Fighting for solidarit

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Around 100 people supported a rally in Coventry shopping precinct called last Saturday in solidarity with the hunger strikers in Long Kesh.

The active local Hunger Strike Action Committee has also been pressing its campaign into the local Labour Party. A leafiet given out at the District Labour Party meeting, headed "Labour's Shame" pointed out that:

"Michael Foot and the Labour leadership describe Margaret Thatcher's approach as stubborn and inflexible on almost every issue except Northern Ireland. On the same day as Foot was lashing the Tories he personally dispatched Don Concannon to the Maze Prison to tell a blind and dying Bobby, Sands that he had no support in the British Labour Party. If Bobby Sands had been a political prisoner in South Africa or South America would Foot have behaved in such a calous way?

John Hume, leader of the SDLP, described Concannon's mission as "a cheap and offensive publicity stunt" . Even the UDA, the Loyalist paramilitary organisation, have publicly stated that they think the prisoners special status.

Despite Foot's statements, there is growing dissatisfaction in the labour movement with Labour's Tory policy. It is becoming recognised that 30,000 people don't elect a «common criminal" as their MP and 100,000 people (out of a Catholic population of 500,000) don't turn up to the funeral of a "common criminal" Bobby Sands was in prison because he opposed British rule in Ireland.

The Scottish TUC. has shown a lead by calling for immediate concessions. We ask Labour and trade union branches to follow their example and to dissociate themselves from the Labour leadership's stance."

In Oxford the local Charter 80 group has mounted vigils at the city's Martyrs Memorial to mark the death of each of the four hunger strikers.

A fold-over leaflet is now being prepared setting out in basic language the issues at stake in the hunger strike. The leaflet is to be distributed at the Cowley car factories, other local workplaces and Labour and trade union meetings.

In Leicester an active Labout: Committee *. Ireland group has already made its mark on the local party-successfully promoting a resolution through Leicester South CLP.

The motion congratulates MP Jim Marshall for backing the early-day motion on Sands, called for two minutes'. silence in respect for Sands, and urged Marshall to move the writ for another by election in Fermanagh/South Tyrone.

And in a close vote which surprised some militants, Leicester Trades Council voted at its last meeting to support the struggle for political status and for a policy of troops out of In Glasgow a rally called by the LCI attracted a rather disappointing attendance of 100 people-mainly those already committed to the struggle against British imperialism in Ireland.

And in London the necessity for urgent action to build the solidarity campaign was underlined by the attendance of only 50 at a regional meeting of the LCI. A local leadership was set up to promote further work in London Labour CLPs: we urge London readers to give active support to this work.

• SL

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One of a large number of Solidarity's regional periodicals, The Free Unionist published in Dabrowa Gornicza in Silesia, in its issue of 5 March 1981 prints a transcript of a tape recording from the meeting of Andrzej Zabinski, First Secretary of the Voivodship Committee of the party in Katowice and member of the Politbureau of the Party, with a group of ranking police ments, idiotically pushed through in the various industries-for which we haven't got the raw materials, etc.

The attitude of the party towards the new unions must not be like the unions' attitude towards the party, that is to say it is not an attitude of struggle.

We think that both the new and the old unions are working class in character.

The essential thing for us is that party members should join both the old and the new unions because we have to prevent a situation which for example? Are the miners to be together with the hairdressers? This is truly a soft spot for political attack, we have to attack, we simply have to attack now.

(...)Let them taste a little power, it will have a cooling effect on them.

Wherever possible, we have to talk to them honestly. A considerable number of people who sit now on those workers' committees are genuine leaders and decent people: but the rabble is there as well.

Of course, we can't say PRESS, Thursday 1981