Sparts and their sick notes

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010 JINI COrR D Steel strikers: WSL fought for solidarity action Yorkshire 1980 Socialist Press Dear Editor, We recently read your article "Sparts set up opponents for - mine.

the sack" in the Socialist Press No. 195 dated April 23, 1980, and would like to correct some of the untruths and lies that you printed about the Spartacist League and their involvement during the steel strike.

The allegations that the Spartacists were despised by steelworkers is totally untrue. While many steelworkers did not always agree with their political strategy and views, they were nonetheless respected for their involvement and seriousness, wanting as we all did, the victory of the steel strike. As an example the Spartacists were welcomed and invited to the BL [British Leyland| Cowley flying picket during the steel strike because they committed themselves to supporting the victory of our strike.

This we would ask of any organisation in the labour movefound what they had to say was always something to think about, interesting and we at least benefited by discussing with them.

As fai as we can tell, a lot of your arguments centre around the Spartacists attacking people who cross picket lines. As far as we are concerned after our 13 week strike, where a lot of strikebreaking/scabbing took place, like Hadfields, Sheerness etc., we don't like people who cross picket lines either.

We hope that in future that if you wish to treat yourselves more seriously you should address yourselves to a more truthfui account of events.

Waiting for the publication of our letter in the next publication of your paper.

Yours fraternally, Hall (Stainless Wks., (Shop Steward T&G Stainless Works)

Dear brothers, Thank you for your letter which we read first in the American Spartacist paper Workers Vanguard and then received.

We note that neither your letter, nor the article attached to it in Workers Vanguard, makes any attempt to answer the sultantive charge we have raised against the Spartacists: that one of their members, having covered his own absence from the track by getting a sick note, stood on a picket line at Rovers calling workers "scabs" because they refused to risk certain victimisation by taking strike action as individuals! Such conduct in our view is a brazen provocation.

The Workers Socialist League, while struggling politically against other political tendencies, has always sought to unify all tendencies in common action during such struggles as the steel strike.

Our fight during the steel strike focussed on the need for other sections to come out in support. It was Workers Socialist League members and supporters who first argued for the steel picket to be brought to Cowley to stop lorries carrying cot_ TEEI supplies and we discussed in detail with steel strikers on the picket how to fight against the organised TGWU scabbing that was taking place.

It was also the case that our members offered as individuals to refuse to cross the pickets (which were aimed at deliveries into the factory and which never asked the production workers not to cross).

We were told to go into work by the steel strikers themselves, who correctly saw the need not for a few individual martyrs, but for a class response which would bring the factories to a halt.

It was this struggle, against the trade union officials who sabotaged the picket, that we fought tooth and. nail. We fought for blacking and for official instructions to the lorry drivers to be upheld.

We don't know about any Spartacist members being "welcomed and invited" to the Cowley flying picket. We do know that members of the Spartacists were told by steel strikers to leave the picket if they would not stop calling our • members and supporters scabs. In the event, sooner than abandon their slander campaign, they did in fact leave!

To suggest that we supported in any way scabbing at Hadfields or Sheerness is scandalous. We can only assume that you have been fed a series of false allegations about our members.

Our dispute with the Spartacists is not over whether picket lines should be honoured. We have consistently fought against scabbing.

The nub of our disagreement with the Spartacists comes down to whether you see the task of revolutionaries and militants as gaining a class response in support of struggles, or whether it is the task of revolutionaries or militants to keep their own hands 'clean' at the expense of a class response.

The Spartacists' slanders against us have reached such a pitch that a supporter of Socialist Press who successfully brought out journalists in support of locked out NGA members (and to do so was obliged -with NGA agreementto cross the picket line for two days) was denounced by the Spartacists as not fit to be regarded as a member of the working class!

We would be glad to discuss with you in more detail our record in the steel strike and on picket lines. We don't think the Spartacist technique of using sick notes as a substitute for strike action is the method for winning workers to support each other in struggle.

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SOCIALIST P. Wednesd

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