Labour's arms pediar praises Shah

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"His (the Shah's) perceptive leadership is not merely a great national asset for Iran but also of great benefit for all those countries which share an interest in the continuing peace and prosperity of this part of the world. I have been tremendously impressed by the obvious signs of real progress and achievement in every aspect of life here"

That is not the statement of just any old venal arms dealer. This support for one of the most reactionary and cruel dictatorships in the world reportedly came from a man who claims to be socialist-from British 'Labour' Defence inister Fred Mulley.

Discussions

Mulley's very ful and fiendly' discussions with the murderer Shah were part of an attempt to step up British capitalism's already enormous arms sales to Iran.

No doubt there was some friendly chat about the plans to start British-Iranian coproduction of the Shir, a special desert version of the Chieftan tank and of the Rapier ground to air guided missile.

It has not been reported whetner 'friendly the Shal real pr nent* ceptive leadership' of Shah there are estin ate be at least 40,000 ›o prisoners in Iran.

SAVAK

That trade unions and all independent workers' organisations are banned. That arrests of hundreds of workers are a daily event; that torture is commonplace.

That the Shah rules through the enormous secret police known as the SAVAK whose tentacles stretch all round the world in order to persecute opponents of all this 'perceptive leadership' wherever they may be.

Some of the Shah's must recent 'achievements' consist of the brutal repression of a series of demonstrations against his tyranny which broke out in Shiraz, Qum and Teheran last November.

Last month alone people were killed by state authorities du demonstrations in Tabri the west of Iran Brutality Since then other rations have taken veral t iwns and tl Mr Mulley touk interest in some of i's other examples of ogress and achieve10г perthe to ical the ring : Ir demonplace in ey have By all, as usual, been broken up with brutality and many arrests.

Such achievements were partly made possible by British weapons sold to the Shah by Fred Mulley and his predecessors.

But it is not just for money that Mulley and the British government have been so anxious to arm the Shah. Nor is it merely to help him repress his own subjecto Mulley, as a representative of imperialism, wants the reactionary Iranian government to act as a bulwark of counter-revolution in the Middle East and beyond.

"Stabilising"

Already the Shah has very concretely played this role in relation to the revolution in Dhofar.

And the massive build-up of armaments by his regime implies a direct threat to any revolutionary development in that part of the world Fred Mulley, the 'socialist' finds all this very satisfac"The determination of Iran and other states in the region to get good defence equipment is a stabilising factor"

Virtually every left MP in the Labour Party has made some statement in the past against the Shah's regime.

Most of them are sponsors PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report.

Mark Hyde or such organisations as the Committee for the Restoration of Trade Union Rights in Iran andthe Committee Against Repression in Iran.

If they had the slightest political courage or honesty then Mulley's remarks would already have ignited an explosion o protest within the Tyrannical So far we are still wa ting hear the first feeble whine of protest from these fake letts.

Mulley's visit and the whole filthy relationship between the Callaghan coalition governm ent and the tyrannical regime of the Shah must be given the widest publicity.

Resolutions must be passed in trade union branches and local Labour Parties demanding the breaking of this relationship, the immediate implementation, by labour movement blacking action, of an embargo on all arms deliverjes to the Shah, the identification and expulsion of all SAVAK agents in Britain, and the building of material assistance from the British labour movement to organisations of the Iranian workers and peasants who are fighting the Shah's dictatorship.

GAY ac aemocranc ship.

But Marxists can never approach the class struggle from the standpoint of abstract 'pure' democracy. All democracy has a class basis.

In this system bourgeois democracy is merely one way, one form through which the capitalist class exercises its dictatorship over the working class.

*Progressive' When the Stalinists and Labour reformists talk of defending democracy through an alliance of "progressive' forces (that is, hand in hand with the capitalist class they seek to hide the class content of democricy from the workers.

The WSI. is not at all interested in the defence of bourgeois democracy, only in the defence of those basic rights of the working class which have been won under hourgeois democracy These rights will be made much more real and taken to a far higher level when bourgeois democracy has been done away with and replaced by a sVstem based upon GAY workers' democracy the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Thus we defend the Soviet Union (which lacks democratic rights) against "free" 'democratic' capitalism-not through any love for the parasitic rulers of the Kremlin, but because the planned economy established by the 1917 revolution represents a historic gain for the working class.

Despite these important qualifications however, in a country like Britain, where the working class has become used to exercising basic democratic rights, the struggle in their defence against the police, the fascists, repressive legislation and all forms of attack car acquire great importance.

In the class battles come, the working class wil come to learn that its basic rights can no longer be con patible with capitalism, or b defended by the reformists.

As with decent living cor ditions and the right to job, their defence and exter sion poses the building of revolutionary leadership an preparation for power.

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The achievement, example, that under the