LAST WEEK Neil Kinnock attempted to modify his previous position on liberty, democracy, and obeying the law.
At the ference Kinnock announced he opposed 'all' defiance of the law. Now, under the pressure of mass opposition in the labour movement to the attack of the High Court on the NUM, he has attempted to introduce a distinction between breaking the law and defying the civil law.
According to Kinnock, speaking on Thursday on World at One, criminal law must be obeyed under al! circumstances. But civil law is difTerenl aneane use oruie aw auas! people does not oblige those people to bend down before the law and accept the civil rule of a court.' Kinnock was even driven, at last, Be vs vocvzc 'It has always been the case in Britain that people will . undertake action in civil cases knowing that they invoke the penalty of the law', 'Many of the advances of English liberty have come as a consequence of people being willing to take those consequences. ' But Kinnock still refused to say the truth. That almost all major advances in liberty, both in Britain and internationally, have been through a willingness to defy the law. That violence, also, cannot be condemned but that it is just to meet the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed. That there are principles and rights which stand above the so-called 'rule of law' rule of law that in many countries, at many times, has been perpetrate the most toul crimes and injustices.
Was it just to obey the law against Jews in Hitlerite Germany? against women in Victorian Britain? Or against blacks in the deep south of the United States?
And if anyone does not choose to compare the trade unions to these rights, let us state a few home truths.
The labour movement, above all trade unions, are the foundation democracy in Margaret Thatcher, now by some theorists of the Labour Coordinating Committee Geoff Hodgson, claim that capitalism and markets which defend freedom. But the facts show otherwise.
concriminal and that, fight is workers, build that labour movement. won South Africa utilised to keep alive, unions.
Or has always parties Anyone wno movement the echoed form open to them SUCI it is can, witn any sophistical Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst showed just how fundamental that and just what sacrifices faced with the tanks of Jaruselski, are prepared to make to This question of the freedom and rights of the labour movement exists where black workers, including black miners, have been openly engaged for 10 years in the fight to create their own unions. In the dictatorships of Latin America workers have fought under conditions of enormous repression and torture to and rebuild, their trade The first drive of every fascist dictatorship, such as Hitler or Mussolini, been to suppress and eliminate the trade unions - and the French Daseo on them accepts the legal shackles and attacks on the labour all opponicil of democratic rights — and that includes the leader of the Labour Party. This is the truth the leadership of the Labour Party should have been proclaiming from every television screen and platBut how is it that Neil Kinnock credibility, refuse to back the NUM in its confrontation with the law, and now try to introduce distinctions between breaking the civil and criminal law? How can he spend his time, with any proclaiming complete nonsense such as that derers? always 'the law will have its way', that successfully break the lence, rejects It is because, despite Loe the rhetoric, Neil Kinnock, and those retuse to base themselves on the real lessons of the struggle for democracy - let alone IaLOU How was even the most elementary step to democracy in Britain, the abolition of the absolute monarchy achieved? It was acmevea by ultimate form of violence, by civil war. The side of parliament triumphed through raising an army, crushing the tyranny of Charles I, and finally executing their monaren. violence justified or unjustified? Would it have been right to continue uve mmder an dosomulc monarchy oi was it not the right and duty of people to take up armsand crush the violence of Charles I?
And what about the establishment of elementary political democracy in other countries? Was the United States right to create itself by taking up arms and throwing out the British? Was the revolution an 'error'? wasn't it right to fight for the birth of the United States, and for liberty in France, both with violence and in a way that was totally 'against the law"?
If anyone believes that such questions are solely issües of the past let them take just some of the events of the present dav. How manv leaders of independent countries in Africa and Asia were once locked up in jail by the British (includng by Labour governments to their shame) for fighting gainst the 'empire on which the su lever set'? Were the Sandinistas rigl in Nicaragua to take up guns to fight -Somoza? And do we urge solely 'peaceful' struggle against the arms of the South African racists and murAnyone who condemns that viotraitor not simply to socialism but t most elementary human mignl.
that exists In world. Because laws exist to fit people and human rights, and not people and human rights to fit laws. The condemby Neil Kinnock violence' is just rubbish.
what about when political democracy is established although under capitalism there is no democracy in the economic or social sphere and only the democracy even in politics. necessary to consider the history of the fight for the right to vote to see the lessons, and the truth. almost too well known to need repeating The passing of the first extension of the right to vote, the 1832 Reform Act, was secured through the pressure of massive rioting throughout Britain and was itself inspired revolutions of 1830 in Europe and the threat of rebellion in Ireland.
In Bristol workers seized the city. Nottingham castle was burned. Derby jail was sacked. Mobs in London attacked public buildings and the king's carriage.
Was all this violence to be 'abhorred'? Or wasn't it the means whereby the first tiny extension of the right to vote was secured? Do we place on an equal level those who took to the streets for the right to vote and the troops who 13 years earlier, at Peterloo, had cut down those demanding it?
Not all violence and lawlessness is to be 'abhorred' phrase. were heroes of democracy. who attacked the crowd at Peterloo were murderers. That is how history remembers them and how it should remember them. The rioters of 1832 were the forebears of the movement Neil Kinnock now claims to lead that And what about Chartism? The movement that every single political right in Britain. Chartism was not simply a petition. Chartism staged the last armed insurrection in Britain -armed miners, under the leadership of John Frost, fought troops. Furthermore in 1824 Chartists attempted the first general strike in history.
formal most limited It is only The story is by the Suffragettes who are rightly, regarded as heroes by history and those who enforced the law against them who are remembered as bigots and enemies of When it comes to the trade unions the record is long. It should be known to every person in the labour movement - and is known to Kinnock.
The first known attempt to form c trade union was six hundred years ago - in riorence in 134). How ao we know this? Because the court records show that the wool comber who made the attempt was sentenced to death b' the courts! Anti-trade union legislation is scarcely an invention of Norman Tebbitt and Margaret Thatcher In Britain as early as 1633 troops