Alabour Inquiry - Not the Bosses

Scan page 9

Matgamna entitled 'Gaddafi's Foreign Legion to Knight's The writ is being contested by Sean Matgamna, who has additionally appealed both to the WRP and to the wider labour movement to prevent the case being taken to court. He has correctly proposed that Redgrave take any complaints she may wish to raise not to the bosses' courts but to a labour Socialist Press is, as an act of fraternal solidarity, reprinting on the issue from the Socialist Organiser Editorial Board.

We condemn this utterly unprincipled use of the courts by the WRP against the labour movement press. And we endorse the appeal for funds to the S.O. Labour Movement Press Defence Fund.

stewaro ever nas, in reauty, surch. • under the compulsor of Ms uncommon tot Newsune to to the WRP. in issue 33 of Socialist Organiser.

movement inquiry.

When Julian Lewis and Paul McCormack tried to use the law courts as a weapon in their fight to control Newham North East Labour Party, they were condemned throughout the labour movement. The act branded them as aliens within our movement. Ultimately it did them more harm than good.

The WRP's attempt to use the courts against Socialist Organiser is an attack on free speech, on free comment and on free debate in the labour movement.

It shows what little confidence the WRP has in its ability to make a political response to our comments on them (SO 33).

It shows the WRP to have as much contempt for the principle of keeping the bourgeois state out of the affairs of the labour movement as had the mysteriously funded Lewis and McCormack.

Why does the WRP choose this course of action? Because SO's outspoken comments on them threaten their central project of the moment.

They are making a concentrated effort to rebuild support for the WRP in Lambeth.

In an effort to regain some credibility they have entered the service of the right wing and of Ted Knight, who leads a big section of the left in Lambeth.

Foredoomed

they have behind Ted Knights W0a1 we get foredoomed policy of trying to fend off the Tory cuts drive by hiking up the rates and the rents.

Now they support Knight's 10% general cut-the proof positive of the bankruptcy of Knight's anti-Tory policy.

Meanwhile, Newsline, snarling at the left, makes its characteristic contribution by spitting the slander that we are "Thatcher's people". • A Newsline editorial seriously equated the Socialist Workers Party with the NF because both oppose rate rises in Lambeth.

And with the impudence characteristic of them, the Newsline carried an immediate public attack on Cir Bryn Davies for daring to vote against Knight's policy! In this coin they pay for their alliance with Knight and his right wing allies.

Ted Knight and his comrades have views on how to fight the Tories which we emphatically disagree with.

We have discussed these issues many times in SO. But Knight and his politics is one thing. People who brand the left as the equivalent of the NF for opposing Knight are clearly something altogether different.

The WRP has set up one of their so-called Youth Training Centres in Lambeth (the other is in Liverpool).

These offer night-school style training and facilities to youth on a very broad and supposedly non-political basis, ask for money from businessmen, etc., appeal for volunteer instructors and so on, without any reference to politics other than anti Taruiem, • TIR fIOT-MTE MM Gaddafi But the Youth Training Centres are run by a political party, a party which for the last 20 years has gained its only (transitory) successes from recruiting politically raw young people to its ranks.

Its purpose for the Youth Training Centres is as a means of drawing young people into a network at the centre of which is the WRP.

Politically the WRP is today an unknown force to most labour movement activists, who would naturally incline towards toleration of it. The SO article argued against toleration of the WRP, especially as people fit to offer traming to vulnerable young people.

The result was a writ against the printer and against Sean Matgamna (who usually writes for SO under the anglicised version of his name, John O Mahony).

Why not make a formal ongue-in cheek apolgy! For: lumber of important reasons. Il the first place, SO values its own reputation as a responsible and serious non-sectarian socialist paper.

Bludgeoned We do not lightmindedly attack or condemn socialists or those who call themselves socialists (or anyone else!). SO can and will defend Sean Matgamna's article on the nature and character of the WRP.

In the second place, it is an important matter of principle for a working class newspaper like SO not to allow itself to be bludgeoned into silence by Ms Redgrave's money, which is being used on behalf of the WRP leadership, even though her money gives her an enormous advantage in litigation.

