Set Back for a Tout

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SSE and how to protect their own interests without precipitating an all-out crash.

But should confidence crack or a substantial dumping of dollars take place, the pressure on a desperate Carter to launch a military attack on Iran would mount-possibly to breaking point.

wallen anti-Iranian • hysteria being consciously whipped up Gerry Fitt, founder member of the Catholic petty bourgeois party of Northern Ireland-the SDLP -resigned last week accusing his party of going soft on the Provos.

His resignation has been mourned by the British government and the British press as wrecking chances of the Atkins Conference going ahead.

In fact Fitt's resignation is itself a reflection of the fact that the conference was always doomed as anything more than a public relations exercise.

'Irish dimension'

The SDLP's condition for attending talks was that they should have, an 'trish dimension' This is the phrase continually used to suggest as much as possible to republicans and as little as possible to Orange Protestants.

Mostly it fools neither side.

Fitt's differences with his party go back a long way.

As the party's only MP he has acted independently of it and off his own bat promised Tory Minister, Atkins, that the SDLP would join the planned talks.

Despite his attacks on "very extreme Republican sentiments now being expressed within the inner councils of the SDLP" there is no chance of the party actively opposing imperialism.

But at its annual conference in early November a resolution from mid Ulster calling for withdrawal of troops to barracks and for negotiations with "all political and paramilitary organisations who belong to the Irish tradition" , picked up a quarter of the votes.

No solutions At the bottom of the division, however is the growing recognition by SDLP supporters that the party has no perspectives or 'political solutions' left.

Demoralisation among the occupying forces, increased success by and support for the Provisional IRA, and the continuing domination of Loyalist politics by the Paisleyites have ensured that 'concensus politics' have never been less relevant.

Paisley has accepted the invitation to talks to underline that in his view the Atkins proposals for local authority-type powers in treland make no concessions to the Catholic right wing:

The official Unionists, on the other hand, demand that there be no conference or discussions outside Westminster.

While the Tory plans lie in disarray, the opportunities for the intervention of a consistent revolutionary perspective are more favourable than for many years.

But though the Provisional IRA's courageous and unyielding battle is capable of frustrating the best laid plans of British Fitt provide that critical interven. it cannot and will not tion.

Under the pressure of events, most notably the Pope's visit, the socialist rhetoric of the Provisional movement has come increasingly unstitched-leading recently to an explicit disavowal of Marxism in Republican News.

There is no short cut to the building of a revolutionary party and such a party must be built.

The need for agitation in Britain over demands on political status for republican prisoners, the immediate withdrawal of British troops and for the self determination for the Irish people as a whole is greater than ever.

The defeat of British imperialism in Ireland through the direct intervention of the British working class has to be the basis of solidarity work.