THE LONG-PREDICTED Tory onslaught on the trade unions has created an opportunity for the movement which we should be ready to seize with both hands.
It is not enough to go on attacking the Tebbit laws, or the new King legislation unless we are also prepared to make the testing of these laws into the occasion for a major political campaign.
No-one should be in any way surprised at the attitude adopted by the TUC General which is in line with the views that they have long expressed.
But we cannot unions which are now in the front line, which would involve us in denying repudiating whole history of struggle generations of trade unionists -and others.
What is really at stake is the whole tradition of political trade unionism, which we thought we had established when the Labour Representation committee was set up over eighty years ago, which led to the formation of the Labour Party itself, and then to the adoption of socialism in its 1918 constitution.
For it was the steady decline of political trade unionism in recent years which gave the Tories the chance that they had been waiting for, to attack unionism, and to try to break the links that it has with the Labour Party. The real test will come with the attempt to enforce ballots.
We must use that opportunity to re-create the politics of trade teachers, the NALGO. such critical importance.
Council, abandon the playing a leading role. by really understands the in the front line.
ahead.
TUC, especially composition situation.
working board unionism and to campaign for the extension of affiliation to every union, and especially those which are not now affiliated, like the civil servants and But these campaigns must be organised and led by the branches and the rank and file membership. Here is where the relevance of the Broad Left comes in, and why workplace branches are of For it can only be by strong and principled leadership at the place of work that we can hope to mount a campaign that will extend affiliations and give real political clout to the other industrial campaigns that lie ahead in the struggle to defeat the application of the present repressive laws, in which the courts are now The solidarity that we need cannot be built unless everyone significance of attacks like those made on the NGA or the NUJ, who like ASLEF in 1982 are now All social progress has always come from below and we shall be learning that lesson all over again in the weeks and months that lie An increasingly non-political.
now that the of the General the Council has been changed, may not be equipped to cope with this That is where the Broad Lefts across the whole will come into their own. We have seen the transformation of the political prospects in a number of major unions over last few years where necessary political work has actually been done. That is why the mineworkers shifted railwaymen shifted and why the POEU moved to a more radical position.
We would be well advised to ignore those supposedly left commentators for whom the present the political situation seems to offer nothing but gloom. For it looks as if some intellectual pessimists are actually engaged in trying to undermine our confidence, cover for a shift in policy towards the SDP, and some seem to be hinting that we might actually have to seek an electoral arrangeThe mass disposal.
of as a ment with the SDP.
This is just another way of re introducing non-political unionism in the guise of 'facing the harsh realities' of our 1983 defeat and we should make it ab. solutely clear that we will have nothing to do with it.
The answer does not, and cannot, lie with some cosy little elec toral arrangement, arrived at, al the top, with a handful of Labour defectors who hate the trade even more passionately than the Tory cabinet.
The real answer will be found next time round, as it was before. in solidarity with those who are threatened with legal penalties for upholding long established principles of trade unionism, and in organising a real socialist campaign which will help everyone to understand what would happen to all of us if these attacks were allowed to succeed.
work-place branches. under principled socialist leadership could strengthen the shopstewards movement and remind working people that, even with unemployment which weakens us industrially, we still have the political weapon at our This political weapon is by no means confined to local and national elections, and it will be most crucial in the development socialist policies democracy within the unions, and in the ballots which may take place on political affiliation. This is how we should be seeing the challenge of the next period, and if we take the initiative and plan accordingly, we shall rediscover our confidence as well. Report