FOR FOUR years before the election campaign the Labour leadership spent its time attacking its supporters, its left wing, and those engaged in a struggle against the Thatcher government. First the miners were repudiated, then Liverpool council was repudiated, then the councillors defying rate capping were repudiated, then the Wapping strikers failed to get the support they deserved.
The Labour front bench acted as mougn me main enemy contronting society was not the Thatcher government, or mass unemployment, but Militant, Sharon Atkin, or the Labour Party Black Section.
After four years of this nonsense suddeniy a high powered machine was turned on which announced that all this was wrong. That the main tasks confronting the country were to rebuna me neain service reduce unemployment, secure decent pensions, defend local government, and rebuild the inner cities.
Can anyone wonder after this why Labour failed to seriously raise its vote last week! The idea Labour can set one agenda for four years, and then set another for four weeks, is absurd. If we have a repeat of that performance in the next four years we are going to have not only tremendous defeats under the third Thatcher government but Labour is going to lose the next election as well.
The announcements coming from the right wing in the press that the task is now to push through one member, one vote' in the Labour Party, move to abolish the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, and change the system of election of the Labour Party leader are, literally, insane.
Not only are these attacks on Labour Party democracy, but they are of no interest whatsoever to the mass of the working class in Britain. If the Labour right is now going to plunge Labour into a new internal crisis this is one of the most criminal acts which even it has carried out.
The lesson which should be drawn from the election is clear. Labour must be turned outwards. The Labour Party leadership should be discussing not how it is going to turn inwards for yet another purge but how it is going to support the civil servants and teachers in the battles. with the government. Second how it is going to aid Labour councils and local government unions to resist the attacks on the inner cities that are going to be launched by the Thatcher government. Third how it is SUDUOIL CYCL group of workers that is going to be forced to defend itself.
Then it should be turning to how it is going to win back the millions of trade unionists and members of the working class whose support it has lost in the last eight years millions of women and young people whose support it never won, and the black community whose loyal support it never deserved.
Turning the labour movement out. wards to defend those who built it, who will be fighting Thatcher and whose interests Labour is supposed to serve, not turning inwards in the service of a right wing clique that sabotaged every strug. gle against Thatcher and then lost the election. That is the task of Labour ouay
Socialist Action 19 June 1987