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Subscribe! The following letter was sent in answer to the piece above, which appeared in last week's Sociulist Challenge. AT THE end of your 'reply' to Andrew Flornung on the Labour Committee on Palestine conference you claim that "Socialist Challenge is in no way allied with the WRP". This is true only in the spirit of the well-known jibe at Fleet Street: "You really cannot bribe or twist/ The honest British journalist/ But seeing what, unbribed, he'll do/There's really no occasion to"

In fact you perform lickspittle service for Ted Knight while demagogically misrepresenting the issues and slandering SO.

The issue is not SO versus the WRP, bui a real labour campaign on Palestine versus disruption. You lie that only SO people walked out. So did Rates: £5 for three months, £8.75 for six months, and £16 for a year.

Rundie of five

each week: £12 for three months.

Bundle of 10: £21 for three months.

Name.

Address..

londose £ To: Socialist Organi. sex, 28 Middle Lane, Landon N8 8PL. a number of independents, including some Palestinians.

for the rest, I find your arguments impossible to follow.

You hedge and bluster, bur have to admit that the account of the tormer chair and secretary of the LCP is essenrially true and thai a lot of people came to the conference on a rent-a-crowd arrangement between Ted Knight and the WRP. "Our considIN 1978 Socialist Challenge convened a rally at the Friends Meeting House in London 'against frame-ups and slanders', to which they ered judgment is that Knight probably did mobilise Labour Herald and WRP supporters in some strength".

In fact nearly 100 such people - a majority — were non-members of the LCP there as mere voting fodder: for example, at a signal from Knight they immediately and without question switched from opposition to support for a reference to Zionism in the platform. invited the principal leaders of the world Trotskyist movement.

Its purpose? To expose and denounce the practices of the Workers' Revolutionary Party.

I taped the proceedings, and the tapes bring devastating evidence against Socialist Challenge's current view on the Labour Committee on Palestine.

Ernest Mandel of the USFI, the IMG's parent organisation, told the rally: «The WRP is a gangster org anisation led by a tinpot autocrat which has spent years slandering other revolutionaries. It is a tendency which should be treated as being extraneous to the labour movement"

Towards the end of the rally, Gerry Healy rose to speak. Tariq Ali, in the chair, refused hims The IMG leadership endorsed Tariq's decision, and in articles by John Ross described the WRP as "a vile, loathsome, and degenerate sect"

So what has changed? Why is refusal to acquiesce in a WRP takeover of the LCP now 'sectarian'?

TONY GALENTO.

Manchester.

Most of these people who, with Ted Knight's and Penny Cole's connivance, gatecrashed a controlling majority into the conference, were not members of the. Labour Party. Ar best a handful were TU delegates. Since WRPers are now even against the return of a Labour government (for fear it will provoke a military coup, it seems) it is impossible to champion the participation of the WRPers as individual members from any position which accepts the minimal electoral raison d'etre of the Labour Party.

So, what should the LCP militants there, including the SO supporters, have done? "Talked politics with them', says Socialist Challenge, refusing to 'fight sectarianism with sectarianism' or to be "organisational" But the WRPers came there under discipline, in factional combar formation, and evidently under instructions to follow Knight's lead. These - the majority, remember - were people who believe, on the say-so of Mr G.Healy and his team of professional liars who produce Newsline, that the IMG's international associates — and probably SO too - are 'controlled' by secret police and run by 'agents' Their relationship to their "party' and its Ayatollah Healy is one of intense and unreasoning emotional.commitment. They believe what they are told. To confine it to talk is to leave them control.

You say, nevertheless, that there were no important consequences. They elected a broad committee with SC people on it.

What would they have done if the walk-oui had not made it necessary to cover their tracks? But there were important consequences. They gave effective control of the LCP to Knight and Cole as its officers — people who, by your oun account, manipulated and cheated to pack the conference against the actual members of the LCP present.

