Drive the fascists off the streets!

Scan page 1

Assemble Edgewick Park, 1 pm March off 2 pm, to Coventry Precinct Called by Coventry Committee Against Supported by ANL and NUS nationally Hours later, Sands was six counties. They have dead. Labour leader Foot backing of socialists rose to his feet in the House communists around of this stance by the minute. Presumably Sands Thatcher government while did not mince his words Bobby Sands starves on about vermin like "Joy in Midlands as landslide buries ruinous Tory policies" was the joyous headline to a Morning Star article on last week's local election results.

There can be no doubt that there was a dramatic anti-Tory: landslide, which sent them crashing from office in county councils throughout the country, including the most coveted prize of all-the Greater London Council.

Barrage But it remains to be seen whether the new councils will bury Tory policies.

The never ending barrage of cuts in education and social services, and hostility to Tory government policies of mass unemployment combined to instal Labour majorities in all of the major urban authorities, and topple the Tories in such strongholds as Cheshire, Lancashire, Berkshire and Warwickshire.

In London, Labour candidates running on a manifesto well to the left of that put forward in the last General Election secured a majority on the GLC in the teeth of a huge "red scare" campaign orchestrated by the New Standard.

The most venomous attacks had been aimed at Lambeth council leader Ted Knight. This personalised witch-hunt, combined the sabotaging, vote-splitting efforts of the Social Democratic Alliance and the unpopularity of Knight's stance in support of rate increases, served to secure his defeat.

But the strengthened position of the Labour left in London was underlined by the vote to remove Andrew MacIntosh in favour of left winger Ken Livingstone as the new Labour leader of the GLC.

Similar challenges to right wing control of the newly elected | Labour Liaison councils are fakina place in other areas as we go to press.

.Indeed this is the major question now confronting the trade unionists and socialists whose votes put Labour back into the county halls.

The election of Socialist Party leader Francois Mitterand as President of France brought a cacophony of cheering and celebratory car horns on the streets of Paris last night.

Socialists and Communists alike rejoiced at the defeat of a savagely reactionary Giscard d'Estaing by 51.7% of the vote against 48.3%, bringing to an end 23 years of right wing rule in Mitterand immediately announced his intention to dissolve the National Assembly and call fresh parliamentary elections in the hopes of overturning the Committee So far not one Labour council has taken a firm stand in defiance of Heseltine's savage programme of spending cuts.

One after another they Cont'd back page Ken Livingstı present right wing majority of the Gaullist RPR and the UDF.

It seems likely that he will prepare for these elections by taking immediate steps to raise wages and family allowances, and making gestures in the direction of implementing his promise of a 35-hour week.

There is little doubt that Mitterand hopes in this way to win sufficient Parliamentary support to enable him to rule without the involvement of Communist Party ministers in the qovernment Anti-Soviet Mitterand, who conduca viciously anti-Soviet Labour leaders are just beneath contempt. One is Don Concannon, Labour's spokesman on Northern *Not content with having built the Long Kesh concentration camp with its notorious 'H' Blocks to house the most militant anti-imperialist fighters;

*not content with having stripped these prisoners of their recognition as prisoners ot war in the struggle Tor Irish liberation;

*not content with Thatcher! supporting the continuation campaign, criticising Giscard accommodation to Moscow, would far prefer to seek an alliance with Marchais' "progressive" forces than to line up with the Stalinist leaders in a coalition of workers' parties that would further raise the hopes of every French worker and small farmer.

35-hour week He has come to power pledged to implement a 35hour week, nationalise the top nine industrial groups, nationalise all those banks and finance houses still in private hands, and take over a slice of the PeugeotCitroen car giant.

But though the election hunger strike;

*not content with warnings to the Tories not to afford the republicans any publicity for the hunger strike by reporting on Sands' condition;

*not even content to issue last minute statements designed to sabotage Sands' successful election campaign, Concannon has to go one step further-and walk into the cell of the dying man to tell him to his face what he already knew: that the / shaur loodorchin romaine committed to support for The interview lasted one result produced an immediate slump on the French stock exchange and a surge in gold prices, French workers should not assume that Mitterand will be in any hurry to implement his pledges.

Rather than wait for the Socialist Party to legislate socialist policies, the French working class should prepare for the necessary mass actions to press home their demands in pursuit of jobs, improved living standards and the lifting of legislation that perpetuates racial and sexual oppression.

And they must firmly oppose any attempted alliance between Mitterand and the capitalist parties. Concannon. sion;

*The prison vi Their demands backing ALL OUT ON MAY 23!

Racism OT commons TO еспо ~f hA Thatcher's sentiments and reaffirm the opposition of Labour's leadership to the prisoners' five demands.

By doing so, Foot knew quite well he was effectively sentencing three more republican prisoners to death.

Near to death

Francis Hughes, now 58 days on hunger strike, is now blind and near to death.

Ray McCreesh and Patsy O'Hara are seven weeks on hunger strike.

They, like Sands, are demanding elementary rights of prisoners of war.

*The right to wear their own clothing;

*The right to refrain from prison work;

*The right to iation;

*The right to right to more its and parcels. struggle and their have the visible of the whole Catholic population of the the and the wonu.

The Portuguese Socialist Party paper has pointed out that the Irish prisoners are being denied rights granted to political prisoners even under the fascist Salazar and Caetano dictatorships.

Lech Walesa, lauded by the British Tory press for his fight for independent unions in Poland, has declared his support for the demands of the hunger strikers.

But the British. Labour leaders stand firmly with the Tories, opposing any concession to the prisoners.

Their ruthless commitment to imperialist rule in Ireland has scandalised some of the Parliamentary Labour Motion 14 Labour MPs | have signed a motion criticising the government's "intransigence": and 32 signed another motion calling on the Tories to make concessions to the hunger strikers.

The response is pitifully late and pathetically weak. How many brave republicans must die before socialists in the British Labour Party wake up to the need to mobilise in solidarity with the struggle for political status, troops out of Ireland and self determination for the Irish people?

No more Irish martyrs! Condemn Concannon/ Foot! End the bipartisan policy!

Political status for PoWs!

Troops Out

Scan page 2

JA