Tories PRIOR'S LA

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land End e gagaina The TUC Congress is dominated by one question. What opposition, if any, is to be presented to the Thatcher Outside the conference workers will be demanding action to bring the government down. Inside its heavily policed doors the bureaucrats of the TUC will be wheeling and dealing to produce a mealy-mouthed resolution of impotence.

The Bakers Union resolution-which at least calls for bringing down the Thatcher government-will be buried.

A resolution expressing disapproval, shock and promise of no serious action will almost certainly be passed.

'Month of action'

•The TUC has a campaign to unveil. Following the Day of Action in May, Len Murray and the General Council are launching a 'month of action' in November.

This will be greeted with despair by workers facing onslaughts on jobs, union rights and wages.

What good will lunchtime meetings, poster parades and badges do against the Tory onslaught? Nothing!

Tameside Trades Council will force its way into the TUC agenda despite the efforts of the General Council to bury it.

The trades council was disaffiliated in April for organising a conference on Ireland in defiance of the TUC. Since then a number of trades councils and the NUJ national conference have condemned the disaffiliation. The TUC told Tameside it had no right of appeal.

Now the NUJ executive has mandated its TUC delegation to follow up that vote by moving the reference back of the report on trades councils and challenging the disaffiliation.

BL is to axe car assembly at Canley, Coventry, by the end of this week, leaving Bill Sirs, ISTC leader, promised a "Gdansk South Wales' if the remainder of the plants are closed. Yet it is Murray, Sirs and the rest of them who are auditioning for the part of Gierek.

At Adwest, Reading, at Brixton, : and in other struggles the bitter results of the Employment Act are already being rammed down the throats of the working class. Yet in Britain, the TUC witch-hunts the strikers and pickets. In Adwest, the TGWU and AUEW have refused to give official backing to strikers upholding basic union rights.

On all fronts the TUC traitors show themselves siding with the employers and against the workers.

The Workers Socialist League calls for a sustained fight to build a revolutionary leadership in the working class against these leaders.

We call for mass defiance of Prior's laws-not for their 'monitoring' by the TUC. We call for occupations against closures, work sharing on full pay and for the forging of the unemployed and employed together to force a general strike to throw out this hated government.

The decision to disaffiliate Tameside epitomises the cowardly role the TUC plays in support of imperialism.

The Tameside slogan "Bring the War to Britain' is not one around which to mobilise the British working class. But the TUC responded in support of an attack launched by the fascists and taken up by the bourgeois press. They refuse to defend their cowardly pro-imperialist 'Better Life for All Campaign' anywhere where it will meet with opposition.

The campaign in support of Tameside is one of defence of democratic rights which themselves are incompatible with the TUC's support for British imperialism.

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