Bureaucracy versus activists

Scan page 2

with telling people that 12 candidates should be stood in the trade union section for 12 seats, and a maximum of 5 candidates should stand in the women's section until such time as that section changes its voting pattern to election by their own conference.

In the CLP section a slate of seven was agreed and it was almost 100% successful. That's a lesson for the other sections.

Les Huckfield IT IS a disastrous day for socialists, and a victory for the Right. Despite Michael Foot's and Jim Mortimer's promise that they can limit the number of expulsions, the new elections to the NEC will now mean the witch-hunt is difficult to stop.

In short, Michael Foot no longer has a majority on the NEC that he can rely on. It looks as though there is a majority for Healey.

Brown MP

IT WAS like the clash of metal on metal as two gears clash. At the Labour Party conference this week the trade union block vote turned the party sharp right, as the constituency Labour Parties swung more firmly left.

The register - under which no-one can organise for a point of view in the Labour Party without the prior approval of the party tops - went through by 5,173,000 to 1,565,000. Together with NUPE, "UCATT, SOGAT 82, TASS, and a few other unions, the grat majority of the constituencies voted In the National Executive elections, the Left gained in the constituency section and the Right swept the board elsewhere.

Division

The division is not between constituency activists and trade union activists, but •between rank-and-file activists of all sorts Bang At Blackpool Labour activists have finally come up with a bang against the fundamental problem of all the victories for the Left since 1979: that the Labour Party cannot be seriously transformed without transforming the unions.

Alliance

The alliance between block votes and rank-and-file revolt which won mandatory re-selection and other reforms was always unstable. Last year the backlash began. We wrote then: 'This year's 'counter-revolution' is like last year's revolution' - a prematurely definite description of something still unshaped and unfinished.' The counter-revolution is not yet an accomplished fact. But it has its troops mobilised, formed into columns, and marching into battle.

The Left still has positions of strength. Even the most stony-faced witchhunter can be given pause by the fact that the Labour Party can hardly hope to operate well and win wlections without constituency activists. The right wing want a purge which will leave the labour Party bloodless and docile - but they can't push it through unless weakness by the constituencies allows them to do.

The CLPs' fight against expulsions will be organised from the conference on October 30. And at the same time the Left needs to hit back at the Right 'from the rear' -through the trade union rank and file.

One veteran Labour activist told us at Blackpool: "The right wing think that they are getting in the saddle. But it's not on this time. Not with three million unemployed. That's the other fact that the Left must build on -that the Right has no answers to the escalating decay of British capitalism, and can lead the labour movement only to disaster.

They can offer only a re-run of the Wilson/ Callaghan government. Only a couple of weeks after the TUC voted down any wage controls under capitalism, Michael Foot was clearly trying to refloat the Social Contract -as well as edging away from unilateral nuclear disarmament.

The working class will fight back - it has no choice. And the Left must be ready to lead that fight. A veteran Labour woman activist YESTERDAY I could have wept. I've been in the party since I was knee high, and I was around when it tried to expel Nye Bevan. Then it was as much a crime to sell Tribune as it is to sell Militant today. Then the right wing was in command. Where did that get us? 13 years in the wilderness. I think to myself: not again! After that all the young people left us. We will probably survive that vote, but what they did to Joan • Maynard today was something else. The bloke from Brighton yesterday was right. Nobody says on unemployment.

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

the doorstep, 'What about Militant?' They ask about