Apartheid gag on TV film

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This space was reserved to review a TV documentary film which was not shown.

A few hours before the third of Anthony. Thomas' documentaries was to go on the air, the big sugar monopoly, Tate and Lyle, got a High | Court injunction to stop sections of the film being shown.

The offending part the subhuman living conditions in a camp lived in by black sugar workers on plantation partly owned by Tate and Lyle.

Tate and Lyle say they have sold the plantation and that in any case they provided "better" accomodation for their workers than that shown in the film.

But what they provided was dormitories in which men were forced to live alone without their families.

The other firm mentioned in the film is British Leyland. They did not try to get an injunction but no doubt breathed a sigh of relief when the film was banned.

They were sufficiently embarassed to ask the director Anthony Thomas to include a statement that they • would negotiate with a black trade union if 50% of their workers joined it.

In theory this is a change of line by Leyland. In practice they know it is just words since the law in South Africa will come to , their assistance because negotiating with black unions is illegal.

And last week's High Court injunction shows again that the law in Britain is also a defender of apartheid as it did when the National Association for Freedom got an injunction to prevent the Union of Post Office Workers from operating a week's mail embargo against South Africa.

It last week's decision stands, it this cos bey ne it has become Coult y criticise capitalists for oper-. ating racist and repressive labour policies. politicians and the establishment of a workers' government.

Conscious obstacle

But this does not mean that we can ignore parliamentary politics.

Quite clearly in the fight today for the nationalisation of particular groups of capitalists the question of the anti-socialist Lib-Lab coalition government-standing as conscious obstacle to further nationalisation-is a factor to be reckoned with.

The demand that those "left' Labour MPs that claim to represent the interests of the working class break from