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WHEN AND WHERE: Saturday April 3, 10.30 to 4.30, Digbeth WHEN AND WHERE: Saturday April 3, 10.30 to 4.30, Digbeth Hall, Birmingham. For details of transport to Birmingham, phone John Bloxam on 01-609 3071.

SPEAKERS: Val Dunn (victimised Bakers' Union militant), Rita Maxim (St Mary's Hospital), Ray Davies (ISTC), Steve Longshaw (Laurence Scotts), Peter Tatchell (Bermondsey CLP), Alan Thornett (TGWU, BL Cowley), lan Williams (NUR), Bobby Owens (TGWU unemployed branch, 6/612), plus report from Women's DELEGATES. and observers invited from all labour movement org anisations. Credentials £2. Cheques payable to Socialist Organiser. WORKSHOPS on: Women and the unions; black workers; Labour Party democracy and the trade unions; organising the unemployed; organising the rank and file - Broad Lefts etc; debate on officials - 'accountability' and direct election. Video 'Question of Leadership'. And in the lunchbreak - trade union caucus meetings and video on Laurence Scotts.

WRITE TO: Democracy Conference, c/o THE LABOUR movement is under severe attack -yet its official leadership has been in retreat since the Tory government was elected in May 1979.

We are about three months from the second instalment of Tory anti-union legislation becoming law. The labour movement has still not roused itself into a serious response.

We have borne blow after blow - to our wages and conditions and legal rights - with a patience and docility that would not have seemed possible even three short years ago.

1. The pressures of the slump In the first place the blows came from the extremely severe crisis of the capitalist system. The conditions of expanding capitalism which prevailed through the '50s and '60s and even much of the '70s, have given way to conditions of capitalist crisis unknown since the 1930s.

Over three million have been thrown out of work, and the numbers continue to rise.

This has led to a loss of trade union membership. It gives the employers a tremendous weapon to bludgeon workers in jobs into accepting cuts in real wages and worse conditions, and to drive women out of industry and back into the home. They have relentlessly taken their opportunities and pressed home the attack in industry after industry.

SPONSORS INCLUDE: Socialist Organiser, London Labour Brieting, Oxford Trades Coun cil, Trafford Trades Council, Basingstoke Trades Council, Oxford CATC, Laurence Scotts strike committee, Kings Cross ASLEF, CPSA British Library branch, TGWU 5/822, TGWU 5/287, TGWU 5/104, TGWU 5/293, NUPE ILEA district committee, NUPE Leicester Hospitals branch, NUJ Oxford branch, NUJ Book branch, ACTSS-APEX joint committee GEC Coventry, USDAW D96, Bradford District Labour Party, Bradford North CLP, Rochdale CLP, Carlton CLP, Upper Stoke branch Coventry LP, Peckham LPYS, Basingstoke LPYS, Coventry Labour Left, Birmingnam Labour Leit, Nottingham Labour Briefing, and in a personal capacity Reg Race MP, Les Huckfield MP and Mike Cooley The upper layers of the shop stewards' movement having become somewhat bureaucratised, the shop stewards' movement was badly placed to defend itself, and has been weakened in the conditions of extreme slump.

But the decisive role in deepening and worsening the impact of the slump on the labour movement has been that of the official leaders of the trade union movement.

The rank and file does not lack the will to struggle to defend itself, to refuse to bear the burden of the capitalist crisis. The strike figures have gone down, but a rash of limited struggles show the mettle that could have been organised in a coherent class-wide movement of resistance to letting slump devastate our wages and conditions, and even the labour movement itself.

The precondition for that movement of resistance would have been a serious, responsive, loyal official leadership, determined to fight and to organise the movement to fight. Instead we have seen the official movement continue to collaborate with the most viciouș rúling class government in recent British history.

They have refused to use the strength of the movement to resist redundancies and to fight wage-cutting pay settlements.

They have scabbed on their members and broken acts of resistance.

BL workers last November wanted to fight in a coordinated way. They were disrupted, disorganised and side tracked by their own leaders, who acted dramatically and brutally to undermine the solidarity and self-confidence of those who wanted to take on Edwardes - and the Tory government behind him.

Yet the spirit of resistance was there still, and led to a rash of uncoordinated battles throughout BL in the following four months.

Nothing shows more clearly the potential -and where the responsibility for not using it lies. 3. Tory tactics against the unions Out of those conditions, and out of the treasonous activity of the official leaders, has directly grown the second stage of the attack on the wages, standards, rights and organisation which we have built up over many decades - the deliberate, conscious government attack which is designed to take advantage of the crisis and its effects on the labour movement to bring about radical changes in the legal framework in which the labour movement operates.

Now, even more than in the period after June 1970, we face a vicious and reactionary Tory government, with the knuckledusters on for the working class. Motivated by middle-class spite and blind bourgeois economics, and driven by the desperate state of the British economy, they are making the working class pay for British capitalism's crisis and for the Tories' quack solutions.

They build on the policies of the Wilson/Callaghan governments and add their own vicious twists. Encouraged by an electoral victory which was handed to them by the right wing policies of Callaghan's government, they have moved to make the fourth attempt in a decade to shackle the trade union movement.

Where Wilson failed in 1969, and Heath in 1971-4, the Tories are now succeeding. Instead of all out assault, they move by instalments, using salami tactics to do what Wilson and Heath tried to do — to shackled the unions with laws which inhibit them from functioning as they have functioned through many decades, and once again to help the union leaders to set up as brutally efficient policemen to control the labour movement.

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2. The role of the official leadership

¡ENCEI Fightback conference CRECHE: will be available. Middle Lane, London N8.