[It's a hard life being the leader of…]

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It's a hard life being the leader of a Labour council. We all know the problems Ken faces with fares and Law Lords.

But on Merseyside the going's even tougher. There the courts ruled in favour of the cheap fares policy. So Jim Stuart Cole and Jack Greshman had to do the decent thing. They resigned as leader and deputy leader of the County Council, after the Labour Group had voted against their proposals to raise the fares by 14.5% in line with Heseltine.

Careers

It's a sad day for labour movement 1 › see careers of such men honour cut short.

'The transport issue is the main one that many of my colleagues are taking a stand on. Thai decision and i res ect them for it," said SI tart Cole. honouring the humble Labour group with his condescension.

'The problems have been caused by Heseltine and the House of Lords. I would love to make a stand against them, but I'm not prepared to lead my colleagues against the law ... Each councillor Supe DIDN'T we know it all along. Underneath that glittering callous exterior, beats the heart of an ordinary housewife and mum!

In a late night radio interview with Pete Murray, Margaret Thatcher explained that she found housework. "a pleasure and a relaxation these days"

Don't we all! There's nothing like a little trudge down to the supermarket, a relaxing two-hour wait for the bus and the soothing realisation that the shopping is simply sticking to his decision.

Such magnanimity! What a shame the courts couldn't have ruled Mersey's cheap fares illegal too, and thus spared the wrench of parting these two fine men from their ambitions!

bag is a little lighter this week thanks to rising prices.

Or what could be better after a hard days work trimming the public purse, to devise dainty little recipes for nettle soup, potato peelings and bones cadged from the butcher for the nonexistent dog"?

Still, when it all gets too much for you, you know where to turn ... to Supermum at No. 10 who is always ready to help out with a bit of skivvying. accusations of ballot-riggir were rich and plentiful.

It is generally acknos ledged i that O 'Hallora would never have got his se without flooding selectk conferences with extreme dubious delegates from aff iated organisations.

While leopards change their parties, they c not change their spots. B Bayliss, ex-Labour depu leader of islington count and current SDP councilk is at the centre of an inqui by the SDP into iregut ities.

It seems he delivered 1membership applications party HQ on December the closing date for eligit ity to vote. in their pos ballot selection of candidal for the May coun Head Office refused accept them since they we not accompanied by the. membership fee.

Now Bayliss and it other members, includi nearly all the councillo have called a special a: party meeting to overtu the party's new constituti and enable all SDP supp ters, including those ru. inelligible by head office. vote in the ballot.

With the elul! s experience acquired ove: years in the Labour Pe they clearly understand 7 to do when the ruk: uncongenial.

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Socialist Organiser no.76 March 11, 1982 Pr rish worker can't afford to wait for socialist policies John O'Mahony concludes his discussion of the general election in the south of Ireland PEOPLE'S Democracy candidate Bernadette McAliskey talked of socialism in her campaign literature in a much more serious way than the Provos and the IRSP did in theirs.

But still the profile she presented to the electorate was predominantly nationalist. For a united independent Ireland' was the keynote. To the electorate, what she siad will have seemed the same as what the populists of the IRSP and the Provos (who talked of socialism too) were saying.

This, for example, is the way PD labelled itself for new readers in the special issue of its paper Socialist Republic put out for the election campaign. "People's Democracy is an anti-imperialist socialist organisation which puts the unity of Ireland as the first task to be met by socialists in every part of Ireland" (quoted in full).

First national liberation, then socialism? Given that the border segments Ireland into very different areas, the focus in the South on the Northern question, to the exclusion of the class struggle in the South, inevitably means that.

Acting on a confused notion that what is happening in Ireland is 'the permanent revolution' , PD wind up having the social/political reality that they fail to adequately assess impose on them the historical opposite of the permanent revolution - a stages theory.

PD would indignantly repudiate the idea that their line now is like the old line of the Stalinists in Ireland and the successive generations of Republicans influenced by them. PD would say that in their view the national struggle is inseparable from socialism, and will grow into the socialist They never explain how, though, and the self-label above is not accidental phrasing, but a clear description of what they do and what they stand for in the political life of Ireland.

This is how the front page of Socialist Republic described what their candidate stood for and would do:

"If elected to Leinster House, Bernadette pledges herself to help lead the fight against austerity measures of both the coalition and Fianna Fail. She will show how Irish working people and their families cannot get justice in our partitioned country, how the economy is at the beck and call of the multi-nationals, the politics of high finance and the EEC.

"The fight by Irish people to take the wealth and produce of Ireland into our hands will be a central part of her campaign. Unemployment, high taxes, denial of rights to women and youth, lack of social facilities, denial of civil rights and repression will all he exposed and combatted by Bernadette. Give her your no.l vote"

Does "the politics of high finance" refer to the Irish bourgeoisie? In the context it is not at all to be taken for granted that it does.

