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the Tory government has immediately begun wielding a sharpened axe on jobs, conditions and social services. Trade union rights face imminent legal attack. Prices are already Plum sectors of state industry will be handed to the Tories' profiteering big business backers; and the pay rises to police and armed forces mark only the prelude to increased state violence against pickets and anti-fascists and an intensified army crackdown The Callaghan-Healey leadership has made it clear that it will oppose any perspective other than settling down and meekly acceptAnd, though they have once more dusted off their near-forgotten "socialist" speeches, 'Labour's 'left wing' MPs have continued to duck away from any fight to remove Callaghan.

TUC leaders, too, have set out to establish a basis for collaboration with Thatcher and the Tory cabinet, parallelling their anti-working class alliance with Wilson and then Callaghan.

But the working class has experienced and overcome such betrayals before-to topple Heath's union-bashing government in 1974, and smash through Callaghan's reactionary Phase 4 of wage controls in a series of monumental pay battles in the winter of These experiences are not dead. They point to the way that jobs, social services and hard-won union rights can be defended against But a principled, revolutionary leadership is needed if the Labour traitors, the TUC collaborators and their hangers-on in the Communist Party are to be exposed and pushed aside, and the mass struggles mobilised that can defeat and remove the Tory governSuch a leadership must fight day in and day out for a programme of transitional demands which, starting from today's conditions and today's consciousness within the working class, lead workers to And in taking up democratic demands-such as an end to racial and sexual discrimination, it must show the crucial role that must be played by the working class as the only consistently revolutionary class capable of leading the struggle for the emancipation of And it must fight on an international basis-mobilising solidarity for anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles-whether in Ireland, south Atrica or elsewhere throughout the world, and drawing strength ana political lessons from revolutionary upheavals such as that which ousted the hated Shah in Iran. This means fighting for the reconstruction of the Trotskyist Fourth International.

To this end, the Workers Socialist League is affiliated to the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee which fights to reaffirm and develop the method and principles of the 1938 Transitional Programme, and for full discussion in the world Trotskyist moveThe next period will see major class struggles in Britain. A principled Marxist leadership is essential. Our movement though JOIN US and take forward the struggle for socialism! rocketing upwards.

in the occupied North of Ireland.

ing five years of Tory devastation. 1978.

renewed Tory attacks.

ment.

grasp the necessity for socialist revolution.

mankind. strong in programme is small in numbers.

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lairy fight Tameside conference dafica all abunada defies all threats A recent unionisation struggle at a Runcorn dairy, P.L. Rigby and Son, has resulted in the sacking of the two shop stewards.

The events which frecipitated this reactionary step developed from a one-day strike ostensibly over unjustified disciplinary measures against one af the stewards but implicitly linked to a demand for recognition.

The solidarity of this action resulted in management rescinding the warning and agreeing to talks with the GMWU.

Two weeks after the meeting took place, the company contacted the union refusing recognition.

This was immediately followed by a number of spurious written warnings and verbal threats.

Union members responded to this with a decision to curtail any further collection of monies outstanding on the various milkrounds.

Unfortunately excessive management pressure on individual roundsmen, whilst shop stewards were barred from the depot, resulted in a demoialisation which split the workforce to a point where half the men returned to normal working without informing either their colleagues or shop stewards.

This left management free to victimise the stewards with no danger of united action in their defence from the workforce.

The stewards were accordingly sacked on the Monday following the action.

In retrospect the correct tactics would have been to stay out on the day of the strike and call upon the local labour movement to mobilise solidarity action.

It is imperative that workers in similar unionisation battles appreciate the lessons to be drawn from the struggle at Rigby's.

Fifty black youths from Moss Side were among 200 anti-fascists who defended the conference on the war in Ireland held last Saturday in Manchester by Tameside Trades Council.

Inside, several delegates referred to the identification by blacks and Asians in Bristol, Southall and elsewhere, with the national liberation struggle in The postponed conferenceheld in defiance of the TUC's disaffiliation of Tamesidemarked an important step in the struggle to defeat British imperialism in the six counties.

Opening the conference of over 80 delegates, Tameside secretary Dave Hallsworth said the left in Britain must defend armed colonial struggle, in Ireland as in Vietnam, against the imperialist tactic of creating a majority out of a minority by partition.

A speaker for Belfast Women Against Imperialism said it was impossible to separate the role of British imperialism from other factors in the double oppression of women.

TUC apologists

Alf Cotterell of the Liverpool IRSP Support Group welcomed the conference's exposure of the TUC apologists for British imperialism and named Seamus Costello and five other IRSP leaders assassinated by forces of the British state.

Pat Lally (TGWU, Oxford) described how the struggle against the labour movement bureaucracy and the Communist Party in Oxford, particularly on the question of Ireland, showed that those forces could be In the witch-hunt following The successful lobby of the annual conference of Trades Councils had produced 60 delegates' signatures in support of Tameside, and some 40 councils had now signified support.

The conference voted for a march on and lobby of September's TUC as part of a campaign for reinstatement.

A Workers Power resolution seconded by the WSL was carried; it recognised that the campaign had to aim to break the TUC's collaboration with government policy on Ireland, had to be fought in the Labour Party as well as in the trade unions, and should build a conference to fight the ban on Tameside and seek to win that conterence to troops our now, self-determination, political status and repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

The resolution called for a steering committee (12 were elected to it). The same resolution urged that local branches and the NEC of the NUJ should in town NF paper sellers were rapidly persuaded to disperse.

The police Tactical Aid Group (550-strong in all) was called out and made most of the six arrests of anti-fascists.

As one delegate at the EIS Annual Conference at Stirling last weekend said, the union Executive are being dragged 'kicking, screaming and smiling" all the way to arbitration.

Despite their protests at discovering that the management

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