2,000 Break up May Day March

Scan page 1

The Callaghan government chose the May Day holiday as the time to strike the latest blow at the democratic rights won by workers in centuries of bitter struggle.

On Saturday, Leeds police arrested Trades Council Secretary Beryl Huffingley for organising the traditional May Day march in defiance of a police ban.

The ban, supposedly directed against the National Front who had announced plans to demonstrate in the town a week earlier, had been imposed by the Chief Constable, and lasts until May 7.

But as similar bans in Tameside and in the London area nave proved, such measures do nothing but provide protection and assistance for the fascists, while depriving the workers movement of the right to demonstrate freely and drive the fascists from the streets.

The previous Saturday in eeds, 1,000 police had cordoned off an entire area of the city to protect a meeting of 57 National Front supporters from a hostile crowd of 600 anti-fascist demonstrators.

But even that operation was dwarfed by Saturday's huge police mobilisation against those workers that insisted on their right to march on May Day.

The 500 marchers who turned up on Woodhouse Moor in Leeds to defy the ban found themselves surrounded by 2,000 police, who had built a small fort on a raised part of the moor, and brought in ambulances, a canteen, horse boxes and Special Patrol Group thugs.

A huge special surveillance camera was pointed at the demonstrators, while a police helicopter flew overhead.

The march formed up and instructions were given to proceed. As soon as the march reached the public highway Trades Council Secretary Beryl Huffingley was arrested along with AUEW member Danny McKenna.

The order was immediately given by Trades Council bureaucrats for banners to be lowered, and to disperse to a protest meeting on the Town Hall steps.

The decision to march had been endorsed at the Leeds Trades Council meeting by 100 votes to 3. It had been backed by eight other Trades Councils, by the TGWU. Regional Committee, four AUEW District Committees and the Yorkshire Area NUM.

The police decision to enforce the ban on a demonstration overwhelmingly backed by the labour movement is a clear proof of the real meaning for the workers movement of state-imposed bans.

The entire strategy of the Lib-Lab government for continuing to cut workers living standards and worsen working conditions in the interests of British capitalism hinges upon its ability to prevent the independent mass mobilis ation of the working class.

Up to now this objective has been pursued with the aid of TUC bureaucrats who have sabotaged every independent struggle against wage control, social service cuts, closures and redundancies.

But the emergence of massive working class hostility to the fascist National Front-which has been reflected in a series of major counter-demonstrations in various areas, and in the huge Anti Nazi League carnival-has created a new problem for the Lib-Lab leaders.

Determined at all costs to head off a decisive confrontation between workers and the fascists in which workers would gain confidence in independent action, Labour ministers have resorted to bans on demonstrations that now give the fascists and the police an effective veto over any labour movement march.

It would now be virtually sufficient for the NF to call a counter-demonstration in order to ensure that a workers demonstration is banned-and that ban enforced by the full weight of the state repressive machinery.

Far from opposing these bans or explaining this state of affairs, the leaders of the Anti-Nazi League continue to call and even campaign for state bans on the National Front.

ANL spokesman Peter Hain was one of the first to welcome the two-month ban on all marches in the London area imposed at the time of the Ilford by-election.

This suicidal policy could soon give the reactionary Lib-Lab government the pretext for an Rees almost complete ban on workers' democratic right to march-on top of other attacks embodied in the Criminal Law Act, the "Prevention of Terrorism" Act and the use of Official Secrets laws.

Meanwhile Home Secretary Rees has presided over a massive

----- pull-quotes -----

Council secretary Beryl Huffingley PHOTO: Chris Davies, Ret