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Speke fight stabbed LEYLAND In a campaign to prevent a McCarthyite political witchhunt within the TGWU, delegations including TGWU convenors, stewards and branch officers will travel to Oxford this Saturday for a special conference.

The conference, sponsored by over 90 prominent TGWU members, is to hear the full facts surrounding the moves by Regional Officials to discipline nine militant TGWU members at British Leyland's Cowley Assembly Plant.

All nine are seen by membership in the plant and by TGWU officials as leading opponents of the Edwardes plan for speed-up and sackings and of worker They include the newly reelected convenor, Bob Fryer, and three newly reelected deputy convenors-Alan Thornett, Frank Corti and Tom White.

Thornett has been recommended for expulsion from the union and Corti and White face a life For the past four years, national, regional and local officials have tried every possible manoeuvre to muzzle and suppress those in the Cowley Assembly Plant who have fought for a clear programme based on the defence of the independent interests of the working class.

Every previous attempt has come up against the problem of the solid support for the left wing from workers in the plant.

Hence the desperate moves to bureaucratically oust these convenors and stewards who only three months ago were victorious in shop floor elections.

Saturday's conference must be the beginning of an intensified and broadened campaign throughout the TGWU to force the Region 5 bureaucracy to drop the trumped-up charges.

This fight for democratic rights within the biggest union in the country is an essential part of the fight for a programme and a new leadership capable of defending the jobs, conditions and living standards of TGWU members.

CONFERENCE

Democracy Under Threat in The TGWU* Saturday April 8, 1pm.

Cowley Community Centre, TGWU cards must be shown COACHES to the conference: NUNEATON: 10am, Bus Station COVENTRY: 10.30am, from Pool Meadow.

BIRMINGHAM: 10.30am from Hall of Memory.

LONDON: 10am, Stratford Bdwy 10.30am Kings Cross, York Wy If productivity is lower in Leyland than elsewhere, then that is the result of the overall crisis of an antiquated, degenerate British capitalism attempting to compete with the high technology forced upon workers in other countries.

Force Capitalism can only "solve" these problems through intensified attacks on the working class, attempting to force conditions here down to the lowest in the world.

Workers must reject this approach. All jobs in Leyland must be defended, through the fight for work sharing on full pay. The Speke plant must be occupied to prevent closure.

The Lib-Lab coalition, which stands behind the jobcutting plans, must be broken by working class action.

Participation, incentives schemes and the Edwardes plan must be thrown out, and the fight taken up to open Leyland's books and those of the privately owned suppliers to elected trade These policies provide a fighting programme for the Liverpool Trades Council 9 April conference.

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union committees to prove the need for an integrated, nationalised motor industry under workers management.