[Centrist 'Militant' Newspaper and its supporters. Under an…]

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Centrist 'Militant' Newspaper and its supporters.

Under an assumed guise of pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric those wafflers carry out an essential task for the right wing and fake "left' MPs by seeking to head off any fight for principle.

Militant supporters, aping the editorial line of their weekly paper, have stepped in in several areas to hold back demands for the breaking of the Lib-Lab Coalition, even melt 30einuine to demand Seeing them like an office cat, which, for all its fleas and evil smells, carries out a useful job in deterring mice, the Labour leadership has been content to tolerate the Militant group, and occasionally offer leading supporters saucers of milkas with the appointment of The capitalist and the newspaper editor have an uneasy alliance. Although the newspapers depend on big business for existence, through advertising, and although they are themselves part of enormous capitalist enterprises, the search for sensation and combat can often bring populist papers into conflict with the capitalist class they serve.*"

The papers trail in the wake of the business world, applying guesswork and wholesale flattery and the basic principles of the witchhunt to serve it.

Industrial correspondents have a special place in this uneasy relationship.

As they stand outside strike meetings being sworn at by the working class, as they wait outside the doors of the big businessmen for a few crumbs of information passed on through public relations experts, they must THE 4 и was erro ... Militant supporter Andy Bevan to the £4,000 a year job of Party youth organiser.

This relationship emerges more clearly from the report of the Special Committee to Examine Documents on come to hate the working class and fear his boss..

It is little wonder that their firmest relationships are forged with the trade union officials, (and the in depth interviews they conduct with the bottles that the bureaucrats hand out).

However, when the pattern is broken the industrial correspondents respond to order.

First class When the capitalist comes out of his lofty tower, when he condescends to speak directly to the reporter, then will that be the happiest day of the reporter's life and a first class service will immediately be laid on.

So it was when Michael Edwardes, the man Socialist Challenge claim to have installed as head of British Leyland, took the more compliant of the hacks aside. They jumped to do his bidding.

He had a problem. There was a story that had to get about. Not directly from him, of course. But a little matter Entrism, set up by the National Executive last January.

This report is now available to all Labour Party members in the NEC Report for 1977. of 12,000 say, 30,000 jobs which might have to go.

A little matter of cl ising the Liverpool factory. That kind of thing. He was Sure they could be relied on.

They could be. For the next few days, every article about Leyland carried the leaks, unattributed, but linked to rumours of the axe Edwardes was wielding or simply with phrases such as "Everyone knows that Leyland could operate with 30,000 less workers..."

What the truth of Edwardes' inspired leak is, no-one has bothered to ask, or seemingly cares. Whether Edwardes is really ready to move to that stage of the struggle could not concern the industrial correspondent in the least.

All he knows is he has heard his masters' voice and he must rush to help. That is in the best traditions of the freedom of the press. Capitalists must be free to have what they want printed without anyone asking awkward questions.

LER SCHOOLKIE LEWIST Wilfully ignoring the un mistakeable evidence that the Labour Party has been infil trated and led for years by whole platoons of Tories and crypto-Tories cast in the Reg Prentice mould, the NEC declared from the outset that the report would centre on left-wing elements.

"The NEC considered alle gations about entrism, that is Trotskyist influence within the Labour Party". (Our Itals).

But in an apparent volte. face from the huge national witch-hunts that accom panied the wholesale expulsion of the Trotskyist-led Young Socialists in 1964, the Committee also asserts that:

«The threats of discipline and expulsion has never won one political argument and never will"

PHOTO: Chris Davies, Report Special Committee member John Chalmers-happy to tolerate 'Militant'.

It is in the conclusions of the three-page Report that the Committee's real attitude to the Militant group emerges most clearly:

"There are numerous references in the documents to the aims of the Militant tendency. These claims are not necessarily proven and some of them may be false existing right wing leadership and their Tribunite allies.

"The things they [the documents] claim include deliberate planning of work in the Labour Party, which they themselves describe as deep entry in the Party, and the tendency has all members of the National Committee of the LPYS which they state they intend to use as their instrument for further action in the Party".

Were the Militant group based on the slightest shred o: = principled programme there is line doubt that their control of the Sall Organisation would bring out the Labour NEC in fits of apoplexy.

Certainly the mere election of a majority of real Trotskyist supporters of the Socialist Labour League into the YS National Committee in 1964 was enough to spark the massive witchhunt.

Yet here the Militant group's operations are catalogued with equanimity. "Live and let live : is the tone of the whole report from Labour bureaucrats confident that Militant will let them live on in the leadership of the Party.

The document points out that "Because our democratic principles are what they are, we must be concerned if there is any organisation attempting to direct the action of its members within the Labour Party"

In a sense this is true. It clearly is time for a sort out of, those who are working for outside interests within the Labour movement in general and the Labour Party in particular.

Advocates and practitioners of the Coalition deal with the Liberals are the most obvious case in point-since they have wilfully abandoned the independence of the Labour Party to the secondstring capitalist politicians and swindlers that make up the Liberal leadership.

They discuss policies with the Liberal leaders first-and then turn to impose them on the Labour movement.

These hostile forces must be driven from the ranks of the Labour Party.

And the Militant group, with its wretched programme of pious demands divorced from the slightest fight in practice against the right wing will be exposed in such a fight.

Foot fobbed Heffer o stating that he still hol his original views on policy.

In other words h favour of wha Callaghan Healey and TUC can impose on the union movement, opposed to the blunt ir ment of a statutory polic Dennis Skinner, who Heffer, parades as a wing opponent of the go ment outside Parliamenl acts as a loyal lackey o Lib-Lab coalition in division lobbies, whether Foot agreed "the new sexy, husky of Mrs Thatcher" on PHOTO: John Sturrock, Report Skii With contributions questions on this level the one Labour MP whe publicly claimed he is w to vote against the Lit coalition deal, it is sca surprising that Callaghan Healey regard the La Party as at best a ru stamp for their policies al worst a tiresome irrelevar Irrelevance So while the primary to prevent a Phase 4 centre on the struggli workers for claims that t through the 10% limit, important that Labour 1 members also put leaders on the spot.

Those Labour MPs declare they oppose controls must be instr by GMCs to take i genuine fight against the limit by campaigning support of any sectio workers in struggle again by voting against the Lit coalition government, fighting break coalition.