Appeals working people' are common stock also for the Provos and the IRSP. So is the talk of the Irish people. At best PI › is here mimicking the pol mulists.

Part of the reason for the politics of PD may be that it is orienting to the Republicans.

But the work of educating and uniting the working class north and south on socialist and anti-imperialist politics can only be done by a struggle against the populism and narrow-minded nationalism of the Republicans - and above all by combatting their right wing politics (despite socialist rhetoric)

Labour Committee on Ireland: Box BM 5355, London WC1.

PROVISIONAL Sinn Fein's campaign in the 26 County election was a new departure for that organisation, encouraged by the H-Block vote last June. The initial assessment published in An Phoblacht of February 25 - 'Questions Posed' , by Kevin Burke - suggests that a recoil away from that new approach may develop.

Initial

Writing "an initial assessment of Sinn Fein's election intervention"

editorial writer Kevin Burke says that "Sinn Fein is faced with the serious task of soberly, and intelliin the south, where the working class forces primarily exist which can solve the Irish problem' If PD's politics do result trom a desire to orient to the Republicans, then it 1s the 'orientation' of the chameleon, which becomes indist inguishable from what it 'orients' to.

PD proposed to the Republicans that an anti-imperialist united front be formed, to build on the achievements of the Armagh/H-Block campaign, on the following programme:

* For a united, independent Ireland. Complete British withdrawal. Against collaboration with Britain.

* Defence of workers' living standards. Against austerity. Give working people control of the nation's wealth.

* Defence of democratic and civil rights.

* Complete opposition to imperialist alliances. No to NATO - out of the EEC.

PD's appeal for a united front was aimed at the Provos and the IRSP and not, as with the IRSP's "broad front' ', at Fianna Fail or sections of it. It is doubtful if the distinction will have come across at all clearly.

All the populist republicans use the working class angle'r but nationalism gently, assessing its structures, strategy and policy in the light of its électoral experience": His article is an honest attempt to start doing that.

He says that Sinn Fein's campaign was rushed and Sinn Fein lacked "preparedness' to carry through its recent decision to offer itself in elections.

•'There was a level of confusion in the electoral strategy" among Sinn Fein supporters, and "Sinn Fein was struggling to develop a policy to put on offer" A tendency developed for Sinn Fein to distance itself from the armed struggle in the North' -especially as they had to campaign against a government ban on their broadcasts. (The ban was eventually declared illegal by the High Court).

Difficulties arose in arguing abstention, especially as people were confused when Sinn Fein decided to take the government to court on the radio and television ban.

Sinn Fein got drawn into the "figure-swapping and suggested reforms" of the election campaign. The "defining of partition by the economic cost of partition... • was a valid point to make, but not the main one.

•The message remains the axis around which everything revolves, not class. Of central importance here is PD's de facto common front with the Republicans on placing the North at the centre while keeping the 'socialist' element at a vague and undefined level.

Bernadette McAliskey was quoted in the - sympathetic - Irish Times as saying that 'her instinct' would be to vote Haughey for Taoiseach if she got to the Dail... which is quite a thing to say when most of the 'socialist republicans' say it too, and draw conclusions like those of the IRSP (vote Fianna Fail).

It means that, whatever their intentions, PD and McAliskey are at one end of a linked 'anti-imperialist' chain at the other end of which many of the 'socialist republ icans' see... Fianna Fail.

What makes all this extremely pernicious is also the main lesson from the experience of the Republicans in the election. After 62 years the Border divides two very different Irelands. The massacre of 13 unarmed Catholics in Derry ten years ago had the power to stir some active support in the South for the Northern Catholics. So did the hunger strikes. In both cases it ebbis the crushing violent oppression of the nationalist population by a foreign army as evidenced by death, torture, imprisonment, constant harassment and so on. To support those taking up arms against this enemy is vital and it is to this support existing in the 26 counties that Sinn Fein must always first appeal" (emphasis added).

"It is imperative that the economic and social struggle is not divorced from the national struggle; that is the path of reformism. The emphasis must always be that native capitalism and British imperialism are inter-dependent and the former can only be overthrown when the latter, its prop in Ireland. is broken.

"Capitalism in the Free State thus depends on the British as its first line of defence and has come to depend on it more than most neo colonies"

Now. while this may be a convenient propaganda 'line' to link the northern question with socialism, it is nonsense as a description of reality. For example. the Southern bourgeoisie on issues like agricultural policy pursues policies in the EEC hortile to British interests. The implication that military withdrawal by Britain would be the end of the power of British capisinn Fein ed very quickly.

