Workers Socialist League

Socialist Press, Trotskyism Today and the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, 1975–1984

[the Tory government has immediately begun wielding a…]

Socialist Press no. 203, 18 June 1980 · scan pp. 10–11 · about 485 words

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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 colläboration 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 Africa or elsewhere throughout the world, and drawing strength and 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 wage control, cuts Programme, and for full discussion in the world Trotskyist moveThe next period will see major class struggles in Britain. A and redundancies principled Marxist leadership is essential. Our movement though rocketing upwards.

in the occupied North of Ircland.

ing five years of Tory devastation. renewed Tory attacks.

ment.

grasp the necessity for socialist revolution.

mankind. ment.

strong in programme is small in numbers.

JOIN US and take forward the struggle ET SOCIALIST MESS lead of Socialist Press. Í enclose .. Name. .

Address 6XX.

← Contents of Socialist Press no. 203, 18 June 1980