[Conference, Week Two" quipped the Daily Telegraph' cartoonist…]

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Conference, Week Two" quipped the Daily Telegraph' cartoonist last week, aptly characterising a Labour Conference which saw the complete and grovelling collapse of the self-proclaimed 'left' wingers and no challenge to the continuation of the kind of policies beloved by industrialists and international bankers.

All the decisions had been taken the week before, when, under the approving eye of the Tory press, the Liberal Party endorsed a continuation of the Lib-Lab coalition deal-provided only that no socialist policies whatever were adopted.

Callaghan From then on the vacant rhetoric, histrionics, arm waving and lectern thumping of the 'lefts in the Labour Conference could be clearly dismissed as irrelevant by everyone except the most gullible readers of Tribune and Militant.

Militant proudly claimed that eleven speakers on the first day alone got up to proclaim the Militant's own toothles abstract category, stripped of an call for a break in the Lib-La coalition, it is easy to understan why it had no impact whatever i shaping the developments at th Conference.

The smattering of "left" reso utions that were adopted b Conterence will of course come 1 for the time honoured cold shoulder treatment from govern ment ministers, who have alway regarded the Conference as diverting week by the sea rathe than any mandate for action.

Among the more improbabl proposals passed by Conferenc was the ritual demands for restoration of public spendin cuts (passed just as final plans fo the sacking of Hounslow Hospita were being approved) and a cal for a reduction in the "unaccept able" level of unemploymen which the government ha accepted and consciously built up over the last three years.

COALITION

Naturally neither policy can be implemented while the Lib-La coalition remains intact.

As the Telegraph summed u the 1977 Conference, the affai will have:

• little or no impact or current Government policy-Mr Callaghan's position is too stron for that and the left does not want to chance its arm by en dangering the new found unity of the party in the run-up to the election.

This "new found unity so valued by the "lefts' is unity with the Liberal Party, unity with the friends and co-thinkers of Prentice who remain the dominant force in the Labour leadership, unity with the very forces that are liquidating the mass base of the Labour Party within the working class.

This unity must be broken, as must the coalition deal with the Liberals, before any progress can be made in the fight for encialict