Where we stand

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* Organise the left to beat back the Tories' attacks! No to attacks on union rights; defend the picket-line; no state interference in our unions! No to any wage curbs. Labour must support all struggles for better living standards and * Wage rises should at the very least keep up with price increases. For a price index calculated by working class organisations, as the basis for clauses in all wage agreements to provide automatic monthly rises in line with the true cost of living for the working class. The same inflation-proofing should apply to state benefits, grants and pensions. * Fight for improvements in the social services, and against cuts. Protection for those services against inflation by automatic inflation-proofing of expenditure. For occupations and supporting strike action to defend jobs and services. * End unemployment. Cut hours, not jobs. Fight for a 35 hour week and an end to overtime. Demand work-sharing without loss of pay. Organise the unemployed - campaign for a programme of useful public works to create new jobs * Defend all jobs! Open the books of those firms that threaten closure or redundancies, along with those of their suppliers and bankers, to elected trade union committees. For occupation and blacking action to halt the closures. For nationalisation without compensation under workers' * Make the bosses pay, not the working class. Millions for hospitals, not a penny for 'defence'! Nationalise the banks and financial institutions, without compensation. End the interest burden on council housing and other public services. * Scrap all immigration controls. Race is not a problem:

Organised!

racism is. The labour movement must mobilise to drive the fescists off the streets. Purge racists from positions in the labour movement. Organise full support for black self* The capitalist police are an enemy for the working class.

Support all demands to weaken them as a bosses' striking force: dissolution of special squads (SPG, Special Branch, * Free abortion on demand. Women's equal right to work and full equality for women. Defend and extend free state * Against attacks on gays by the state: abolish all laws which discriminate against lesbians and gay men; for the right of the gay community to organise and affirm their stand publicly. * Tbe Irish people — as a whole - should have the right to determine their own future. Get the British troops out now!

Repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Political status for Irish Republican prisoners as a matter of urgency. If you agree with what we have to * The black working people of South Africa should get full say, you can help. Become a supportsupport from the British labour movement for their strikes, struggles and armed combat azainst the white supremacist er of the Socialist Organiser Alliance -regime. South African goods and services should be blacked. groups are established in most large * It is essential to achieve the fullest democracy in the labour for more information, write at once * The chaos, waste, human suffering and misery of capitalism now - in Britain and throughout the world - show the urgent need to establish rational, democratic, luman control over the economy, to make the decisive sectors of industry social property, under workers' control. The strength of the labour movement lies in the rank and file. Our perspective must be working class action to raze the capitalist system down to its foundations, and to put a working class socialist alternative in its place — rather than having our representatives run the system and waiting for crumbs from the table • YORKSHIRE AND NORTH-EAST Durham. SO is sold at the Community Co-op, New Elvet.

York. Contact: 796027. SO is sold at Coney St on Saturday mornings, at the Community Bookshop, and outside the dole office most mornings.

Leeds. Contact Garth Frankland 623322. SO is sold at Books and Corner Books, Woodhouse Lane. Bradford. Contact Barry Turner 636994. SO is sold at the Starry Plough bookshop.

Sheffield. Meets every other Wednesday, 7.30pm at the Brown Cow, The Wicker. SO is sold outsidé conditions. for the unemployed.

management.

* Freeze rents and rates.

defence. Build workers' defence squads.

MI5, etc.), public accountability, etc.

nursery and childeare provision. paid the average for the trade. of the bankers and the bosses. the Wedge Co-op, High St.

Meets on first and last Thursday of the month, 7.30 at the 'Queen', Primrose Hill St, Hillfields.

Leicester. Contact Phil, 857908. SO is sold outside Supasave (Friday 4.30 to 6), the Co-op, Narborough Rd (Saturday 11-12.30), and at Blackthorne Books, High St.

Northampton. Meets every other Monday. Next meeting April 18. For details contact 713606.

Nottingham. Meets every Friday, 7.30pm at the International Community Centre, 61b Mansfield Rd. SO is sold outside the Victoria Centre (Saturday 11 to 1) and at the Mushroom Bookshop, Heathcote St.

Get Socialist Organiser is not just a We fight to organise workers struggle for a new leadership labour movement.

towns.

To 'Get Organised' in the fight, us at 28 Middle Lane, London N8.

Name meeting May 16: Is a Socialist Revolution possible in Britain? All meetings 7.30 Chute House.

North-West London. Readers' meetings first Sunday of month. Phone Mick, 624 1931, for details. SO is sold at Kilburn Books. Islington. Next meeting: Sunday April 10, 8pm, Thornhill Neighbourhood Project, Orkney House, Caledonian Rd/Copenhagen St. Bob Sutcliffe on 'Marx's 'Capital' and capitalism today". For childcare phone Nik, 278 1341. Haringey. Contact 802 0771 or 348 5941. Meets every other Thursday, 7.30, paper. in the in the • LONDON 7.30pm, 'Why the working class is a revolutionary class • Phone lan, 609 3071, for details.

