Blocking moves fo reselection of MPs

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Class against class To most Labour Party members, the vote for a Labour candidate in an election is seen as a vote against capitalist policies, and for the party traditionally linked to the workers movement.

Only a tiny handful of benevolent eccentrics would vote Labour in order to keep an established Labour MP from the dole queue.

And, given the chance freely to dispose of extreme right wing Labour MPs who, once elected, act as eager servants of the employers, few Labour Party militants would have any compunction about doing so.

Major issue

This is why the call for reselection of Labour MPs has become such a major issue within the Labour Party.

Right wing MPs have been anxiously seeking ways of heading off rank and file pressure, in order to preserve the existing state of affairs, in which a Labour MP is answerable to nobody, and can only be removed atter years of wrangling on the pattern of Newham NE.

Latest bid to take the steam out of the campaign for automatic reselection has come from Joe Ashton MP.

Writing two weeks ago in Labour Weekly, Ashton elaborated a 'compromise' plan for each MP to face an "endorsement" procedure involving a secret ballot.

No avenue Once this hurdle was over, there would be no further avenue for criticism until after the next election.

By ensuring that reselection moves could begin only if the MP failed to win endorsement, and isolating these proceedings to one fixed time in the life of each Parliament, Ashton hopes to defuse the kind of violent resistance from disgruntled right wing elements as was displayed by ousted candidates Dick What was "Comrade' Svetlana Nikulina doing teaching the children of the bourgeoisie?

Brought to Britain from the USSR on an exchange visit she found herself teaching the streamlined children at Bristol Grammar School and 'visiting' the children at the most expensive private school in the country, Millfield.

This calculated insult to the gains of the 1917 revolution was the latest exercise in detente, made little better by the exchange visit of Galina Polshack to Hackney Downs Comprehensive.

Their varying experiences formed the basis of a mocking piece in the Daily Mail "Comrade Galina gets a lesson in class warfare"

Nikulina (who teaches 'extra-bright' children in Taverne, Eddie Griffiths Reg Prentice.

offensive But of course with or without Ashton's plan such elements would continue to attract the support of the Tory press, and would continue to campaign against any attempt to remove them.

The only answer to such a fight is a political offensive against their reactionary, anti-working class policies.

Ashton has good reason for wanting to avoid such a fight in the Labour Party.

Colleagues

He knows that Prentice was backed to the very last moment by his cabinet colleagues-Healey, Callaghan, Williams and Rodgersand that his views on almost every key question are identical to theirs.

To politically arm the Ashton Labour Party for the ousting of right wing MPs means to sharpen the whole fight against the Lib-Lab policies of the leadership.

Ashton also stresses the fact that MPs get no redundancy pay, "nor can they appeal to the unfair dismissals tribunal and get compensation there"

Severance pay

The fact that Labour MPs are elected to represent the interests of the labour movement and not to provide themselves with a comfortable pay cheque each month Moscow) had nothing but the best. "I could only be impressed by the conditions and traditions of these schools", , she told the Mail.

This is no doubt partly because class sizes in Russian state schools average only 16.6-equivalent to those in elite British private establishments like Millfield.

In contrast, Polshak (according to the Mail at least) found the pupils lacking in refinement. She refused to use text books because she claimed they were full of pornographic drawings.

The differing experiences of these two teachers of Stalinism provided the Mail with a Kremlin sent opportunity to compare comprehensive schools adversely with selective schools.

In an editorial headed Top Marx for Grammar, the Mail explains with heavy seems to elude says:

"Of course the rules ought to be altered so that MPs do get severance pay. But, with the present government pay policy, can anyone see that happening?"

This pathetic. statement sums up the bankruptcy of those who wish to detach the reselection issue from the question of political leadership in the Labour Party.

Desperate

It is partly because their MPs have devotedly supported successive stages of state control of wages and other anti-working class measures that sections of the Labour Party want to remove them and replace them with people prepared to defend working class living standards!

But Ashton seems more concerned to give these reactionary MPs a big enough 'golden handshake' to get them out without a fight!

This desperate effort to cut politics out of reselection also emerges in the proposals advanced by the crypto-Tory "Campaign for a Labour Victory"- whose members include Shirley Williams-who basically accept Ashton's position, but advocate an additional appeal procedure to give added protection to beleagured right wingers.

Delighted

And union bureaucrats are also likely to back the Ashton plan as a means of avoiding a full scale fight inside the Labour Party.

Most MPs of course are delighted that the Ashton plan is massively biased in the favour of the sitting MP, and will add their backing to it.

The fight for the unrestricted right of Constituency Labour Parties to ditch reactionary and unrepresentative MPs and replace them with candidates of their choice must be stepped up, as part of the general fight to remove and drive out the Callaghan-Healey coalitionist leadership. sarcasm how the two "simple Russian teachers" fared and concluded:

"This is not a fairy story dreamed up by some Dr. Rhodes Pushkin in Tory central office. It actually happened, dear reader.

"And the moral is ... if Soviet teachers can give Britain's grammar schools top Marx, shouldn't our own proletarian progressives pause a little longer before storming those that are still left"

Let us not blame all this on Polshak. She did her best to stress the poverty of the children and refused to compare the black kids unfavourably.

But providing the Daily Mail with the means to chalk up a cheap jibe at the fight against grammar schools, the official responsible for teacher exchange has given a whole new meaning to class collaboration.

PHOTO: Chris Davies, Report Williams PHOTO: Laurence Sparham, IFL