Kick the Tories

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No.57 BLACKPOOL this week will be no place for a holiday. The air is already blue with the screeches of the assembled wealthy racialists, union-bashers, warmongers, the petty and larger-scale parasites, exploiters and bankers that make up the Tory rank and file.

They want not only to oppose any retreat from the policies that have put three million on the dole and slashed working class living standards: they want more attacks on the labour movement - new anti-union laws, more racist legislation, more missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, more army violence against the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, more cop violence on the streets of Brixton.

On Friday, this seething body of 'grass roots' Tory reactionaries will be confronted by thousands of angry workers and unemployed in a mass lobby.

The fighting spirit of the Right to Work and Trans-Pennine marches is a vital component of the struggle against the Tories. Their hatred of the Tories is the hatred felt by every class conscious worker and thinking person.

But in many ways the lobby is six weeks too late. Six weeks ago in Blackpool the leaders of the labour movement assembled at the TUC congress. They agreed to continue to do precisely nothing to challenge this government which continues to wage brutal attacks on the working class.

These are the leaders who kept the steel strike isolated, and who have worked might and main to prevent any all-out confrontation with the Tories.

They have come under continuous pressure: even now, strikes, factory occupations, the St Mary's hospital occupation, and the moves towards a strike in BL show the readiness of workers to fight both on jobs and on wages.

The divided Tories can be ousted in the next period - if public sector workers are Saul mobilised alongside BL in a full-scale attack on the four per cent pay limit, and if two and a half years of pent-up anger and frustration is focused on confronting the main obstacle to such a fight - the TUC bureaucracy and its co-thinkers in the Labour Party.

In this way we can not only kick out the Tories but also prepare to fight for a genuine alternative - a workers' government that will carry out policies in the interests of the working class.

RIGH TO WO RIGH MARC TO WA Right to Work marchers set out to take their protest to the Tories Inside Eye-witness report from Solidarnosc congress centre pages

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Socialist Organiser, Thursday 1981

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