Workers Socialist League

Socialist Press, Trotskyism Today and the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, 1975–1984

Tribunites bloc with Tories

Socialist Press no. 93, 29 March 1978 · scan p. 1 · about 493 words

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and unorganised jobs-there are plenty of people now on the dole queues with little prospect of any other employment.

"Good sense"

So if the interests of the employers, and not the basic rights and independent interests of workers are taken into account, it makes "good sense to cut immigration.

It makes sense to the Tories for another reason. They desperately need a reactionary base of support if they are to drive home their proposed battery of attacks on the working class after an election victory.

Whipping up a hysteria about "floods" of immigrants "swamping" the "national character" offers them a cheap and easy road to frustrated sections of the middle class-squeezed towards bankruptcy by the big monopolies-and backward sections of workers denied leadership by class collaborating TUC and Labour bureaucrats.

"Muddled"

Two months ago Thatcher launched this campaign, clearly acting in full knowledge of the recommendations of the Select Committee Far-reaching calls for stringent action against "illegal" immigrants and other measures were aired by Thatcher and other • Tory spokesmen.

Bidwell at the time was one of the few Labourites who declared that he did not regard Thatcher as a racialist, but as "an extremely muddled woman on this Now he has put his name to a report which embodies nearly all of Thatcher's proposals. Its provisions include:

* An end "large scale" immigration.

* An annual quota for immigration from the Indian sub-continent.

* A crack-down on illegal immigrants, co-ordinating with Social Security offices and the police.

* Penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

* More black British citizens to be denied the right to come to this country.

Rather than defend the immigrant population from the propaganda of the Tories and the growing physical violence of the fascists of PHOTO: Mark Rusher Thatcher the National Front.

Bidwell and his racist colleagues on this anti-immigration committee have "for the sake of unity" added their voices to the Tory campaign.

After a few initial bleats that the Labourites had been "duped" and "outmanoeuvred" by the Tories, Bidwell has now settled down to a dogged defence of the Hysteria Replying to a mild attack on it by Labour Party chairman and fellow Tribunite Joan Lestor, Bidwell declared that if immigration is an election issue and the Tories "take a more realistic line than Labour", then "you can say gooaoye to a Labour nan hera Takara victory"

Bidwell's "realism" has in fact played a major part in laying the basis for renewed and increased racialist hysteria by Tories and by the National Front, and for renewed and intensified harassment of the immigrant community by police, immigration officials, social security officers and the whole weight of the capitalist state apparatus.

In adding his name to this Tory document he and his Labour colleagues have joined an unholy racialist coalition.

But this does not exhonerate Bidwell's Labourite opponents on this issue. To a man they continue to support the reactionary Lib-Lab coalition, whose policies of

← Contents of Socialist Press no. 93, 29 March 1978