Redgrave and ourselves are, of course, equal before the courts. But the libel laws are a rich person's option. No libelled striker OI victimised shop

Rescue' , published

an option, though it does exist in law.

It is part of the general problem of formal equality under capitalism encapsulated in Anatole France's apt description:

"The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to steal bread, to sleep under bridges and to beg for food."

Free speech and free comment are vitally important for the labour movement. They are irreplaceable where its own affairs and the affairs of those who claim to be a part of it are concerned.

Thiraly, the original article was a blow in a necessary and unavoidable political conflict with the WRP arising out of the struggle in Lambeth.

That conflict continues: the political health of the labour movement in Lambeth and perhaps other areas will be affected by whether or not the point of view of SO can be expressed and heard by the labour movement.

We are not prepared to abandon our viewpoint OI be silenced because the WRP is richer than we are.

And while a tongue-in-cheek apology would provoke a cynical wink from those in the know, it would add considerably to the problems of the uninitiated -young people in the Youth Training Centres, for example-in getting to know what's what.

They are the people who most need the benefits of free comment in the affair.

Fourthly, given that our real opinion is that SO should in honesty defend the article in court, to make an insincere apology, would be to allów ourselves to be forced to tell lies Healy Redgrave's wealth.

We are not prepared to tell lies to the labour movement or to the youth. That is in general a rock-basic rule. It is urgent to preach it and to live by it because for fifty years deliberate and systematic lying and other falsifications of truth have been a major part of the labour movement.

Spreading outward from the totalitarian Stalinist state via the Stalinist parties, the politics of lies and double-talk, of the double standard or none, of 'anything goes' for my organisation or for my faction, the politics of the numbed or dead conscience and of the supple spine-these have wreaked havoc with the political consciousness and the political morality of the labour movement. They are not the sort of politics SO exists to promote.

Bankruptcy

Not for nothing did Leon Trotsky preach and insist again and again that one of the first principles of revolutionary politics was to tell the truth to the labour movement and to the masses' We subscribe to Trotsky's principle. And we will fight for it.

Fifthly, while the WRP uses the courts and the threat of bankruptcy to present SO with the option of paying out a lot of money or denying its opinions by issuing a formal apology that would be a lie, the WRP's own press spews out libels against its socialist opponents of such a volume and at such speed as to deserve at least a nomination for the Stalin prize for mendacity.

With utter lack of scruple it uses the libel laws to inhibit its critics and relies on the scruples of those it libels to keep it out of court.

It has used the threat of the courts against working class newspapers before, Yet it is not accuse its socialist opponents of murder or complicity in murder!

To give one of many cases:

A youth who supported the US WRP (the Workers League) was shot dead in October 1977. For three years there were no arrests-a common occurrence in New York. Newsline commented:

"While the police investigation has never begun ... the International Committee of the Fourth International [the WRP's international self-projection] have exposed [they mean repeatedly made groundless allegations about] the FBI agents who control the leadins positions in the revisionist SWP not connected to the Batish sWP as the ringleaders of thi political murder... * (emphasis added!. "[The vicious killing did not stop a struggle to unmask and drive out the agents of counter revolution in the workers' movement" (Newsline, October 16, 1980).

Three or four days later a suspect was arrested and Newsline rushed its editor, Alex Mitchell to New York. His report carried the ritual attack For all these reasons we have decided to fight the case. SO would not choose to spend time and effort on this. There are many far more important things. But we do not consider the only alternative to be an option for us.

We ask trade union branches and Labour Parties to condemn Vanessa Redgrave's and the WRP's use of the courts against the labour movement press.

Tribunal

For socialists, the only proper tribunal for accusations against a labour movement newspaper or tendency is a labour movement inquiry.

Merely by taking out the writs, the WRP has already drawn us into a costly process that now strains our usually stretched resources. So we are starting a fund to pay for our defence.

We ask our supporters to send us a supporting donation. And we ask the SO groups to discuss what they can do to raise money to cover the cost of the case.