Labour's "Peace" aimmick

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Though the anti-nuclear power campaigns so popular in Europe and the USA have largely fallen flat in this country, growing sections of the workers' movement are making it clear that they are opposed to being blown to smithereens in a nuclear war.

This stand WHEN THE MUTS THE REBELLION COMES, EXPLANATION! I'LL BE READY 100% News was suppressed until after the seige was over.

Editorials about 'one rotten apple' begin to look threadbare set alongside evidence that the whole barrel is of one piece.

Fervour

The SAS raid has stirred Fleet Street nationalistic fervour since England's World in 1966.

No doubt the National Front are holding meetings in celebration of the SAS's stirring deeds Iin which they made the nationalists holding the embassy get up off the floor where they had surrendered and shot them in cold blood. Excellent heroics!)

But however fervently the fascists celebrate this victory for the trained killers they will not be able to exceed the display which the press has churned onto the streets.

No doubt there will now be SAS tee-shirts, SAS coffee mugs and SAS bed socks flooding onto the market.

But next time an SAS man or ordinary soldier gets blinded by a bomb in Derry or Belfast his cries of disbelief are unlikely to be marketed in the pages of the Telegraph. is causing considtherefore into unseen Cup win erable annoyance to military chiefs, irritation to the Tories and embarrassment to Labour's right wing.

Labour's Special Conference saw the novel exploitation of the call for "Peace" as a major element in the diversionary document put forward by the Party's NEC.

Only former Foreign Secretary David Owen at the Special Conference tried to argue the case in favour of a further expansion in nuclear weapons programmes-to offer, he argued, a bargaining counter in arms limitation talks!

Owen was howled at for his pains. And a succession of floor speakers-including Agricultural Workers' Union leader Jack Boddy got up to voice vocal opposition to the siting oi hundreds of US Cruise missiles in Britain, targeted on the Out of 580 Cruise missiles in the whole of Europe, 170 of them are to be sited in East Anglia!

"If the bomb is to fall, I hope it falls on me" , declared Boddy-a sentiment no doubt echoed by thousands of militant farmworkers angered by successive pay sell-outs!

Opportunism

"Left'-talking MP Martin Flannery however pointed out that while the Party prattles on about "peace" only: 70 Labour MPs went into the lobbies to vote against the latest Tory defence estimates.

There is certainly à hefty measure of opportunism and cynicism in Labour's present verbal commitment to "peace"

Conspicuously the talk has grown louder while Labour is in opposition, and not in government. The policy statement a ne poor joois wont know waich declares that:

"The Labour Party opposes the manufacture and deployment of Cruise missiles and the neutron bomb, and refuses to permit their deployment Britain by the United States or any other Country"

But of course there is no commitment to withdraw from the imperialist NATO alliance that is masterminding the missiles programme or from the other reactionary alliances of British capitalism.

Only last week NATO ministers reaffirmed their commitment to the deployment of Cruise missiles and other aggressive military hardware against the Soviet Union.

Until this alliance against the workers of the world is broken, there can be no guarantee of "peace" or safety.

But the whole woolly notion of "peace" has only recently dawned on Labour's leaders as a vote winner.

The June 22 "peace" rally -complete with posters, badges, balloons, sticks of rock and a £500 TGWU sponsored band -is the first anti-war gesture called by the Labour Party since the Suez crisis of 1956!

The Party's squalid record includes support for British imperialism in two World Wars, and support for imperialist aggression in general.

The Party sat firmly on its hands throughout the barbaric US war in Vietnam-while Harold Wilson as Prime Minister hobnobbed with US mass murderer Lyndon Johnson.

Labour leaders have time and again given tacit or open backing to the aggressive colonialist policies of the Zionist state of Israel against the Palestinian and Arab people.

And even now they support the vicious military repression MX MX MX MX MX Bill Mauldin © 1980 Chic:

LI_1 of the Irish people by imperialist troops.

For such leaders to talk of "peace" is a fraud. But there is also another deception involved.

The Labour leaders know full well that the Thatcher government is hell-bent on an aggressive cold war militaristic policy: and they know that the only way this can be stopped is to bring the government down.

Yet the "Peace" rally and the Special Conference statement are a conscious attempt to head away from any such fight.

Only through revolutionary, not reformist action can the working class of Britain and the whole world secure the right to live in peace.