[February 1st, 7.30 The Mail Coach West Street…]

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February 1st, 7.30 The Mail Coach West Street BACK ISSUES!

We have back issues available of both "Trotskyism Today' BIRMINGHAM lay 8th February, Digbeth Hall Dare 1

LONDON

6th February, Conway Hall Red Lion Square LEEDS Sth Febr s Council that this is done only to "expose" the scheme, is it still WRP policy to enter joint management-union committees when these are rejected by a majority of the workforce? If it is not national WRP policy, why has it been carried out in Cowley behind the backs of the membership?

For our part we have opposed and still oppose 100% any participation in these scab committees. We call on all WRP members to take up these vital issues of principle and fight for the removal from the leadership of Healy and White who have done so much to ---71-- 11. - of Tantabarion in

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In doubling the number of oops operating in South irmagh, and including aming the reinforcements 150 jembers of the SAS who Mill operate in four-man terDr squads, Harold Wilson oes indeed move to mainmin security - the security ( British imperialism. - The immediate pretext for this jassive intervention - the gunning own of ten protestant workers y a splinter group from the tovisional IRA - has indeed been arefully singled out by the capalist press. There has heen a oncerted attempt at the same me to underplay the parallel itivities of loyalist paramilitary murder squads, which in the recat period of "cease-fire" have laimed far more Catholic victims lan the IRA has murdered rotestants. And also to conceal hat the real concern of British aperialism has not been so much rith sectarian murders (which the AS will no doubt now assist) but le IRA campaign against British oops which had overwhelming apport in this largely Repubtan area.

SAFETY The safety of Armagh's popution will be no greater with the ¡tention of the SAS, a gang of rofessional army psychopaths, mined to perpetrate atrocities id provocations. Indeed governent denials, assisted by selfaposed censorship of the press, tve not been able to hide their dercover presence all along and weir role in keeping the sectarian st of violence on the boil. • From the time they set up the arder squad called the Ulster teedom Fighters from within the DA in 1972, the SAS have used *assination and bombing to ferent divisions between Loyalists il Nationalists, and to exacerbate tension within both the republican and loyalist ranks, all for the purpose of nipping in the bud the most embryonic of moves towards class unity.

When it was felt that the Dublin government needed a little encouragement to take a firmer line against the IRA, special agents like Kenneth Littlejohn crossed the border to rob banks and blow up public buildings; and the night the Birmingham pub bombs went off, who should be spending the night with the agent provocateur, National Front member and chief prosecution witness, Watts? None othet than special army agent Littlejohn!

CALL The frantic activity which the murder of ten protestant workers has inspired in Harold Wilson does not maicate any concern or tne people of South Armagh. What does concern Wilson is his imperialist strategy which is up for debate and scrutiny in the Commons on January 12th.

This is the day on which the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, must state the government position on the Convention report. In it the Loyalists demand the return of their Stormont government and reject out of hand the possibility of power sharing with the SDLP.

Only a few days ago, Harry West the leader of the UUUC confirmed in an interview that the position was unchanged:

"How could any government work if it was forced to include people dedicated to bringing down the state? It is a ludicrous proposal."

To emphasise to the British government that it is determined to havé its own government and to control its own security forces the UUUC have called their supporters to rally at Inniskillin on Saturday, two days before the debate on the Convention report.

Faced with this obduracy, the British government dare not reject the report in its entirety, and it is as part of its plan to force the SDLP to accept it that the recent intervention in S. Armagh must be seen. • The SDLP have so far capitulated to the Loyalists on every issue bar two: they have demanded that they be included directly in the government at Cabinet level; and they have declined to give full support to the security forces (the RUC and the UDR) while they retain their sectarian structure.

By putting extra soldiers, espécially units like the SAS, into S. Armagh, the British government calculate that the SDLP. will come to terms rather than see nationalist solidarity surging back to the IRA.

A further ace in Wilson's hand against the SDLP is to get their supporters in Dublin to disown them. This must be the clear inference from Justice Minister Cooney's statement before he left his recent meeting with the British government that "Neither the SDLP not any other party can afford the luxury of polemics about the RUC at this time"

So after 6½ years of military occupation the British government will now consider it a success if they can manage to restore the sectarian structure they started to dismantle in 19721.

The presence of the army has been the basic guarantor of sectarian divisions in the fight for class politics in Ireland today.

But the resistance to imperialist domination in Ireland can only be successful if led by the independent strength of the working class - the only class whose interests demand. no compromise and an all-out fight for social But the unity of the working class in this fight can only be secured by a political programme representing the international interests of the working class. Even if we were to believe the IRA could bomb the British out of Ireland, what it would not be able do (and reject their methods precisely for this reason) is bomb itself into a united söcialist republic.

Fighting for working class leadership in Ireland against the conspiratorial and terrorist programme of the IRA, which effectively has no political perspectives to advance the consciousness of Irish workers, is inseparable from our tasks in Britain.

BANKRUPTCY

The situation in Armagh must be seen as the outcome of the combined treachery of the SDLP and the complete political bankruptcy of the IRA which in the whole history of its necessary struggle against British imperialism has sought and found no way to mobilise the strength of the working class in the fight for national liberation.

It is this crisis of political leadership which must be resolved in the next period.

A first step in this is to take up the fight for workers' defence in Armagh. The huge non-sectarian march last week called by local trade unions to protest against sectarian killings must be made the starting point of the setting up joint protestant-catholic workers' defence patrols with the aim of preventing sectarian murders.

The fight for workers' self-defence must be accompanied by the demand from both protestant and catholic workers that the troops, main cause of sectarian division, be withdrawn from Northern Ireland. Only in this way can the road to class unity be opened up.

Cowley, cont'd from front page. Mathers, was forced to go on ATV Midlands and denounce Parsons as an "alarmist" ', dismissing his allegations.

This is clearly not enough.