Know Your Rights!!

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RECENILY mice Class Fighter supporters in Ware LPYS were told by the Militant caucus (not even by the YS as a whole) that since Class Fighter is a minority in the YS they are not allowed to sell the paper!

In fact there are no rules in the YS about what socialist papers members can or can't sell. And that is as it should be.

The Militant majority often seems to want to run the YS as a disciplined centralist organisation, where the major condition of membership is agreement well milane s editorai une. And since that way of running the YS has no basis in the rules, they try to enforce it by browbeating or wearing down new YS members.

In reality all currents of working class opinion have the unconditional right to express themselves in the YS.

Class Fighter supporters are determined not to tolerate any repetition of such tactics. The YS is our organisation just as much as Militant's.

CARRAS

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.TUC CONFERENCE- Socialist Organiser, Thursday 27 August. 1981 Page ::

A WIDENING GULF ahatec NUPE:

Brighton 1478 police harass Right to Work lobby of TUC THE TUC Congress has HE TUC Congress has never been noted for its ever been noted for its spirited and spontaneous, ›irited and spontaneous, straight-from-the-shoulder raight-from-the-shoulder debates.

The endless stilted speeches ате m generally drafted by research departments. They are delivered by General Secretaries or handpicked hacks to an audience typically composed of middle aged, white, corpulent, male, time-servers who always seem to be a million miles from the realities of the class struggle.

But since Thatcher came to office, the stodginess of the TUC has lapsed further and further into complete somnolence.

Even verbal references to the Tories have been largely weeded out of the bland and blithely irrelevant motions passed up from snoozing National Executive Councils.

Breaking the silence this year as on previous occasions is the lone voice of the Bakers Union, which is the only one to call for a joint TUC/Labour Party campaign which:

"should clearly aim to bring down the Tory government and bring to power a Labour Government pledged to the socialist policies contained in clause 4 part 4 of the Labour Party Constitution."

Although the Bakers' Union signally fails to attach any concrete form to their call for a "campaign" or to make specific the "socialist policies" they seek, the resolution will stand as an embarrassment to the TUC bureaucrats, and there will as usual be pressure for it to be withdrawn.

Elsewhere on the Preliminary Agenda there is little that could cause offence to even the most rabid right Moss Evans - bellows Grantham leadership of APEX, for instance, emerges as an advocate of its own variety of the supposedly "left wing" Alternative Economic Strategy - complete with APEX calls for "selective import controls" a "revitalised NEB". , and "a National Investment Bank".

Public sector unions are conspicuously muted in their demands. NUPE calls vaguely on:

"all affiliated unions to unite in a campaign to defend the welfare state and the public services."

Yet NUPE does not explain what this campaign should consist of - or why no such action has yet been mounted while many public services have been decimated by the Tories.

Elsewhere there are warnings that union chiefs are contemplating another round of tutile and demoral- round of tutile ising selective strikes over ising selective public sector public sector pay, in notion again tabled by motion again NUPE:

"Congress therefore instructs the General Council to develop a coordinated campaign, which will include the use of industrial action, to unite all public sector unions in opposition to the Government's policies."

But possibly the most pathetic of the public sector resolutions is that from the National Union of Tcachers on the demolition of the education service by the Tories.

It rambles on for four wordy paragraphs, "condemning" "deploring" and "regarding as morally indefensible" before proposing - no action at all against the government or local councils!

There are few constructive notes in an agenda which includes only one resolution - (and that a reactionary endorsement of current policy) - on Ireland, and only three on nuclear disarmament.

wi shutte Fisher - poses David Basnett puckers The FBU however spell out a correct demand for unions to recrull unemployed workers and youth, and for unemployed centres to be staffed by:

"democratically-elected unemployed officers, controlled by the unemployed themselves and funded by trade union donations."

And the Society of Civil and Public Servants takes a stand opposed to military training for youth, opposed to the "WEEP" work exper ience programme, and drawing attention to the special hardship of young women and black unemployed But in general the TUC agenda exhibits only the widening gult that separates the top level of the union bureaucracy from the problems. struggles, debates and aspirations of the working class on the shop floor. the estates and the dole queues.

Seldom has the need for a new, revolutionary leadership in the British workers' movement been more starkly expressed. JOHN LISTER reviews the TUC agenda