Phone Tapping Ok-whitelaw

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The telephones of political organisations, trade unions and strike leaders, militants and socialists will continue to be brazenly tapped by a vast state surveillance system, Home Secretary Whitelaw made clear last week.

He declared that he found a report on the extent of phone-tapping drawn up by the Post Office Engineering. Union (POEU) 'very interesting'.

But, since Whitelaw already knew it all-and tar morebefore he began reading, it made very little impression, and:

"It does not lead me to change my view that a full inquiry of the kind you are seeking , would not be justified".

The POEU had rather naively complained that phone tapping was "out of political control'.

covered In particular they pointed out' that the Tory White Paper does not cover official phone tapping by warrant in Northern Ireland or the official tapping outside the warrant formalities that is widely practised by the notorious Government Communications Headquarters.

But of course while such moves are outside the control of the talking shop of Parliament, they are very clearly politically controlled by the real apparatus of the bourgeois state-the police/military machinery which stands as the backbone of capitalist control over the working class.

Whitelaw shows his utter contempt for the trappings and niceties of bourgeois democracy when he claims that the review of phone tapping by Lord Diplock constitutes an 'independent check" on the state's eavesdropping.

Lord Diplock is of course the man who devised the vicious no jury courts system for the six counties of Northern Ireland with the specific purpose of ramming through the summary conviction of republican forces on the basis of confessions extracted under torture, or on the uncorroborated evidence of unidentified police officers.

With Diplock and Whitelaw "safeguarding" our liberties, Socialist Press readers can draw their own conclusions as to whether their own phones are tapped.

Meanwhile, even as POEU Whitelaw leader Bryan Stanley belatedly raises this issue, former Labour ministers, who themselves must know the huge extent of state surveillance, remain conspicuously silent.

Having themselves failed to gag reporters in the AubreyBerry Campbell secrets trial, they now sit back and allow the Tories to escalate state snooping.

Socialists must demand that these Laboutites spell out all they know about secret files and phone tapping-and, with other unions, assist the POEU campaign to reveal the true facts.

The demand, however, should not be for a Tory-run "public enquiry"-but for a full-scale workers' inquiry into the sinister workings of the state political police.

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ing the Tory acceptance if American Cruise missiles (and therefore the statements by Labour's right wing Defence spokesman William Rodgers).

The resolutions call, in various permutations, for a closing down of all nuclear bases, forward to workers in struggle. Demands-whether on the EEC (ten calls for withdrawal) or on low pay; whether on the anti-union Employment Act or on the National Health Service -lapse simply into utopian day dreams on the policies that these two positions, since they talk of socialism only in occasional holiday speeches.

But this is not the standpoint of the growing left wing current in the Party's ranks.

If the fight for democracy in the Labour Party is to bring any