Gangsters flounder
Socialist Press1981 1981-02-11Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 7 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 7
• Williams In the wake of the publication of a remarkably unimpressive list of 100 sponsors and an evident slowing in their tide of fan mail from reactionary wellwishers, the right wing Council for Social Democracy has begun to flounder.
Shirley Williams has at last announced her eagerly awaited resignation from the Labour NEC, and the processes for the formation of a new "centre" party seem to be pressing forward more swiftly than its leaders appear to wish.
This pressure takes the form on the one hand of seething hostility to everything they stand for from the vast majority of Labour activists-as reflected in the overwhelming vote by Wrexham CLP to call on their CSD-supporting MP Tom Ellis to resign.
On the other hand there is steadily increasing pressure exerted from the Liberal Party leadership-anxious to engulf the Labour renegades in time to utilise their dubious electoral support in the local government At the back of the minds of the central "Gang of 4" must be the worry that the reams of sympathetic newspaper coverage and hours of sycophantic radio and television interviews may begin to ebb unless they maintain a momentum towards a total split.
But such free publicity seems to have attracted surprisingly little practical suport to the splitters.
Reactionaries
A claimed 8,000 letters from middle class reactionaries a week ago had gone up to only 10,000 letters a week latercontaining only £5,000 in donations. This is scarcely enough to keep Roy Jenkins in claret for a week!
Nor will the CSD's popular appeal be much enhanced by the wretched list of 100 political has-beens, businessmen and parasites published in the Guardian last week.
Meanwhile in the Labour Party itself the departure of these forces has already weakened the right wing-pulling the carpet out from under the "Campaign for a Labour Victory" which was disbanded last week.
If Tom Bradley follows Shirley Williams in resigning from the NEC, the left vote will be increased-and the conditions for a witch-hunt by right wingers to regain their lost authority will be worsened still further.
In these conditions Labour Party members and trade unionists must press home the fight to defend and extend the gains of the Blackpool and Wembley conferences-ditching right wing MPs and councillors and fighting for socialist policies to mobilise action against the Tories.
Scan page 8
SOCIALIST st