Rallying the workers' movement against racist menace

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Coventry labour movement conference against racism. Saturday May 8, from 10.30am, at Lanchester Polytechnic, Coventry. Open to all labour movement organisations in the cuts, the fall in real wages, movement are beginning to

and most recently Thatcher's organise some sort of fightSINCE THE winding-up of the Anti Nazi League after the last general election, there has been no national anti-fascist organisation in Britain.

But despite the electoral failure of the National Front in that election and its subsequent splits into the Constitutional Movement, the British Democratic Party and the New National Front, the fascists have certainly not gone away.

On the contrary, the Tory government's policies aided the ineffective 'opposition' of the labour movement leaders, have provided fertile breeding ground for fascist and racist ideas.

Over the last year there has been a horrific growth of racist violence, with the deaths of well over 20 black people.

Even the Home Office's official statistics recognise that Asians are 50 times, and West Indians 36 times, more likely to suffer racial attacks than whites.

In an attempt to cover up the implications of this reality, the state has increased policy of criminalising black people. The recent police/media campaign against "black muggers' and 'black crime - the alarming facts, has followed attempts to intimidate the self-defence actions of black youth in cases such as the Bradford 12 and the Thornton Heath incidents in South London.

All of this has been intended to make blacks, and all workers, pay for the capitalist crisis.

Unemployment of four million, the Tory spending

cuts, the fall in real wages,

and most recently Thatcher's war drive and the bosses' rallying calls for patriotic unity, all provide favourable conditions for a rise in fascism.

Taking all this into consideration, the racist and fascist threat is even greater than in 1977 when the ANL was launched.

No response Five years later in 1982, however, there has been no real response from the Left. The SWP's enthusiasm for the ANL seems to have been redirected into the opportunist sectarianism of its very own Right to Work Campaign. The anti-fascist magazine Searchlight has, since an editorial last October calling for a new national anti-fascist link-up, made efforts to provide a forum for debate. But the response has been seriously inadequate.

There are, however, signs that sections of the labour

movement are

organise some back.

Following extensive racist and fascist activity in Coventry last year, Coventry Trades Council has organised a local labour movement conference against racism.

This will provide 1 the Coventry area labour movement with a valuable opportunity to send delegates to discuss the programme and policies required "to forge the unity in struggle necessary to smash racism and take on the economic and political structures responsible for it' The two central themes of the conference are racism in the workplace, and the unions' counter-strategy to racism in the rest of society.

Perhaps this can set an example for the labour movement elsewhere, and lead to a national delegated on racism later in the year, which would discuss the need for a labour movement anti-fascist organisation.

CIVENTEN

ARNTH-DACHT DEFENC FONTAND

Coventry area.

ORTH

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