The population in the South is separated off, and despite the sentimental nationalism of sections ot Fianna Fail, essentially feels itself to be separated off, from the North and its problems.

Probably the only road by which the southern working class can arrive at James Connolly's republicanism now lies through redeveloping socialist conviction and building a socialist. movement which accepts its responsibilities to the oppressed in the Six Counties and can also propose class unity to the Protestant workers, to fight for a working class socialist-republican solution in Ireland.

To try to tell the southern working class that the border is the first question and the main One, is to stand no chance of bringing the Irish working class into the struggle. Only a movement that roots itself in the straightforward struggle for workers' interests in the south, and offers immediate answers there, can hope to bring the strength of the Irish working class into the struggle for a solution in the That is the lesson of the last dozen years of war in the and now again of talism - or perhaps of all capitalism, including Irish in Ireland is also nonsense.

It is not an adequately true view of the nature of modern imperialism which does not mainly depend on military occupation - or of the nature of capitalism and how to overthrow it in Ireland. It ignores the centrality of the communal antagonism in Northern Ireland.

It justifies the 'nationalism first' political focus of the Republicans - by way of transparently spurious and false definitions of the realities of Irish economic and political life.

Kevin Burke is merely restating the central error intell in Faie sinn Fein the election. T'hat is the conclusion to be drawn from the growth of Sinn Fein the Workers' Party (though it is a precise mirror-inversion of the Republicans, equally though differently one-sided).

From the "30s, at least, Republicanism has repeatedly played the role of a social lightning conductor in the South. It has attracted generations of would-be revolutionaries, propelled often by impulses of social revolt, to a nationalist movement that related only to the North, was essentially without a social programme for all Ireland (including, of course; the South), and was therefore politically sterile. The working class must wait -that was its answer to 'Connollyites'.

The decades of politically sterile physical force revolutionism in the South are one of the causes of the isolation of the Catholic revolt in the North now. Bits and pieces of socialist rhetoric grafted to the Republican movement don't change that. They only emphasise the void of serious policies and the absence of precise class commitment.

The rhetoric - no longer concerned exclusively with 'Ireland, mother Ireland' -has changed, but essentially the message is still: The of socialists in Provisional Sinn Fein - that the national question can be the main locomotive of working class revolution in Ireland.

Against the elements of 'social work' politics he sees in PSF's election campaign, against the huckstering and 'clientelism' that is dominant in 26 county politics, and against the possible notion that a socialist republic can come by parliamentary decree, he argues that the road to the socialist republic lies through 'the moulding of all the working class, including the unemployed, the youth, women, small farmers and the underprivileged in whatever way, into a definable and self-conscious class which is in a position to take into its hands and control for itself the economic wealth of the country. Without that, party political success is meaningless"' Final goal Exactly (though smali tarmers are our pr ssible allies, not part of the working class).

But how? With what slogans? With the class struggle in the south related how to the Northern Bu kr: individual working class must wait But with mass unemplo ment and poverty in ti south, the working cla cannot afford to wait.

Therefore, to mimic po tics such as were offered t the Republicans in tl southern general election to embrace and promo their political sterility. It also to abandon the strugg to win rank and file republ ans to James Connolly's po tics.

And it is to be ine ective in bringing to t oppressed Northern Irela: Catholics aid of an all-l land working class revol ionary socialist moveme that can settle with capit ism and imperialism throug out Ireland, building on t great strength of the sou ern Irish working class.

All in all, with the exc tion, despite everything, Bernadette McAliskey, 1 workers of the 26 Count were not entirely off be: to refuse the nationalist: vote. The socialist-republic programme of liberating a unifying Ireland on the ba of working class polit north and south was not option they were preseni with in this general electio The Irish working cl urgently needs to build movement that will pres this programme, and work organise republicans c socialists to fight for it both sides of the border. battles and campaigns housing, employment i so on must be engagec and fought with vigour: the final goal must alw be kept in mind, the poli isation not only of Sinn f members but of all people towards the reme of the British presence fi the North and the or throw of the capite system, North and Soutt (Emphasis added).

Burke's conclusion clearly that what needed was a har sharper version of the :

ionalist core of their ca aign, and a more gene 'elevated' and abst proclamation of the so ist goal alleged to be at end of the nationalist r That is, an intensificatio everything that showed impotence of PSF's ca aign in the 26 col No, the lesson is that national question musi viewed, assessed, and assessed in the light.

working class prograr for Ireland of which only a part, and not other way round.

Provisional Sinn Fein its political satellites I an upside down, bac front view of the pr relationship of the nati question and the figh:

workers' power. nort south, in Ireland today.

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sinn Fein ialist