TROOPSOUT 66 NOW! RELAND Hull fascists' shotgun raid

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Stalinists giving the right wing a lesson in outrage and indignation against those who question Britain's 'democracy' by exposing the reality of its bloody imperialist repression.

svell so, , the vote was only Fascists in Hull have resorted to gun attacks to intimidate their opponents.

In the small hours of Tuesday May 27 two left wing book shops had their windows shattered by shot gun blasts.

One-Socialist Boox -is operated by the Socialist Workers Party. Two adults and two children narrowly escaped serious injury in the attack.

Arson

In the second one, linked to the Communist Party, a shot gun blast shattered a ¼-inch thick plate glass window.

The same shop had been the victim of an arson attack in March 1979.

ES condemning the picket, but AUEW official John Baldwin, saying:

"If this is modern trade unionism in Britain I want no part of it. Today we have seen its ugly and unacceptable face."

Press attacks on strikers and pickets have become so highly tuned that they are produced to a formula. Like Elizabethan or classiçal tragedies there are certain conventions that simply must appear in the witchhunt.

One is the poor dogged workers (scab) determinedly pursuing his desire to work (collaborate) despite trade union power (vacillation). In the Isle of Grain it was not however a question of finding a few individuals:

"The pickets failed miserably as more than 30 coaches and minibuses carrying around 1,200 bona fide trade unionists [!] rumbled past GMWU official picket lines. "

A second convention is to praise and pity the poor hard pressed police as they neutrally' carry out their role of upholding law and order.

So at the Isle of Grain when one of the coaches broke down the impartial role of the police was to push-start it! The Mail remarks:

*This seemed to anger pickets more than ever, as they broke through the police cordon there were bodies sprawled all over the road."

Somewhere there must be found space to note that the strikers are determined to bring the word that Mail readers know and love crashing about their The shotgun raids are by no means the first terrorist attack by fascists in Hull, who have many times tried to smash up events organised by working class political organisations and trade unions.

They are now obviously escalating violence in a bid to cash in on the sky-rocketing unemployment in the cityparticularly amongst school leavers.

This vicious attack must be a warning to the movement.

If the fascists are not crushed, their campaign of arson, intimidation and violence against the labour movement will only intensify. ears.

The Mail writes:

"The Isle of Grain was the first real test of the power of the GMWU laggers to hold the industry to ransom."

But maybe the major flourish which every good witchhunt must contain is to find some women who can be held up against male strikers-to divide workers on sexual lines and to demonstrate a constant myth that women are 'naturally' more reasonable' (Tory) than men.

Under a headline «Wives who ran the gauntlet of hate" (whose wives?) the Mail said:

"Four brave women ran a terrifying gauntlet of jeering pickets as they drove the power station workers to their jobs."

The women, serve several uses for the bosses: they not only drive scabs through picket lines, but double up as "wives"

the headline and as "'mothers" in the text.

The Mail shows the women pictured in a coach with a shattered window. (None of them were actually driving that coach, but why draw the line at a bit of poetic licence?)

The conventions are familiar, but as ever with press witch-hunts, they are only powerful when allied to reaction within the workers movement.

It is not the press which has invented the scabbing at the Isle of Grain. Rather it is the AUEW EEPTU, UCATT and the TGWU which have presented them with a witchhunt on a plate.