[Major confrontations between fascists and antifascists will be…]

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Major confrontations between fascists and antifascists will be necessary to stop the NF holding meetings in the run up to the London council elections in May.

Several Labour-controlled councils have a policy of banning fascists from using their halls.

But to do this in the election period when those standing candidates have a 'right to the use of school premises for election meetings would involve taking a stand against the law.

Minimal

The likelihood of Labour councils who have obediently imposed savage cuts on public services taking a stand against the law on this issue is-to say the least-minimal.

It is only by the physical intervention of anti-fascists that the NF can be stopped from holding these meetings.

Trades Councils and Labour Parties should be being called on now to make the necessary preparations, to bring together squads of workers from trade unions, Labour Party branches, tenants associations, youth clubs etc to cordon off halls and beat off the fascists.

Clearly the police will be the major obstacle in this process and mass mobilisations will be necessary in each case.

But another obstacle will be all those liberal and bourgeois elements involved in existing antifascist organisations who oppose physical attacks on fascists and who want to uphold the law.

In fact all the many such organisations have built exactly these elements into their ranks.

Some were set up in response to the circular last year urging Trades Councils to form antiThis body, instead of being based on a l policy of beating fascists off the streets and building a socialist alternative, appeals to individuals regardless of political affiliation, on the basis of moral opposition to fascism.

Thus SWP members and supporters who had SO courageously and successfully helped inflict a blow against fascism in Lewisham last July found themselves in Ilford, as members of the ANL, constrained by SWP stewards to 'orderly behaviour" beyond the police cordon.

Leading ex-Liberal spokesman, Peter Hain had promised 'peaceful' activities and had welcomed the two month ban on all marches in London as a 'victory'.

From their previous refusal to mobilise the workers movement as a whole in confrontation with the fascists the SWP have apparently swung with the ANL to opposing any confrontation at all.

Many of the local committees against racism and fascism begun and coordinated by the IMG, are similarly popular-frontist class alliances, including church figures and Liberals.

Some, however, are labour movement bodies fought for through trades councils.

The approach of the International Marxist Group seems to be to set up some kind of organisation and decide the policies later.

The national co-ordinating newspaper CARF, carries no statement of policies whatsoever, gives no explanation of the causes of fascism, and says not a word of the necessary socialist solution.

Nor does it criticise trade union and Labour Party leaders, who, by their strangling of workers' struggles hold back the development of the socialist movement and are themselves responsible for the problems which provide the breeding ground for fascism.

Liquidation

This problem of bankrupt and reactionary leaders is the key police provocations, who have gained the distinct impression that police repression is on the increase, are right.

But in case they feel like protesting to their Labour leaders and demanding this trend is reversed, they should take into account that Labour's right wing is openly boasting about the increased cash allocated to the police under Wilson and Callaghan.

Labour': 's General Secretary Ron Hayward last week chose the pages of that well-known workers' paper the Financial Times to spell out the reactionary stand of Labour bureaucrats on "law and order Greater resources Hayward bragged to the Financial Times solidly Tory readers that:

•Labour has devoted greater resources to combating rising crime than the Tories ever did. In the life of this Government we have spent £250m or more in real terms on public expenditure covering law and order and protective services than was being spent when we took office. An extra £50m was pumped into the system last year' Social frustration Much of this extra cash "pumped in" to the repressive police apparatus was of course siphoned out of education, social services, housing and health spending. thus helping to create the kind of social trustration and unemployment that create violence and other forms of "'crime"

Hayward does not reveal how much of last year's extra £50m was spent on training the brutalised thugs of the Special Patrol Group for their picket-busting activities at Grunwick, and their violent attacks on anti-fascists.

Nor does he elaborate on the amounts devoted to protecting meetings and marches held by the National Front from the legitimate hostility of the trade union and labour Hayward employers that it was the Labour leadership that has finally implemented the Criminal Law Act-which creates a whole new series of offences carrying jail sentences for those engaged in factory occupations, college sit-ins, or squatting in empty accomodation.

"So who can say that Margaret Thatcher is more repressive than us?" is the implicit question throughout the letter.

Hostilities

But of course the ruling class and their spokesmen in the judiciary are not content even with the reactionary moves carried out by the Callaghan regime.

Only last weekend Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls expressed the hostility of the bourgeoisie to the fact that the law is not invoked against unofficial strikes.

PHOTO: Mark Rusher Thatcher NO OCCUPY CCUPY TO SAVE OW JOBS PROPERTY DIRECT ACTI NOW MUSH The law knows no right to strike, said Denning, especially when a strike harms "innocent bystanders" disrupts "essential services" or brings "the country to a halt"

The workers who carry out such strikes are exercising not their rights but their power, he spluttered.

Forbidden

The courts have been forbidden by Parliament to act against strikes 'in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute".

Denning wondered why unofficial strikes-sometimes even called contrary to union instruction-should be YSS Milit.

Demonstration against the Criminal Law exempt from the law.

Judges of course star. to the right of the poi spectrum.

Warning

But as with McKinnon, they have a : of putting into word: thoughts in the minds c capitalist class that pays fat salaries.

And with Hayward the entire Labour leade trying to out-Thatche: Tories, this is a warning Labour Party militants si not ignore.

The fight to revers: ban on marches mu stepped up alongside the to break the Li coalition. SUP THE Chi YINAL

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