[Just after we go to press this week…]

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Just after we go to press this week polling will take place in the Stechford byelection-to fill the seat vacated by Labour's Common Market careerist Roy Jenkins.

The local Labour leadership have succeeded in dredging up a worthy successor to the extreme right purporting to represent the interests of Stechford's working class population.

NO CONFIDENCE it is obvious that no contidence can be placed by workers in Davis to wage any kind of struggle for socialist policies or oppose the coalition with the Liberals, any more than workers can rely on any Labout right winger.

The only way with such elements is to lever them out of the Labour Party through a mobilisation of working class opposition to their betrayals--as has occurred with the crypto-Tory former Minister, Reg Prentice, in Newham North East.

HOSTILITY

But we can well understand the frustration and class hostility to "Labour" candidates such as Davis which will motivate those workers who turn out on Thursday to vote for IMG candidate Brian Heron, or for SWP candidate Paul Foot.

Those workers will be registerPHOTO: Angela Phillips. IFL ing their call for a clear alternative to Labour's coalition policies of wage controls, mass unemployment, cuts and racist immigration ALTERNATIVE The IMG and the SWP are both claiming to put forward such an alternative. But while the SWP simply calls for more militancy and its well-worn string of trade union and anti-racist demands, it avoids any attempt to develop political consciousness among its supporters.

• And the IMG, though putting forward a much more developed take forward the struggle that must be waged within the Labour Party and the unions to mobilise for the removal of the right wing.

'DOWNTURN'

Rather, their decision to inter vene in this by-election and in the Greater London Council elections in May reflect the IMG's analysis that the class struggle is in a period of "downturn" which rules out a principled fight for new leader ship within the labour movement around the demands of Trotsky's Transitional Programme.

They see the propaganda work of these election campaigns as a substitute for such a fight.

We disagree with this analysis and we therefore disagree with the standing of alternative candidates to Labour at this stage of the fight within the workers' movement.

We call on our readers and sup porters to vote Labour in these elections, and to take up the fight within their union branches and Labour Parties for a breaking of the coalition with the Liberals, for the expulsion of the crypto-Tory right wing, and for a programme of alternative policies in opposition to those of the Callaghan-Steel govern. ment.

LEAGUE

Public Meeting Down with the Coalition!

Sunday 3 April at 7.30 pm Prince of Wales, Division St.

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winger Jenkins. This time a British Leyland manager, Terry Davis, is

programme, is unable to show how their candidacy in this election can