down the Tories-is only a superficial change.

PHOTO: Andrew Wiard. Report No question Lest there were any doubt on this, Tony Benn last week in repeated radio and TV interviews insisted that as far as he and his fellow 'lefts' are concerned there is no question of fighting for the removal of Callaghan, arguing:

*We do not knife our leaders: we stand by them until they choose to go."

While the "lefts" recoil in horror from the necessary all-out fight to oust the right wing, however, the Callaghan gang show no such scruple and are engaged in a no-holds-barred scramble to defeat their opponents.

The third proposal to which Callaghan is most adamantly opposed is that the Labour NEC should finalise the Party's election manifesto.

Pol Pot Legacy Yet this, too, is a toothless measure, since it provides for no means whereby the Parliamentary Labour Party can be compelled to implement the manifesto.

Indeed both sides tacitly acknowledge that there should be no attempt by the party to prevent a future Labour government acting the way they all have-first and foremost in accordance with the requirements of capitalism.

This is not to say that the reforms should not be supported: we favour any moves that weaken the hold of bureaucratic dictatorship in the labour movement.

But there must be no illusions that merely by reforming the internal processes of the Labour Party it can be edged gradually to the point of adopting and implementing the necessary socialist policies.

Shrewd

The Labour left around Benn and the Tribune Group shrewdly recognise the need for the party to adopt a manifesto reflecting some of the demands of the masses, and for its MPs to appear to fight for workers' interests if workers are not to become completely disillusioned with the politics of parliamentary reform.

But they essentially are at Cont'd p12, col 6 USFI XIth World page UI

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pressure some right wingers to pretend to a greater interest in