Duffy ballot- Nho car check?

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The Workers Socialist League is a Trotskyist organisation fighting to construct a principled revolutionary leadership in the working class in Britain and internationally and for the reconstruction of the Trotskyist Fourth International on the basis of the Transitional Programme.

The WSL fights at every step against the League On Thursday 24 April, over 100 strikers went back to work at Claridge's. NEWS Early reports of irregularities in the procedure for the second postal ballot for the presidency of the AUEW-in which extreme right winger Terry Duffy secured a shock victory over Broad Left nominee Bob Wright -have apparently been discounted.

But the fact remains that nobody predicted in advance that Duffy would win-and certainly not by a 47,000 vote margin on a staggeringly high 32.2% poll.

The double advantage for the right wing of a postal ballot consists in the fact that it not only gives the Tory PHOTO: Labour Weekly Duffy press free reign to witch-hunt the left wing candidates and promote the bosses' favourites, but it is completely out of the hands of the membership. The result cannot be properly challenged.

Whatever actually happened in the counting of ballot papers there is no doubt that Duffy's victory was prepared as much by the bankruptcy of the Broad Left and of failed candidate Wright, as by the efforts of the right wing.

Wright was notorious as the man who has. sold thousands of jobs in Chrysler and British Leyland, tirelessly advocated class collaborationist 'participation' schemes and stayed silent on the betrayal of the Desoutters strike, the Heathrow strike and the Leyland toolmakers' strike last year.

But the fact remains that these election results, coupled with the defeat of other Broad Left candidates in 24 out of 26 ballots, consolidates the right wing stranglehold on the AUEW and sharpen the problems faced by engineering workers' struggles in defence of jobs, wages or working conditions.