Polish fringe meeting

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our Party get their views on such matters from Soviet Weekly.

An attempt to challenge the Standing Orders Committee at the beginning of conference over the non-invitation was unsuccessful.

Solidarity

Then, during the compositing, an amendment from Cathcart CLP which called for solidarity measures such as demonstrations, material aid, labour movement delegations to Poland, and breaking off links with the official state-run 'unions' , was lost.

• The composite presented on the final day had thus been stripped of detailed proposals for solidarily, but it did call for support for 'SOLIDARNOSC was our big chance, and possibly for many years our last chance' • That was how Artur Swiergiel, a member of the executive of Warsaw Solidarnosc, and now a representative of the Solidarity Trade Union Working Group in Britain, expressed the feelings and hopes of the vast majority of Polish people about their free trade union.

Comrade Swiergiel was speaking at the fringe meeting on Poland at the Scottish conference of the Labour Party on Saturday March 13. Despite the small attendance at this meeting, it and the lobbying of conference delegates by comrade Swiergiel and supporters of the Polish Solidarity Committees in Edinburgh and Glasgow may have been the deciding factor in swinging the Sunday session of the conference to back Solidarnosc.

The differences of view between Artur Swiergiel and Piotr Kozlowski and Marek Garztecki, two Solidarnose members who have already visited Scotland, gave some idea of the debates which must have gone on in Poland around the question of workers' control, what kind of democracy to fight for, and how to defeat the Stalinists.

Most of those present at meeting agreed that whatever disagreements they might have with individual parts of Solidarnosc's programme, they had to fight for its right to exist.

Baxter

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Socialist Organiser, Thursday 18 March, 1982 Page :

... all the way to the bank THERE are those who would say it is money well spent. After all, a man of Joe Gormley's calibre and managerial skills doesn't come cheap.

At £25,000 his salary was modest - supplemented only by his expenses claims when he went anywhere or did anything, and by his "moonlighting" directorships.

His car - at £15,000 -was by no means the top of the scale for a man of his prestige. And the house (with swimming pool) which he occupied at "peppercorn" rent was in a distinctly down-market, proletarian quarter of that old mining area of Sunbury on Thames.

Now, after a lifetime of service, Joe has to look to the future. True there is some consolation in the £30,000 lump sum hand out but the pension - a mere £10,000 a year - is distinctly on the stingy side. It seems that Joe will need to work on in retirement - taking on more directorships and advertising work - to keep himself in the style to which he has become accustomed as president of the NUM.

But at least he will keep a rouf over his head (the house is at his disposal until he dies), and the car will remind him of the times he would drive to the offices of the Daily Express to deliver his appeals for his members to "see sense" and accept the latest NCB offer.

Joe will no doubt be hoping that his declining years could be graced with recognition of the service he has rendered - a peerage, he has said, would be welcome land the attendance allowance at the House of Lords would be handy pocket money). Perhaps Margaret Thatcher will oblige.

He will be remembered as the man whom the press described as "close to his members" • They had so much in common. Joe knew what hard times were all about. Occasionally he would even have to buy his own lunch.

With his finger on the pulse of the industry and his hand on a glass of wine Joe could assess from his Thames Valley vantage point the mood of the average miner.

After he had been press-ganged into strike action in 1971-2 and 1973-4, it was Joe who recognised that beneath the veneer of mass pickets, solid votes and militant demands, miners really wanted - like he did - to live peacefully with the Heath government.

He was expressing this innermost urge of the miners when in 1974 he engaged in secret talks with Heath at Downing Street in unsuccessful attempts to save the Tories from defeat.

But in his lifetime of dedication and service Joe has perhaps been most distinguished by his closeness to the Tory press. This has shaped his relationship to his members.

Certainly since the 1974 settlement there has emerged a rare unity of purpose between Gormley and the mass media - a unity achieved only by other great statesmen like Terry Duffy, Frank Chapple, Tom Jackson Denis Healey.

Even in his parting political utterances in the NUM Gormley was providing classic Fleet Street copy: He spoke warmly, recalling his 30 years of fighting the left.

He advised his admirers in the NUM to fight on against the newly elected left wing leadership of Arthur Scargill - though generously hinting that perhaps Arthur himself will settle down into the kind of pattern expected of NUM Presidents.

Maybe there are signs he is right. His final executive meeting saw a unanimous decision to endorse his lavish pension and conditions, and a handshake from Scargill in what Gormley has described as an atmosphere of 'wonderful goodwill"

Is this the kind of atmosphere in which the much-needed democratic reforms in the NUM will be fought for by Scargill and the left? Is it a sign that Scargill will honour his pledge to break the reactionary policy by which the union's President is elected for life - and stand for regular re-election? Will 'Marxist' Arthur Scargill reduce his salary and renounce the dency perks of the PresiBe that as it may, Gormley's life-style and attitude are by no means exceptional. When we talk about the role of the union bureaucrący we are talking precisely about an undemocratic layer in the labour movement who enjoy huge material privileges more akin to those of the capitalist class than the living standards of the members they are supposed to represent.

Gormley and his ilk see the working class as more of an enemy than the Tory government with its battery of anti-union laws.

The struggle for a leadership which will fight for workers' i . class interests means precisely destroying this encrusted structure of bureaucracy, which stands as the principal obstacle to policies of class struggle and the socialist overturn of the capitalist system of crisis and slump.

That is why Socialist Organiser is sponsoring the April 3 conference on the fight for union democracy.

Those who regard Joe Gormley as good value for money are the capitalist class who have profited from his betrayals and consistent struggle against socialist politics. Is it not high time the labour movement stopped paying out to support the agents of its enemies in a life-style no worker could ever dream of attaining?

Let the case of Joe Gormley be a stark reminder of the task we face.

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