Special Conference: Callaghar's safety

Scan page 4

clearly drawn up by the NEC 'lefts' and eagerly endorsed by Callaghan.

No amendments or counterresolutions will be allowed.

As Labour Weekly has admitted, the resolution, for all its superficial puffs of anticapitalist rhetoric:

"contains no new policies, though some areas are toughened."

The essential unanimity between the right wing Callaghan leadership and his supposed left' wing opponents on the NEC has been exposed in a joint statement based not upon socialist policies but upon the reform expansion of capitalism.

*After five years of mass unemployment under Wilson/ Callaghan governments, the resolution hypocritically proclaims that "the restoration and maintenance of full employment" is "the highest priority for the next Labour government"

*After the ignominious collapse of the price controls introduced under Wilson, it pledges once again to introduce "a comprehensive and powerful system of price controls"

*While talking gamely "international agreement" and of peace, the resolution nails its colours to the mast of nationalist trade war and class collaboration with a pledge "not to allow manufactured imports to continue to destroy our [!] industries and jobs."

*It calls for "extending public ownership and planning the economy" , while-with the exception of North Sea Oil and sections "hived off" by the Tories-studiously avoiding any pledge to actually nationalise major industries or the banks. Instead it restricts itself to seeking a "significant public stake-and a degree of control" over various industrial sectors. This amounts to little more than further Callaghan/Wilson-style government cash handouts to private employers.

*And in a section headed "Policy for Peace" , the resolution, tongue in cheek, condemns the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with a ringing and hypocrtical declaration of "universal respect for the rights of all peoples and self-determination" -a "universal" réspect which of course successive Labour leaderships and governments have refused to extend to the Irish people in their ongoing struggle for national liberation.

As an exercise in tub-thumping, whistle blowing and antiToryism the Special Conference will undoubtedly prove a success for the Labour leadership, whose document will inevitably be endorsed.

But, as the NEC has already decided, as a basis for hammering out a coherent socialist policy for full-scale mobilisation to bring down the Tory government it is a non-starter.

Far from offering "Peace, Jobs and Freedom" to the working class, the conference resolution expresses the desire of Labour's leadership to prestrve men uwn peacerur co- munnaun thain aren nannafil on existence with capitalism, their own well-heeled and influential jobs and their own freedom to flout the wishes and ignore the interests of their rank and file in successive treacherous social democratic governments.

The absence of the slightest challenge to such policies from the "socialists" on Labour's NEC confirms that a constituent alternative to Callaghan can only be developed in the fight for a revolutionary leadership in the workers' movement.

Scan page 5

The Working 1: Wages For all the Tory attacks and plans, the most powerful factor dividing and weakening the working class is the treachery of