In put Knight and Cole in such a position is to give them carte blanche to call in the WRP voting squad in any future dispure - and to do it more smoothly. In the circumstances you are not talking about giving Knight a prominent position, but giring him a differential franchise (this time, he had about 100 docile vntes, in effect, to everyone else's one).

Yet you present the question of the LCP officers as if it is a matter of personal pique and ambition (!) on the part of Greenstein and Hornung. Just like the Newsline.

Then, says Socialist Challenge, worse than walking out was not keeping silent about why. Andrew Hornung talked to the Guardian, and thereby ensured that the facts were not distorted. In fact the Guardian article from which you pulled the skittish diary-style introductory senrence was a precise account.

It nailed Knight as a liar over the alleged break-in (and despite that he hasn't sued). Is the Guardian, probably the paper read by most serivus labour movement activists, really the gutter press'? This is mindless demagogy which would come better from the WRP.

Your reasoning escapes me here, too. Newsline publicises Ted Knight's appearances on WRP platforms. What they did at the LCP conference could not be done in secret. Yet when we refuse to keep silent about the hi-jacking of the LCP, we border on 'red-baiting' Knight and Cole. We are fomenting a "muck-raking', irresponsible and scandalous campaign in the bourgeois press. The fault, and the source of the discrediting of the new 'LCP' is not what Knight and the WRP did, bur that we tried to tell the labour mevement the truth about it!

Isn't there, comrades, a glaring discrepancy between your attitude to Knight and the WRP (with which you are "in no way allied'!) and to us?

The facts say that the 'irresponsible and scandalous' campaign is yours. Your demagogic misrepresentation of SO, and your toadying to Knight and the WRt, is a scandal. The irresponsibilit i on one a 50, 0 hide from yourselves the truth that nothing good can be built in association with the WRP and its stooges.

Most certainly no serious campaign on Palestine will be built under control of the WRP pensioners of chauvinist and reactionary Arab governments, and their allies like Knight. Such control is god's gift to the hard-pressed Lionist propagandist. We have a duty as well as a right not to be tainted and discredited by such an association and by a campaign into which the WRP walk with controlling rights whenever Ted Knight chooses to give them the word.

A good share of the political stupidity is also yours. You rely on the arts of the lickspittle and the toady to ingratiate yourselves with people like Ted Knight and think thus 1o gain influence. This has long been the technique of your tendency in Casld politan nom to tho meini! When it leads you to covering for the WRP for the sake of relations with Knight and Livingstone, isn't it time you took a hard look at yoursélves?

You subordinate the real interests of building Palestinian solidarity to petty calculations of factional self-advancement. You engage in a conspiracy of silence about the events of the conference, and join the WRP in demagogy and slander against those of us committed to freeing Palestine solidarity work in the Labour Party from the dead hand of the WRP. How sectarian can you get?

SEAN MATGAMNĄ amongst such groups as: the unemployed, the poor and low paid, workplace, women and ethnic minorities.

Other workshops would compare experiences on the scope for action by local authorities, and discuss the improvement of trade union participation in all these activities, as well as the structures through which trade union involvement takes place.

We think a convenient date for sich a conference would be Saturday March 12 1983. We suggest that Constituency Parties reserve this date for a day conference, which might be held either in Sheffield or Nottingham.

Trade union

We suggest that Constituency organisations be invited to send, say, four delegates each, at least half of whom should be drawn from their trade union affiliates.

We would be very pleased to hear from Constituencies which would wish to be associated with this kind of initiative, and would suggest that CLPs agree to sponsor such a meeting. A steering committee for the conference, made up of sponsoring Parties, could make the detailed plans for the conference itself.

If your Constituency is prepared to act as a sponsor or you would like to be kept informed of developments, please write to Roger McGarva, Secretary of Rushcliffe Constituency Labour Party, 5 Trentside, West Bridgford, Nottingham. This address will serve as a clearing house for the different CLPs who wish to be involved, until they are able to make some permanent arrangements.

E. BULLIMORE Chairman ROGER McGARVA Secretary KEN COATES TONY SIMPSON Rushcliffe CLP