Hounslow. SO is sold outside All Saints Church, Hounslow High St, Saturdays 10.30 to 12. Next meeting: Sunday April 10, 'The Transitional Programme'. Ask sellers for details.

Hackney. Contact Andrew Horning, 28 Carlton Mansions, Holmleigh Rd, N16. SO is sold at the following London bookshops: Colletts, Central Books, The Other Bookshop, Bookmarks, Bookplace (Peckham Rd, SE15), Kilburn Books, and Reading Matters (Wood Green Shopping Centre).

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Britain out of Ireland; self-determination for t people. Demonstration sponsored by Labour ( on Ireland and others, Saturday May 7, 1pm f CLIVE Soley, deputy Labour land, has beenan outspokenad Ireland is the only real solutic now official Labour policy.

Soley's chief, Labour's Secretary -of-State -for- Northern -Ireland-in-waiting, is Don Concannon: Concannon who, like the man in the Christian myth who offered the ailing and parched Jews a drink of vinegar, visited dying hunger striker Bobby Sands to tell him that the British Labour Party was supporting Margaret Thatcher's refusal to make concessions to the IRA prisoners; Concannon who helped organise a wild mob of chauvinists, racists and reactionaries in Mansfield to counter a peaceful Troops Out demonstration in his constituency during the hunger strike; Concannon, who was Roy Mason's deputy in Northern Ireland during the last Labour government, when the policy was one of heavy repression of the Catholic community.

Concannon would not carry much conviction as advocate of the united Ireland policy of Labour conference. So there is a division of labour - with Soley acting as spokesperson for the Labour Party on Northern Ireland, while Concannon preserves himself to do business as. before if Labour wins the next After all, talk about a united Ireland is not all that new. Back in 1971 Labour leader Harold Wilson put forward a 15-year plan for movement to a united İreland. Even Tory prime minister Edward Heath was reliably reported (by the Irish Times) to have told 26 Counties prime minister Jack Lynch in late 1970 that if a sufficient number of Northern Ireland people wanted a united Ireland, Britain would do everything it could to help the process along.

And of course it was the British state in the mid '60s which triggered the (mainly) Catholic civil rights movement and, indirectly, the Orange backlash which- destabilising the Six County state, destroying the 50 year old Protestant government in Belfast, and leading to British direct rule.

All 'initiatives' attempts to rood intentions, Park (Speakers' Corner]. spokesperson on Northern Irevocate of the view that a united in to the war in Ireland. This is In Socialist Organiser nos. 123-4 we carr ied an interview witl Labour Northern Ire land spokesperson Clive Soley. Here th interviewers comment on Soley's arguments.

reform the Six County state DI, in collaboration with 26 Cour ity governments, to restructure t ihe Irish state system (by the Cor incil of Ireland of the mid-'7l Os) have foundered on rocky Prot estant unmoveability. Comr ritment - even if only 'for now' to maintain the partition of I reland and to seek solutions witl hin the artificial Six County ent ¡ity has left only one option open .to British governments, Labour Tory, once the attempts reform had been smashed or neutralised by the opposition . of the Protestant community 8 und its built-in majority - to b eat down the Catholics and try to defeat their drive to break | the Six County framework.

Commitment to the Six Cor unties, and options within it, ¿ all that inexorably flowed fr 'om that commitment, turned the Labour government in the m rid1970s into a government of j ailers of the Catholics. It gave the army - which was reluctant i, if it did not refuse outright, to act against the Protestant g ¡eneral strike - its head in cond lucting mass terror against the Catholics. House-wrecking ' was one of the mildest techniques Under Rees and Mason, in the three years after the Ora nge general strike brought down the power-sharing executive in May 1974, about 70,000 Cath lolic homes were raided by the Ar my.

There are 400,000 househ olds in the whole of the Six Counti ies.

The Labour government also did dirty deals in the Hous e of Commons with the Ora inge Unionist bigots there. Mie! hael Foot was the wheeler-dealer MAY One Irish 'ommittee 'om Hyde. INI FOUGHT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS?

AFTER POLICE ; PERTURY,SENTENCE IN A DIPLOCK go-between.

All in all, the last Labour government had a worse record on its treatment of the Catholics than Heath's Tory government, even counting Bloody Sunday (when 13 unarmed Catholics were shot down in Derry on January 30 1972). By removing political status, it set in motion the H-Block protest movement which culminated in the tragedy of ten dead hunger-strikers, presided over by Mrs Thatcher.

There is no reason why we should trust the Labour Party establishment one inch where Ireland is concerned.

