Carter threat to use force

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Hopes of an all-out struggle to defend hard-won union rights and agreements in BL cars revived last week despite the frenzied efforts of the AUEW to prevent a strike and a total abdication of leadership by TGWU officials.

Indeed as we go to press TGWU General Secretary Moss Evans is pondering whether he should call out the union's 47,000 members who form the majority of BL's semi-skilled workforce on official strike-or whether he should hold back and wait for the growing wave of unofficial shop floor resistance to subside./ Mandate The issue has been forced to Evans attention by the strikes that have erupted in BL's midlands car plants. But he is not basing his decision on this clear evidence of workers' willingness to fight Edwardes-nor on the unmistakeable mandate for action given to him by the recent ballot rejection of BL's 5%-with-strings package.

Instead he has been sounding out the views of individual TGWU convenors-who have time and again held back from Evans MILK * Laid-off workers from the Mini are now picketing the Longbridge plant-pointing out that Edwardes' new strings have -among other things-scrapped their 80% lay-off pay.

*Yet still Evans is holding back on an all-out strike call.

Stewards from the Leyland Action Committee, however, are Edwardes against the whole pay-closuresIn both Iran and in the USA reactionary leaders are searching for a way out of the confrontation that has developed over the American embassy hostages.

For President Carter, the miserable failure of US diplomatic and economic sanctions against Iran has now been compounded by a similar failure of his attempts to whip up a coordinated response from his fellow imperialist leaders-all of whom fear for their own oil supplies and for the long-term stability of the Gulf region.

For Ayatollah Khomeini, supporting the seizure of the hostages seemed at first to be an ideal and comparatively harmless means of diverting mass attention from mounting unemployment and economic crisis through a limited anti-imperialist mobilisation.

Shah's regime

As moves to consolidate an Islamic dictatorship in Iran and suppress the national struggles of Kurds, Arabs, Azerbaijanis and others drew out unpleasant memories of the Shah's repression, the demand for the Shah's extradition seemed a useful cover.

But in following this course of action, Khomeini has in fact helped to paint both himself and his protege President BaniSadr into a corner.

Bani-Sadr has from the outset opposed the holding of the hostages, and sought to reconstruct the centralised state apparatus and repressive machinery in Iran, and to make overtures to Us imperialismpartıcularly ın the wake of the invasion of Afganistan.

But his efforts to bring an end to the hostages confrontation have run up against the anti-imperialist sentiments of the Iranian masses: and neither

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Cont'd p.2, col. 1 Bani-Sadr