Lee Je How Much of a 'famous Victory'?

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MAN'S impressions from the Edinburgh Festival. THE Edinburgh Festival can be divided into two sections - the official, financed by the local authority, and the fringe.

For those with an enthusjasm for the visual or performing arts, the festival is the realisation of a dream -theatre, music and painting, continuous performance from early morning until well into the night in every possible venue. since the introduction of the new licencing hours in Scotland, everything is on tap almost twenty-four hours a day.

The official festival provides a weighty helping of the sort of things one would expect.

At the Museum of Modern Art could be seen the now controversial doors to . the Edinburgh Poor House rescued by the artist Joseph Benys and since sold to the Staedtisches Museum, Moenchengladbach, 1U1 £25,000. It can at least be said in his favour that Benys is donating a substantial amount from that to help save Richard Demarco's sadly underfinanced gallery. Demarco is a unique champion of the arts, providing friendship, support and sympathy to unknown and known artists alike, and putting a truly democratic spirit into practice.

The Fringe Festival included 490 separate events. Its aim is simply to let people enjoy themselves on both sides of the footlights.

Message

Because ot this, it provides a venue for many works of a more controversial nature; and is a platform not only for performance but for the message contained in that performance.

In the events I saw, the message was what seemed most lacking.

A play called Czechmate' by G. Docherty and Bill Kinross, was an excellent performance but seemed to amount to very little in the end. Based on what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968, it told the story of a group of students at the University - among them Jan Palach, who committed suicide by setting light to himself as a protest against the Russian invasion.

Even the use of newsreel of the time, projected onto a screen at the side of the stage failed to make any more potent statement. In the end it left one wondering What, it any, was the point they were trying to make?

The Cambridge Mummers' put on a lunchtime presentation 'Across the Roaring Hills', a portrait of Ulster through a compilation of prose and poetry related to that area. Absorbing and sometimes amusing, it was well presented and well acted, but in the end it was somehow unreal, without the anger that such a celebration must lead one to feel in the light of current events in Ireland.

By more contrast in their choice of material, again a far stronger and more important comment might have been made.

Other events included Monstrous Regiment's 'Dialogue Between a Prostitute and one of her Clients' a great deal of Brecht in one form or another and several periormances of 'Woyzeck" Buchner's distressing story of the hopeless condition of a poor soldier.

Ivor Cutler, the Scottish poet, read poetry at four o'clock in the afternoon each day in the Assembly Rooms and Griff Rhys Jones ('Not the Nine O'Clock News') led a cast of five in two hours of revue. with which he is touring and performing for charity.

Scotland

There were prays about inner city deprivation (Treatment' by Jonathan Moore - New London Actors) and female emancipation (Trafford Tanzi' coming to London, should be seen - by Clare Luckham, Traverse Theatre Company), plays about gays ('Yestergays' Eric Presland, Consenting Adults in Public), and yes, plays about Scotland (Maran Sheppard Productions, 'The Jolly Beggars of Kobert Burns' and 'A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle' based on the poem by Scots Stalinist, Hugh McDiarmid).

The event which perhaps dominated all others was part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, whose chief importance must be as a much needed arena for more provocative and non-money spinning British made films.

Abel Gance's 1927 silent epic 'Napoleon' , recently restored by Kevin Brownlow (himself an undervalued name in British cinema) spun out its five and a halt hours, projected on two screens simultaneously and accompanied by a musical score written by Carl Davis and performed by the Wren Orchestra.

It may be this last fact that is responsible for the ridiculously high price of tickets both in London and Edinburgh, the cheapest being £8 and the most expensive £16. However devoted one is to the cinema and however worthwhile the experience, these prices place it well out of the range of all but the elite.

In the magazine 'Cineaste' (vol. XI, No. 2) Peter Pappao describes 'Napoleon' as a monument to fascism, which any idealisation or sympathetic depiction of the life of the general must inevitably become.

The City of Edinburgh comes under the Labour Lothian Council. The cleanliness of the streets and parks, even at festival time and the efficiency of the bus service, top rate fare 25p, were outstanding. But how long will that last now?

Information and programmes for the Festival can be obtained from the Festival Box Office, 170, High Street, Edinburgh. IT IS a rare occurrence for the bourgeois press to whip itself up into a frenzy of enthusiasm for . workers fighting for, and winning, the right to work. But this is what happened a fortnight ago when the Vanity Fair Corporation finally sold off its Lee Jeans factory near Gourock, which had been occupied by the workers since February.

In an editorial entitled "A Famous Victory" ; the Glasgow Herald praised the workers' "endurance and tenacity ... their sheer persistence and patience" whilst banner headlines in the Daily Star screamed out: «We've won, girls! -Champers end to Scots job fight"

Victory

The sit-in's result was definitely a victory for the women's fight to keep their jobs. If they had not launched the occupation back in February, then most, if not all, of the women would today be unemployed.

And it was a victory won against all the odds. Their union, the National Union of Tailor and Garment Workers, (NUTGW), has no tradition of militancy, nor was there any tradition of militancy in the factory.

Union full-timers and many lay members of the union's executive were acutely embarrassed by the whole affair and wanted to wash their hands of it, whily they eventually did when they withdrew official support at the initiative of members of the Communist Party.

It was a similar story with other trade unions and local trades councils. Blacking of VF goods at the docks themselves, not the TGWU.

The local "Support Action Committee" spawned by a collection of dull-witted bureaucrats, was neither supportive nor active.

Levy

But this is not to decry the very real support which the women received from the labour movement in general. Donations poured in from Labour Party and trade union branches, notice boards in the occupied canteen were covered with wads of letters of support, and dockers and miners put on a weekly levy in support of the women.

•But workers have won famous victories betole without being "fortunate" enough to be praised by the mass media and Tory MPs. Bringing down the Tories in 1974 or winning advances for Labour Party democracy in 1980 were likewise each a "famous victory" , though there were never any headlines like: "We won mates - Champers end to fight to

STAN CROOKE and IAN McLEISH look at the Lee Jeans victory.

ed how the bonus will be worked out - if there will be one at all.

And this is where the negative side of the victory becomes apparent.

Charters is not seen as the person who, in the years ahead, will be trying to SCrEW as much profit as possible out of the women's work. He is seen instead as an ally, someone with whom they should be co-operating to make the firm - in capitalist terms - a success.

"We feel that Mr Charters is a good businessman and with the workforce here, he will be able to make the venture a success," siad Helen Monaghan, the convenor who led the sit-in.

Her attitude is shared by the rest of the workforce. When Charters turned up at the factory a week last Wednesday (26/8/81) he was given what can only be described as a "rousing welcome" by the women.

How many workers are in the habit of giving their employer a standing ovation - especially one who recently tried to give them all the sack (Charters was VF director of operations in Britain until July of this year), and one who has not even told them what he's prepared to pay them?

Enjoy

It is precisely this attitude on the part of the women to Charters which makes it possible for the bourgeoisie to join in the celebrations about the women's "famous victory"

In one sense the workers have come out of the sit-in more militant than they went in.

"I think this fight has shown the whole of the working class what we car. achieve, that if we fight we Cait win" one of the shop stewards told Cani-lis: Organises.

But in another sense ine:

have become less minter. Wher. Vanity Far sured:-= Tr

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MAGLI IC REM was organised by the women