[At Bramcote near Coventry to be 2,100 men…]

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At Bramcote near Coventry to be 2,100 men in all.

Clearly trade unionists must view these developments with alarm-not forgetting the cash laid out to finance the exercise including a grant of £100 per reserve plus travelling expenses.

One Midlands newspaper estimated the cost of kit issued to be a further £102 per reserve.

Such mobilisations remind socialists that whilst the concept of waging class war is far from the thoughts of trade union bureaucrats, it is ever present in the minds of Tory politicians grown bolder on a diet of betrayals dished up by trade union and Labour Party leaders.

Yes we knew it. Only a week after the press predicted the end of democracy as we know it, the riots began in the House of Commons.

Labour MPs-looking suspiciously like a picket lineblocked the entrance to the House of Commons and Black Rod had to hang about at the entrance like a lemon.

This man sent by the Queen to tell the MPs to wind themselves up is surely a symbol of our democracy. If he can't even get into the Commons then what hope is there left?

After all he has been chosen to express the popular will hasn't he? Not actually elected of course. But definitely chosen.

It was a bit lightminded of the Daily Mail to remark: "Such high jinks are part of the parliamentary tradition reaching back to the time of Charles I"

That is hardly a serious attitude for a paper which sees a red menace in every corner.

Nor did it square with its front page story "Gang of two protest at Labour riot" ' (It is easy to forget that Shirley Williams was actually defeated at the last election and that the Gang of Three is itself partly an extra-parliamentary body):

But if the Daily Mail does not know its duty, the Express can remind it.

Its leader "Mr Foot and his brawlers" condemned as "totally inexcusable" the rugby scrum formed by the MPs.

"That was not only an indirect insult to the Monarch herself, it was also a challenge to the authority of the Speaker and so to our parliamentary system and democracy."

The Guardian was not so much worried about Black Rod as about what Shirley Williams might think. (The Guardian is always worried about what Shirley Williams might think).

Centre Party One of the reported links between a Gang of Three breakaway centre' party and the Guardian is that the number of people who would buy' the former would be about the same as the numbers who buy the other).

It said:

"They ought to resist the temptation ... to try to turn the Commons into a theatre of protest. To do so will deepen the suspicion, raised by Mrs Shirley Williams in Glasgow... that there is a developing streak anti-parliamentarianism about some Labour MPs."

But of course that is. nonsense. Occasional unparliamentary' outbursts are themselves part of the parliamentary tradition for those who have swallowed its seductive poison.

At any rate the Telegraph and the Sunday Times seemed less concerned with the events than with their possible effect on the hoi poloi.

Marches

The Telegraph said:

"There is far too much talk on the Labour side about the public meetings they are going to call, the marches, the acts of political manifestation. Street politics are quite bad enough in the street: as a form of reasoned argument in Parliament they rapidly become intolerable."

The Sunday Times (its death throes seem to make it more pompous than ever) said:

"If the methods of the sit-in and the strong-arm picket line come to seem current, because not universally repudiated, then at the apex of national discussion there is a lesser value set on reason than on muscle; and the effects will flow downwards again into a multitude of lesser gatherings."

Who are those "multitude of lesser gathe! ings"? They must be the worki ng class!

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Page 6 SOCIALIST PRESS, Wednesday November 19, 1980.

Unlike many previous military crackdowns on the hard and poor peasants, the brutal regime of General Luis Garcia July 1980 appears to have set itself the task of imposi Chile-style defeat on' the most basic organisations of the interview with an exiled member of the Bolivian Worker in Madrid examines the nd political conditions that paved