Danger of steelworkers isolatior TUC BLOCKS GENERA STRIKE

Scan page 1

The nine-week old steel strike suffered a heavy blow last week, as South Wales miners voted by 5-1 not to strike against threatened closures.

The decision marks a defeat for those seeking a means of extending and strengthening the steel strike, which now faces a growing danger of isolation and demoralisation.

Yet it would be wrong to heap the blame for this setback on the rank and file of the Welsh NUM.

Behind the miners' retreat lay weeks of deliberate sabotage of the jobs struggle by TUC leaders determined at all costs to avoid a showdown with the Thatcher government.

Warnings last month from NUR leader Sid Weighell and PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Gormley ISTC leader Bill Sirs that a General Strike was possible, stemmed not from their willingness to lead such an action, but from their fears that control of the struggle was slipping from their bureaucratic grip.

The warnings were heedednot by the Tories but by the TUC. The machinery of the TUC ground relentlessly into action-not of course to support the steel workers, who remain the victims of massive, organised scabbing, but to suppress moves that could win the strike and defeat the Tories.

The most obvious target was the Welsh TUC, which: had called for an indefinite general strike against steel closures, beginning on January 21.

The backbone of this action was the Welsh NUM, whose members had voted 9-1 to endorse such action.

Brushed aside

Len Murray at once put the boot in. Appeals for support from the main TUC were brushed aside, and every available pressure was brought to bear to force the Welsh TUC to postpone the action to March 10.

In its place a one-day token stoppage was called for January 27 -a gauge of the militancy was given by the staggering 250,000 workers who responded with strike action on that day.

Welsh NUM leaders correctly protested at this retreat: but they went along with the new proposals, in the name of 'unity'.

As it became increasingly clear that the March 10 deadline itself would be dropped, however, and plans for a delegate conference on February 27 were postponed by the Welsh TUC the NUM after a month of stressing the need for uniter action, convened a delegate conference to consider going it alone in the fight to defend jobs.

The delegate conference voted unanimously to call all-out strike action from February 25-stating that "the action would be called off only when the TUC undertook to play a more positive role in fighting the steel and coal closure!

Yet miners in South Wales were painfully aware that, while Scargill and McGahey have marched squads of flying pickets around, theirs is the only area of the NUM even seriously to have considered strike action against closures.

Marginal impact

• For Wales to come out while every other section of miners continues producing coal, would have only a marginal impact on production-especially when the NCB has always claimed that the South Wales pits are loss makers.

Faced with no prospect of support from the Welsh TUC, active sabotage from the British TUC and opposition from Gormley and the NUM leadership to their strike, the Welsh miners voted against actionand, as Murray and Co. intended, the steelworkers have its attacks on the whole working class-carving up trade union rights, stepping up closure plans and ramming home even more savage public spending cuts.

TUC leaders, happy just to collaborate with the Tories and the employers as they did with the right wing Callaghan governallow súch a setback than mobilise the strength and militancy of the working class to bring down the Thatcher government.

Such a course must be resisted. Within BL, within the NUM, within the transport unions, within other sectors facing pay struggles and throughout the public sector in the struggle against the cuts, the demand must be raised for all-out strike action alongside the steelworkers.

Bring down Thatcher Resolutions must demand the TUC call a General Strike to bring down this bosses' government and create conditions to drive out Labour's right wing traitors who helped them into office.

To prepare for such a General Strike, councils of action, drawing rank and file delegates from every section of the labour movement, must be built to organise mass picketing, blacking and workers control of essential supplies.

And a principled, revolutionary leadership must be built to wage the struggle for socialist policies that offer the only solution to the crisis now facing the working class.

----- pull-quotes -----

ment, have proven by their actions that they would sooner