Consent

Nevertheless Soley said some important things when we interviewed him. He talked of "clear commitment to a united Ireland" (by consent). "Consent' , he said, "must not mean a veto on political progress. We would legislate in a way that would lead people to the conclusion that a united Ireland was in their best interests"

Labour's policy would mean:

saying something you've never said before to the Unionists: it's not just that we want to BORN IN A FENIAN GHETTO?.

THAT'S A POLITICAL ACT!

SPECIAL COURTS TO DEAL WITH POLITICAL PEOPLE!: get things better in Northern Ireland. We are saying to you that we don't want you in the UK any more, we want you in a united Ireland. That is a very different message going out to the Unionists than has gone out Dublin 'What we'll do is first have talks with the Dublin government... to set up new economic and social institutions, and we do not allow the Protestants to veto that"

"In effect what I'm saying is: Yes, we are giving a strong commitment to get out. We are not setting a date". To the question, on what definition are the IRA straightforward criminals, he said: 'They're not. Of course they're political. I'm not disputing that for a moment". (''But if we lock them up", he added, "'that doesn't mean they should be treated differently... ').

On talks with Sinn Fein, he said: "People who have not broken the law are people who, at the end of the day, you can't refuse to talk to"

'What I'm after is the vast majority of the people prepared THAT'S A POLITICAL ACT!

AND SOME YEARS LATER, TORTURED IN A POLICE (ELL"..

WELL, HE'S POLITICAL, YOU SEE!

BUT WHEN THE DOOR SLAMS ON THE PRISON CELL....

POLITICAL PRISONER?!

OH, NO! JUST ANOTHER CRIMINAL!!

FROM 'CORMAC STRIKES BACK' to enter into a united Ireland" 'I don't blame [the N.I. Catholics] for being alienated ... it's very difficult to reverse that quickly... but in the meantime we must stick with the main objective of a united Ireland because all of these things are symptoms of the problem. The problem is the Border"

While counterposing a united Ireland to immediate self-determination ('Troops Out'), Soley concedes almost the whole moral and political case for it. But, he says, a certain economic and political framework must be created first. He pledges Labour to create it.

Logical

Though he refuses to accept it, he concedes the entire case for political status - "of course they're political". He needs to find other grounds for refusing to face the logical conclusion: spurious . and far-fetched grounds, we suggest.

These points would be a great step forward if they came to be accepted in the broad labour movement: those who accepted them would not be likely to take refuge, as Soley does, in Socialist Organiser no.126 ive Soley evasions.

One might question the realism of this or that aspect of Soley's belief that the framework to usher the Protestants towards a united Ireland can be legislated piecemeal. No socialist can have any confidence in a policy to be supervised by the wretched Concannon. But if we assume both the practicality and the sincerity of the approach, and a will to carry out the policy Soley advocates, it is still a certainty that it would fai.

Soley says in effect that a Labour government would have to scrap its plans if Orange opposition became powerful enough. But opposition will be extremely powerful. Ian Paisley's claim that he has now become 'the leader of the Protestant people" is a long way from being just bombast.

Soley stakes everything on "political skill' to avoid a confrontation. That is to rely on "political skill' to square the circle.

Miracles

And if the skill fails to work miracles? The policy will have to be scrapped.

Given also Labour's commitment to wait on a majority within the Six Counties, which has a built-in majority hostile to any moves towards a united Ireland, what we have from Soley is not so much a serious commitment to a united Ireland, as a commitment in advance to surrender to those who are fanatically opposed to it.

Soley commits himself in advance to bow before the Protestants if he cannot outmanoeuvre them. Like Martin Luther he says: 'Here I stand' • But he is careful to add: 'I can't be sure I won't have to move' With a policy like that, the one thing you can be sure of is that you probably will move. And the pressure will not come only from the Protestant community. I will come from sections of the British state apparatus - the sort of people whose reluctance to stand up to the Orange strike in 1974 was a factor in Harold Wilson's decision to surrender to it.

full-scale coercion of the Protestants into a united Ireland would be neither sensible nor practical: and it would not lead to a united Ireland. Commitment to stand up to the Orange bigots is not the same thing, and it is essential.

Soley is a big step forward for an official Labour spokesperson on Northern Ireland. Some of the things he says are important éven should they prove no more than passing comments -they can help change the climate in the labour movement.

It's plain, however, that we cannot rely on the official Labour Party. That's why it's important that we break away from the paralysis on Ireland that has gripped the Left in the last decade. We must build a powerful mass labour movement campaign in support of the Catholics of Northern Ireland, and for a united Ireland with as much autonomy for the Northern Ireland Protestant community with.

in it as is compatible with the democratic rights of the Irish people.

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EMBURGH & EAST OF SCOTLAU - DISTRICT no.126 April Na nal Unionof Ra Twayn REAS OF THE WOR

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John O'Mahony and Jonathan Hammond reply to Cl A division of Labour on the Irish question

A policy based on commit- ment to, and relying mainly on,