Foot sells HealeyPress Gang line to GMWU

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bounds of possibility that later reported to be under convenient to carry out a man said: "The bus has been Certainly Marcus Sarjeant the seat in question has been has a pedigree suitable for taken from it. We have such a role. thoroughly checked the bus His grandmother told the and we are now inspecting Sunday Mirror: the seat."

the Army, then changed his this bus seat (What colour mind and tried the Marines. was it? Red? Take that down He went off to train with constable!) has given a whole them for a few weeks but new twist to the trooping save un. the colour.

Michael Foot had most of them eating out of his hand in Brighton last week.

And he was feeding them on a diet of Dennis Healey campaign propaganda.

Half his speech was in opposition to democracy in the Labour Party and the other half peddling Foot's confused line on multilateral nuclear disarmament.

Snide references to those backing Tony Benn and the struggle for democracy within the Labour Party drew spontaneous applause.

Tiny

But then Foot was not addressing just any trade union conference. He was speaking to the 452 delegates attending the GMWU annual congress, held in the gloom of Brighton's Dome pavilion.

The union-despite losses brought by the recessionhas over 900,000 members. The conference is therefore tiny in proportion to most union delegate conferences.

But the size is only one aspect of the lack of democracy in the GMWU.

Delegates at the conference are selected and resolutions moved on the floor of the Congress not from branches but from Regional Councils. Many branches are not even represented on their own Regional Councils.

Through such a mechanism, the anger of rank and ile militants is as far as possible filtered out long before it disturbs the routine tranquility of the annual "Moderate"

• A succession of mandated "moderate" speakers can therefore be conjured up at a moment's notice from the platform to endorse the Basnett leadership's line with lengthy, monotonous and things did not go all the right wing's way.

True, Basnett steamrollered through a mandate to cast the union's 650,000 Labour Party votes against the electoral college formula adopted at the Wembley Conference.

But, somewhat surprisingly, the platform made no attempt to tie the same votes to support for Dennis Healey in the deputy leadership elections-adopting a rather surprisingly cautious "wait and see" stance that will leave the decision " in the hands of the union's Executive.

Attempts to establish a process of consultation in the union to govern the casting of block votes were defeated; but the right wing suffered a setback when conference voted against the platform to submit GMWU MPs to periodic review. This decision followed on the defection of one of their sponsored MPs to the Social Democrats-to the evident embarrassment of the union Also carried against the platform was the decision to endorse a policy of unconditional withdrawal from the Common Market. And earlier the left came within 40 votes of defeating the leadership's new multilateralist stance on nuclear disarmament in favour of a unilateralist position.

Absent

But it is hard to imagine a union conference in 1981 that is less typical of the political ferment now running through the entire workers' movement.

Though Basnett threw in few perfunctory witch-hunting references to left groupings within the Labour Party, the seige atmosphere which dogs the right wing bureaucracy in other unions -from the EETPU to the CPSA -was significantly absent from proceedings the in the Dome.

Foot The left in the conference was largely confined to supporters of Militant and the Communist Party, with revolutionary forces either muzzled absent altogether.

Treading neither the outright provocative pro-capitalist line of Chapple, Duffy and Losinska, nor the path of 'left' talking bureaucrats such as Evans, Fisher or Buckton, the Basnett leadership successfully blends vague demagogic calls for nationalisation and threats of militant action with a day-to-day passive acceptance of Tory rule, wholesale closures and falling living standards.

This is what made the GMWU conference such a happy hunting ground for Michael Foot. But whether Healey would have drawn forth the rapturous applause delegates accorded to Foot is something Basnett and other union leaders s will be anxiously calculating in the months to come.

'Real bullets and she would not stand a chance'-that was one of the more lucid headlines amongst the jumbo sized hysteria of the Sunday papers.

The six blank shots fired by the young failed Marine commando at the Queen while she was trooping the colour gave the media an opportunity to cover a Royal assassination-only with less blood.

In fact the only blood on display came from the youth himself who was dragged by the hair over a security fence by one of Her Majesty's heroes.

This was a heaven-sent opportunity. The scope to whip up support for novel and draconian legisiation is now virtually infinite--and it is a distinct advantage for the bourgeoisie that thev have not actually had to lose their figure-head to reach such a position.

In fact a whole new cult 'nearly' assassinations seems to have emerged and it shot. is by no means beyond the some sections of the British arrest! bourgeoisie have found it sham attempt.

"First he wanted to join Bare up.

He said it was far too hard. Then he decided on the RAF but nothing seems to have come of that.

Well something did clearly -if they got the right bloke -even if only a love of high explosive.

The sunday reople, in What seeins to be a ludi Crous. compilation of evidence disenvered that a UJUNUTUIVU Folkstone bus (the home town of Sarjeant) had had a message scrawled on the back of a seat naming the day the Queen would be A double decker bus was A Kent police spokesremoved from service and This clear conspiracy by A steady supply of heroes and heroines is essential for the ruling class.

According to the People "The whole nation was still marvelling at the Queen's amazing composure."

The truth is that whether by accident or design the . whole working class will shortly be marvelling at the crackdown to come.

The Queen (right)