Tories Bank All on Tuc Tra Tors

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strengthen and mobilise the mass anti-Tory feeling that has grown within the working class.

Instead, TUC leaders will this week troop limply into Downing Street with another list of half-baked suggestions which they know in advance Thatcher will derisively reject.

Were the union bureaucracy half as ready to wage an all-out fight to defend their members as the Tories are to defend and raise the rate of profit of the big businesses they represent, they would not even be talking to Thatcher at all: they would be preparing their members for the General Strike which alone can topple this government and create conditions for the establishment of a workers' government in Britain.

But the union leaders are just as afraid of the power of the working class as are the Tories. They know full well that as it learns its own strength in the course of struggle, the working class will turn increasingly against those trade union and Labour leaders who support the continuation of capitalism because they seek only to preserve their own positions of power and privilege, feeding off the strength of the workers movement.

Far from preparing action to defend jobs or an offensive to bring down the Tories, the Financial Times has revealed that TUC leaders have for the past year been closeted in regular dinner meetings with CBI leaders, drawing up a joint agreement on the introduction of new job-cutting technology in industry!

The Financial Times warns industrialists that if the CBI rejects this new "deal" it would:

*endanger the mood of collaboration which has built up between the two organisations [!] during a series of dinner meetings over the past year or While TUC leaders can still hobnob with the bosses, trading their members jobs for glasses of clarel, What interest have they in bringing down the bosses government or putting an end to a system that offers them such a lavish style of living?

Challenge

Thatcher, however, has recognised that a growing challenge to such class collaboration has now begun to break to the surface in the She is relying on the trade union and Labour bureaucracywith the aid of the Tory press and media-to crush such resistance.

For socialists, however, the task is to build upon and Len Murray develop the struggle for a new leadership within the labour movement-fighting within the new emerging forces for the kind of consistent programme and principles that can offer workers the way forward to revolutionary politics.

It is in this context that the November 15 conference of the Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement (see page 11) acquires a particular importance in the fight to build a genuine alternative to the existing leaderships within the unions and the Labour Party. We urge readers to support and attend this vital conference.