Buckton Sits and Waits

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gle left' MP remained firm his determination to murder ank Stagg.

Den sententhin ireland, a ritis it had already been conceded to any "loyalist" prisoners, Stagg dertook a hunger strike that ded in his death.

In a solitary cell in Wakefield ol, his body wasted to a mere BT stone, Frank Stagg finally ded his name to those Irishmen no had sacrificed their lives so it Ireland might be free.

Whether or not the bombs that re since exploded on the London be and at the Ideal Home exhibon were a direct consequence oi ugg's death it is not possible to RESPONSIBLE What is possible and what we ve no hesitation in doing is recting the attention of the work• class in England to those iponsible for the killings and mimings that have taken place on ith sides of the Irish Sea. It is British capitalism's attempts er many years to impose its nous solutions on the Irish ople that has produced from the pressed Irish the inevitable istance. , It was Britain's capitulation to E Belfast bourgeoisie abetted by e military section of the English fing class that led to a partitioned tand and thus an unfinished tional revolution that is at the urt of todays struggles.

And it was behind the shield of • British Army that Loyalist egs formed to unlease the sectarI assassination campaign from 12 onwards.

From this understanding flows I demand for the immediate hirawal of British troops from and. our support for Irish selfkimmaton. resistance to poties for the war effort against ELizzople and the release of police prisoners.

Ost atitude to the bombing abdication of proletarian internationalism.

Nor do we lend support as Red Weekly has done, to the delusions of the Provisionals' petty bourgeois leadership that they are undermining the economy of the six counties by their bombs.

MOBILISATION

For us the inner needs of struggle to prise loose the grip of British imperialism. demands a massive mobilisation under working class leadership, while the programme of Provisional terror demands no more of the nationalist population than that they provide a refuge from the British army.

As a programme of action nothing has contributed so much to the present demobilisation and demoralisation of the nationalist population as the bombing campaign of the Provisionals.

To say this is not to say that the working class could finally triumph against capitalism without recourse to arms.

Anyone who could claim otherwise after the slaughter in Chile is either a fool or a conscious counterIt is to say that the arms that the working class must wield must be under political control, whereas the Irish Republican or Catholic nationalist organisations - from the Officials to the left-wing split from the IRSP - are not political parties but military conspiracies.

Their struggle against British imperialism, which we support quite irrespective of the methods they choose to wage that struggle, is composed of a series of heroic acts undertaken "on behalf of the" the people but is very rarely, and not at all in the last few years, an expression of the conscious development of that mass movement.

One exception that took place After his release Herrema successfully dealt with a wage payment that was due by circulating a personal plea to all the workers in the present economic climate to defer their claim.

We criticise the petty bourgeois programme of the Republicans on grounds very similar to our criticism of the bureaucracies that dominate the English labour movement. Both are profoundly contemptuous of the masses on which they rest.

To both, the masses are a stage army to be manipulated in negotiation with the capitalist boss or the imperialist war lord. For one the negotiating card is the threat of strike, for the other the bomb.

Both belittle the role of the masses in their own consciousness. For the labour bureaucrat the masses "owe" him a soft living that might culminate in the House of Lords. For the Provo the masses owe him shelter against British army patrois.

BUREAUCRAT

But having noted the similarity let us note also where it ends. The labour bureaucrat is the last defence of the capitalist state. At every turn he tries to tie the fortunes of the working class to the nation state.

He fuels anti-Irish chauvinism and foments hostility to all those who resist the oppressive actions of his "nation" • The Provisionals, nowever, fight British imperalism, and, however inadequately they do it, to the extent that they remain undefeated they weaken the capacity of British imperialism to manage their own working class.

Having only a military perspective for defeating British imperialism it is hardly surprising that the entire spectrum of Republicanism is blind to the divisions within the Loyalist camp. Instead it can only see civil war.

The so-called . revolutionary left in Ireland - the jesters at the Provisionals court - can add nothing to this. No doubt the conditions exist for civil war.

Barring one small matter. There At the National Assembly on Unemployment on March 27th, the overwhelming majority of the TUC General Council were conspicuously absent. One notable exception however, was Ray Buckton, General Secretary of ASLEF.

Like the other eminent bureaucrats at the conference he restricted his contribution to routine attacks on Labour's right-wing, reactionary calls for import controls and vague exhortations to the delegates to organise "action" in support of the campaign against unemployment -without at any point committin! himself to any action whatsoever.

Buckton's recent past has shown him to be a man who prefers inaction. Four days before the National Assembly, at a public meeting in Oxford called by the three railway unions in opposition to the rail cuts, Buckton was asked why, if he so vehemently opposed the cuts, he had instructed his striking members on the Eastern Region to return to work and abandon their fight to defend working conditions threatened by those cuts.

"I sat in my office and waited, he replied, "to see what would happen"

Since, during the course of this vigil he received none of the usual calls from the Secretary of State and the Chairman of British Rail begging him to send the men back to work he became convinced that those forces seeking to implement rail cuts were happy to see a section of railway workers isolated, fighting a losing battle and turning 'public sympathy' against the railways.

It was in order to prevent their "further isolation" that work, he told the audience.

If it was not their militancy but their isolation that he genuinely feared, he could have taken positive steps to end that isolation.

It was his duty to make their action official, call out all the other Regions and insist that the NUR Executive bring out their members (whose jobs are equally at risk) in full support.

From this base a real struggle could have been waged not only against rail cuts (the first round of which Buckton accepted last year) and the unemployment which they will inevitably create, but also to force the government to inject capital into the railways, and guarantee a sliding scale of state spending to prevent the rundown of public transport.

That is what might have been. As it happened, the only light that Buckton fought was against his own members, to ensure that they returned to work both isolated and His past actions therefore, in the battle against unemployment, have not been those of the shining champion of the working class who presented himself to the National Assembly. But we have yet to see it he has a future in this role.

The Assembly voted to make May 26th a day of national action against unemployment. Branches of ASLEF must table motions insisting that Buckton use his position on the National Executive and on the TUC General Council to fight for official strike action by all unions on that day.

This time he cannot be allowed to watch railmen stick their necks out in unofficial action while he sits and waits for the employers' axe to

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SOCIALIST PRESS, Fednesdes Ith April 19-6