Socialst Tories Shaken by Workers

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The veil that Mrs Thatcher donned for her banquet with King Khalid of Saudi Arabia should become standard wear for her entire cabinet.

Certainly some effective disguise is now advisable wherever and whenever the organisers of the Tory offensive come face to face with the workers they oppress.

Even as Thatcher was showing her adaptability to the feudal practices of the Gulf States, the most oppressed victims of British class rule were showing they are capable of shaking her In Derry nationalist workers have been in action against the British army; in Brixton the black youth prepare for their next close encounter with the SPG. In Delhi Thatcher finds here racist government's Nationality Bill has dogged her footsteps.

Cringing

While the British TUC cringingly offers its latest appeal for a 'U turn' , the most highly exploited victims of the Thatcher government throw themselves into direct action against its army and police shock troops.

These young workers have more effect with their anger, their bricks and petrol bombs than all Len Murray's bootlicking words.

It is those who wish to restrict the struggle, not those who advocate bold policies who are out of step with the mass movement.

In Ireland the impact of Bobby Sands' election has produced the biggest demonstrations against British rule since 1972.

After 11 years of struggle the nationalist population has shown it is not bowed or beaten by one of the most intensive "security" campaigns ever mounted against a civilian population.

Sands' election has given workers-predominantly youth-the self confidence to come back onto the streets to show their hatred for the imperialists who are leaving Sands to die in the H Blocks.

The army has responded in its time-worn way. One Derry youth lies in hospital critically injured after being shot by one of 100 plastic bullets fired into one group of demonstators.

Two other Derry youths lie dead, murdered by an army patrol who drove a Land Rover at high speed into a crowd of youth who were armed only with stones.

The two youths were flung into the air. A Land Rover then reversed back over one of them. Both died soon afterwards.

Cynically the RUC Listed these war casualtir as Youth on the streets in Derry victims of a toad accident'!

There is an organic link between the Catholic youth of Derry and the black youth of Brixton.

Neither are offered any official' focus for their struggles-and they therefore fight with the weapons at hand and with the hatred born out of years of oppres sion and harassment.

In Brixton now the sociologists and peddlars of quack cures have moved in in force.

The Scarman inquiry launched by the government is a particular irony. It was Scarman who was called in to investigate police violence in Belfast in 1969.

His report was used then -as it will be today-to reduce what was a class action to questions of indiv¡dual 'crimes' (on the part of the black youth) or possibly *errors' on the part of individual policemen.

The fact is that the spark for Brixton was not this or that incident but Operation Swamp 81'-presumably named in honour of Thatcher's racist 'swamp' speech-during which police had stopped and questioned 1,000 people in Brixton before the riot started and which was itself a pretaste of a London-wide Operation Star'.

The vicious techniques they have learned on the streets of Derry and Belfast int effect by the Brist state forces on the streets of London.

The police harassment faced by the youth of Brixton is not an abberation or an accident.

It is part and parcel of the Tory onslaught. The danger for the youth now is not renewed violence'-but the timid reformists who try to divert their struggle into appeals for sports halls and neighbourhood bobbies.

The labour movement should applaud the action of the youth and put itself at the disposal of the whole community of Brixton in organising united defence patrols.

The demands must be not on the youth to turn to the unions-but on the unions to turn to the youth.

In Brixton and Derry the youth have shown that the armed forces on which this government rests can be driven back.

Every day that the TUC refuses to work for a general strike to throw the government out it sides with the police in Brixton and the army in Derry. TUC chief Murray Thatcher Direct ruler Atki