[SOCIA IS Socialist Press is taking its summer…]

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SOCIA IS Socialist Press is taking its summer break.

Weekly paper of the Workers Socialist League * No. 207 * July 16, 1980 * 20p The next issue will appear on Wednesday 30 Months of surveillance and investigation and weeks of harassment by journalists and photographers of Workers Socialist League members and supporters is being turned into a series of wildly inaccurate witch-hunting articles in the Daily Mail as we go to press.

Desperate to draw a (nonexistent) link between the WSL and armed guerrilla groups around the world, the Mail reporters make up in imaginaJULY NTRE July.

Porter Socialists from at least one country -Chile-would certainly face arrest for their political views-even the TUC would be illegal under the Pinochet dictatorship.

Needless to say no guerrilla groups will be attending the summer school.

Perhaps the most scandalous aspect of the Mail report of the summer school, however, are the statements by trade union leaders.

Frank Chapple, right wing leader of the EETPU is quoted by the Mail as urging security forces to ensure telephones at the summer school are tapped, and that a full report of the proceedings is obtained!

Railwaymen's leader Sid Weighell argued that: "These links with foreign organisations should be thoroughly investigated"

Such is the cringing subservience of these reformist leaders to capitalism in crisis that they are prepared to line up with the most right wing forces-including a Tory paper whose record extended in the 1930s to support for Mosley's fascists and Hitler -against trade unionists and socialists within the labou MARLE DUVA movement.

John Patten, Tory MP for Oxford called for the summer school to be banned and pressure will no doubt continue to be placed on the education authority to cancel the hall booking for the summer school.

The article in the Mail witch-hunting the WSL summer school Cramp has the gall to refer favourably to a "meeting of Conservative and Allied European Parties in Austria"

An international gathering of reactionaries is clearly in order as far as the Mail is concerned.

It is only when revolutionary Trotskyists get together to discuss how they can win the support of the masses in the fight against exploitation and oppression that these "defenders of democracy" desperately try to witch-hunt such a gathering to a standstill.

Another aspect of the first Mail article is its other pet theme of 'WL infiltration into the Labour Party".

The Mail, of course, backs Callaghan, Healey and the right wing all the way in their struggle against socialist policies and against any moves to democratise the Labour Party-no matter how limited those moves might be.

Their campaign which attempts to draw a link between Benn and the left wing of the Labour Party NEC and Trotskyist groups with which, of course, they have nothing in common, has been growing in the course of the Heslin case.

It can be expected to reach its climax in the lead up to the Labour Party conference in the autumn. _ The Workers Socialist League and its supporters within the trade unions and the Labour Party will not be intimidated by this crude witch-hunting.

The growing economic and political crisis confronting the capitalist system at home and abroad makes witch-hunts by the press and surveillance by the state all the more inevitable.

What the state, the press and the reformists and Stalinists at the head of the labour movement fear most is that the working class and oppressed masses around the world will turn to the revolutionary policies of Trotskyism.

They fear the independent mobilisation of the masses around their own class interests in confrontation with capital and its agents both within the labour movement and the state.

The Workers Socialist League and the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee will continue the fight to build Trotskyist parties and for the reconstruction of the Fourth International to lead the masses in the struggles that they now face.

We call on socialists in Britain and internationally to join us in that fight.