October 20 elections for Prior's 6-county 'Assembly

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onists -on!! against one anish cops back holocaust. to 'normal' duty London N8 8PL. 30p plus 20p p&p. Available from SO, c/o 28 Middle Lane, Mitterrand of the French economy in genera but also to the 'political" speculations in the stock exchange.

The government also took a decisive turn to make th. French working class bear the brunt of the crisis. Mauroy announced recently a price freeze on certain products but also a salary freeze for the next four months. While prices can hardly be effectively controlied, the decision to freeze wages is seen as a serious move to depress workers' ( living standards by around 3%.

All these measures are said to be dictated by the international crisis" Mitterrand now speaks in the name of "realism" The "utopian socialist project" has little place when contronting "the reality of governing". inherited over react The has the reactionary institutions established by the Gaullist coup of 1958. The Fifth Republic concentrates real power in the hands of top civil servants and technocrats beyond the legislative institutions of the bourgeois state.

The repressive apparatuses were immeasurably strengthened under Giscard. The powers and strength of the police have reached an unprecedented level making it one of the most powerful police forces in Western Europe. To think that such a formidable machinery. will passively stand by while deep political and social change takes place is the utmost naivety.

Cosmetic changes Mitterrand, refusing to dismantle the rotten institutions of the Fifth Republic, has instead made cosmetic changes, dissolving he State Security Court and the Armed Forces Permanent Tribunal. The police hierarchy was left undisturbed. The 1982 budget was increased by 19.7% to cover the recruitment of an extra 14,000 policemen and purchase even more sophisticated equipment for better surveillance and repression.

Home Office Minister Deferre's speeches about "security" , the "fight against crime" and "law and order" are indistinguishable from those of his predecessors. Top police bosses openly express their satisfaction with thẹ government's performance; and so do the Army top brass.

After May '68, different military regions were reorganised to enable the Army units to act quickly and effectively against the "internal enemy" • None of these policies and priorities established by Giscard are being challenged.

The support of conscripts for Mitterrand has evaporated since he blatantly refused to implement his promises to reduce the length of service to six months and to grant them the most basic democratic rights.

The backpedalling of the government stands in stark contrast to the confidence of the working class. Last autumn's strikes at Renault-Sandouville, Billancourt and at the SNCF were the thin end of the wedge. While differing in their nature and objectives, these strikes were well-supported and usually achieved unity between members different Massive mobilisations were to follow at the beginning of 1982. Strikes over the 39-hour week marked a decisive turn: more than 650 firms were affected, and several hundred thousand workers struck at one time or another during those two months.

The beginning of 1982 saw also the sharpening of other forms of struggle: there were 62 occupations, an undeniable expression of the new mood of workers threatened with closures and redundancies. This was followed by sharp struggles in the car industry (Citroen, Talbot) involving the most oppressed section of the working class: the immigrant workers.

If the hopes of May 10 are to be realised, it will be in struggle against the socialist government and not through it.

JAMES Prior has succeeded in overcoming the filibustering of the Ulster Unionists and Tory backbenchers. The Northern Ireland Assembly proposed in his White Paper published earlier this year will now be elected on October 20.

This has caused an uproar amongst Loyalist politicians as the elections will be conducted on the old 12 constituencies rather than the new 17 seats recommended by the Boundary Commission.

They claim that with proportional representation this will give more seats to the minority parties such as the Catholic SDLP.

The same people are of course experts in how to manipulate constituency boundaries so as to ensure Loyalist majorities. for 50 years up to 1968, these means ensured that a Catholic majority in Derry never won control of the City Council.

More fundamentally, the borders of the Northern Ireland statelet itself were drawn in order to preserte an artificial area which would have a Protestant majority, yet still be politically and economically viable. Any Assembly Assembly So iST SO at last it's over. The month of mindless machismo culminated last Sunday in the defeat of a violent squad of German hatchet-men by a skilful and resilient Italian team.

The World Cup - like so many "international' sporting occasions - has established itself as a gladiatorial contest which focusses the most frenzied nationalism of men around the world.

Controlled as it is by a handful of established footballing nations, FIFA successfully discriminated repeatedly against the newcomers to world football. Algeria was squeezed out by a blatantly fixed game between Austria and Germany - while the Kuwaiti manager was instantly disciplined for his complaints over these double standards. based on the partition frontiers thus has an artificially created majority and a minority held within the state against its will.

