Crypto Tories reneu Labour witch hunt

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some areas Party, organisation a cautious welcome by shadow PRESS Still bruised from the clubbing meted out to Callaghan by delegates at extreme right wing is now openly hunting for revenge.

But with local Labour Parties increasingly under pressure from a militant working class seeking a means of struggle against Tory cuts, closures and anti-union laws, the problem that faces the right wing is how to reassert their authority.

Cut off noses

The danger that many fear is that they will wind up simply cutting off their noses in order to spite their face.

This is because in combatting elements within the Labour Party that are pressing for socialist policies, for Party democracy, ana for an end to the line of the reactionary Callaghan-Healey leadership, the right wing winds up having to choose between two unsatisfactory options.

*They could launch a full-scale McCarthyite witch-hunt against any socialist. : element that stirs within the Party.

Some are plainly looking to this option, despite its evident disadvantages. The results of this would be unpredictable: in Owen-warning against party split would be reducea to a filmsy shell of time-worn careerists and right wingers, incapable of mobilising the electoral support on which the PLP rests.

In other areas the witchhunters themselves could be defeated, and the position of Labour militants could be consolidated.

*Or alternatively, in line with the idea floated by bloated Enrociat Roy Jenkins and given minister Willam Koogers, Labour's extreme right wing could simply proceed to split the party and attempt to establish along with Liberals and possibly a few left' Tories, a new, "centre" party free from any embarrassing links with the working class or socialist rhetoric.

This, too, is a major gamble, which would effectively hand over control of the Labour Party itself to the left wing , and could well throw its advo cates into a political limbo-dr enied votes from both working class Labour supporters and from hard line Tories.

Fight inside

This is plainly what concerns right wing spokesman David Owen in opposing this scheme and calling on the right to fight it out inside the Party.

The reemergence last week of the rather tired old report by Labour's former National Agent Reg (now Lord) Underhill is another expression of this GANG The press had gone easy on the steel strike in the hope that it could be wound up early.

But as the picketing spread lurid accounts of the dreaded 'secondary pickets' began to crowd the front pages. The union. was 'out of control': Strike committees were tearing up the instructions of their leaders.

The Daily Mail interviewed Bill Sirs and Sir Charles Villiers under the headline The Two Faces of Crisis. Large photographs showed them looking glumly out of the page.

Sir Charles Villiers is:

"an old soldier with wounds and medals to prove it" ... "a 6' 4" tall ramrod master... the eternal Senior Officer-listening to subalterns' advice, yet confident in his own judgement and absolutely determined to go his own way.

"There's autocratic Norman blood there. His folk came over with William the Conqueror, though not, to his regret, on the first day."

He doesn't smoke or drink and:

"from a sense of social obligation rises at 6 a.m. and tries to be in bed before 11.00 p.m."

The Mail writes:

"As his stand forces flying pickets and police into confrontation, he says: I'm trying in my little way to make Britain better. That's what I'm on about, d'ye see? By better I mean more understanding, more clever, more successful, richer' In his way Sirs is treated dilemma facing would-be witch-hunters.

Retreating from a full scale war against those adhering to the very idea of socialism they have attempted instead to pick a more restricted but inescap able target: the Militant' group.

"Militant' is an obvious target for the extreme right because of its considerable support, particularly within Labour's youth movement and its ostentatious socialist and even Trotskyist rhetoric.

Anti-communist

For veteran anti-Communists like Underhill, the fact that such an outward political face is combined in practice with a stubborn refusal to carry out or support any serious struggle within the Labour Party for the removal of the Callaghan-Healey leadership is seen not as a reason for soft-peddling on a witchhunt, but as evidence of Militant supporters' perfidious and devious tactics.

But for the fake lefts of the Search Cue hiltant tor at group of MPs to support their positions within the party offers an alluring prospect of a left' cover. _ Benn, Heffer and others, along with left-talking NUPE leader Alan Fisher have repeatedly utilised the Militant in efforts to repolish their tarnished image as radical "socialists. with more respect by the Mail. The press does respect the labour bureaucracy. The feeling is mutual.

Sirs plays his interviewer a tape of a meeting with British Steel in which the Teeside Managing Director Derek Saul says "I am not very much impressed by the rhetoric I have heard in whatever dialect"

Before he plays the uproar which follows, the Mail notes that Sirs tells , his secretary to put her hands over her ears. "The nicest word she heard was "poofter' "

But the bureaucracy-aspiring to the ideals of the Daily Mail itself-is also vulnerable at such times.

The paper notes:

"There was nothing left-wing about the way he ran his expensive . Iwo-garage house Hatfield, where he runs in the morning and sees the lights go on in the homes of stockbrokers and insurance executives who are his neighbours and like him for what he is."

Sirs provides the classic bureaucrat's explanation for leading the strike.

"If I had tried to persuade my people to compromise on a wage offer which is practically nothing, i would have lost my credibility. They would have led me and not me them."

Behind the calls in the press for tougher picketing laws and for strike breaking measures lies a growing uncertainly of which the Mail interviews are only one symptom.

The most dramatic shift has come from the Sunday Times, Perhaps this is one reason why the NEC's organisation committee has once again turned down a call for the publication of the Underhill The report itself has now been promptly leaked to the press to facilitate a coordinated Tory intervention into the In contrast, the same committee voted to recommend that the expulsion in Oxford of a TGWU GMC delegate, Socialist Press supporter, Ted Heslin, be upheld.

Iwo other socialists, Peter Mcintyre and Ken Williamson, whose membership applications had been rejected, were recommended to reapply.

The political crisis confronting the Labour bureaucracy offers a • vital chance for socialists to struggle for a principled programme within the No bans But a precondition of such a struggle is the fight by all Labour activists against all right wing witch-hunts, and against bans and proscriptions on socialists.

Instead the fire must be directed at the crypto-Tory right wing that stands opposed to the fight to bring down Thatcher, and unashamedly committed to a programme of class compromise and betrayal. which at the beginning of the strike, congratulated the government for staying detached but has now dramatically changed its line.

It outlines the way in which the strike has hardened:

"The fact that they very nearly accepted a modest rise linked to productivity, no no longer means that a little more money would do the trick. The climate is now quite different.

"Plant closures and job losses as well as current wage demands are being drawn into what is now a wide challenge, sincerely felt, to the government's policy for the industry, and to some extent for industry in general"

"In our view the issue is now whether intervention should come before or after several weeks of probably irreperable damage has been done to British industry. We suggest the sooner the better"

The paper goes on to blame bad management for the crisis in steel, and proposes fewer job cuts, a bigger wage rise and the cancelling of some of the massive interest charges British Steel has to pay, in return for productivity.

This "solution' is of course no solution. But when the paper that has consistently argued (and practiced) confrontation management now pleads for classic Labourite horse-trading with the bureaucracy, it is an indication of the lack of confidence with which important sections of the bourgeoisie now view the Thatcher government.

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last year's annual confer- ence, the Labour Party's