Although the Unionist parties are guaranteed a majority, how much of a But in the tide of chauvinism which engulfs the occasion it seems that some on the left have gone overboard on a position of 'inverted nationalism" which quite loses touch with reality.

Socialist Challenge on June 24 carried an article by Geoff Bell and Davy Jones arguing in favour of Spanish cops beating up British football fans:

'We will then be treated to English fans rioting and the Spanish police effectively (!) dispatching the conga-dancing, anthem-singing, 'We hate Argies' thugs to the gutter from where they crawled. And that will be one of the most pleasing sights of the World Cup"

Obviously a substantial number of British fans in Spain were outright By Bruce Robinson majority is vital because of the way Prior intends to use the Assembly. Unless an Executive can be set up with the support of two-thirds of the Assembly's members (or unless it has in Prior's opinion "subreactionaries. But we must wonder what has happened to the class consciousness of any 'socialists' who can rejoice in the vicious scenes that were • shown of the armed defenders of the Spanish bourgeois state laying into British supportThe logical extension of this Socialist Challenge position would be to support or even call for police violence against virtually all British football crowds, which on average contain more than their fair share of racialists, nationalists and monarchists.

Perhaps the IMG comrades forget that the majority of active football supporters are also working class - the class they as socialists are supposed to mobilising against the capitalist state apparatus!

It should be noted that during the same week, the same Spanish cops were called into action against Polish supporters of Solidarnosc. Their flying of huge banners supporting the repressed trade union was objected to by Moscow bureaucrats during the Poland/Soviet Union match - televised live in the USSR. They telephoned FIFA - who in turn called in the Spanish police to beat up the demonstrators.

Now the World Cup -the continuation of politics by other means - is over, the Spanish cops can get back to their. primary responsibility - beating up Spanish, Basque •and Catalan workers with the kind of thoroughness the IMG comrades obviously admire. stantial cross-community support "), no powers will be devolved to the Assembly and Prior will maintain the essence of direct rule.

The Assembly will then become a mere talkingshop, which, like the 1975 constitutional convention, will eventually degenerate into the hoarse repitition of the claims of the Unionists and SDLP until finally the British government decides they have sat long enough.

There is a slim chance that, with the support of the Alliance Party, the Paisleyites and Official Unionists could stick together the required two-thirds of the remote chance and that is why the Unionists are so concerned about the boundary changes.

On the Catholic side, Provisional Sinn Fein has already said that it will fight the elections, though Zi MOSHE 'Machover, a leading anti-Zionist Israeli activist and editor of the journal 'Khamsin' , told this story to an audience in London gathered to protest against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Some time ago, an Israeli academic institutior decided to hold an international symposium on the holocaust and genocide.

At first things went well. A number of Israeli institutions agreed to participate, including the Yad Vashem Institute which is concerned exclusively with the holocaust of Jews under Nazism. Support from overseas was quickly forthcoming too.

But then things started to go wrong. To begin with the government started to pressurise the organisers to exclude from the agenda any reference to the genocide of Armenians at the hands of the Turks. The inclușion of this item Latest issue of Polish Solidarity Campaign News - articles on resistance in Poland and solidarity in Britain and abroad. it won't take any seats it wins. The SDLP is split on the issue and has not yet taken a clear position, but almost certainly will fight the elections rather than leave the field to Sinn Fein and miss the chance of being able to deal with Prior through their strength in the Assembly.

Prior's plan is a gamble, with the cards stacked so that even if he loses, the situation won't, in his view, be much worse than at the moment.

His plan will fail because there can be no "majority rule" with the support of the Catholic minority in the artificial state within which "majority rule" oppressed them for so long.

Contact: Labour Committee on Ireland, BM ox 5355, London WCIN 3XX. apparently had irritated the torturers who run Turkey today.

The Evren dictatorship is ideologically sympathetic to fascism, but then Israel doesn't have any friends in the region wh aren't..

That might have been swallowed by the organisers. But soon the conference was a dead-duck any way, for the Director of the Yad Vashem Institute withdrew his support. He didn't realise that the conference was going to be anti-semitic.

Anti-semitic? Well, yes! After all, given the breadth of the agenda, it was clear that the term holocaust was being used to cover groups of people other than the Jews who perished in the concentration camps. And to assert that the term 'holocaust" applies not only to these tragic victims but to other people IS anti-semitism!

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