Register: it's our kegıster: ITs oul right to resist

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John O'Mahony replies to a new argument from the witch-hunters

Labour movement conference: September 11 Fight the Tories, not the Socialists!

At Wembley Conference Centre, London All bona fide labour movement organisations re entitled to send delegates (maximum 5 pe organisation), and are invited to sponsor the conference. Credentials fee £1 per delegate.

Credentials from Tony Saunois, 23 Ironside House, Homerton Road, London E9 5PW.

Cheques payable to Labour Movement Socialist organiser no.97 hunt 19 1 LAST week's Labour Weekly carried a particularly poisonous piece by one Stuart Bell. a prospective parliamentary candidate.

Under the headline, 'Civil War Approaches Bell's message to the Labour Party is that if the rank and file organise to fight back against the impending witch-hunt and purge, then the responsibility for civil war , a perhaps decisive split in the Party, and probable victory for Thatcher in the next election will lie with... those who fight His immediate objective is to discourage support for the conference on Stptemher Il called under the slogan, 'Fight the Tories, not the Socialists'. "What purpose is it supposed to serve, other than to weaken and divide the Labour Party still further?"'!

Does Bell also oppose the witch-hunting and purging apparatus that is now being set up? Not at all. He is in favour of it, and arguing for it.

In arguing for it, he uses the sort of demagogic arguments that the Right and soft Left are using up and down the country to spread confusion and undermine the fightback. The trick is to turn round the arguments for democracy and accountability that the Left has developed, and base the case for a purge on the Left's own arguments for democracy!

In this way they hope to inhibit and confuse the softer Left, and isolate the hard Left.

Bell asks of the September 11 conference: 'Why is it being held at all? Is it to usurp the role of the Lahour Party conference? Or is it meant simply to influence the decision the conference is likely to take over the registration or otherwise of non-affiliated groups within the Labour Party?"

He knows very well it is part of the campaign to defeat the witch-hunters at the conference. What he is saying is that we have no right to organise to oppose Conference.

If Conference decides on the register, he says, 'then all members should unite around that decision, and" he adds demagogically, "indeed begin the prolongParty Conference BRIEFING For just £2 you can get this amount of space to urge delegates to back a resolution that you support, to remember an issue you feel strongly about or come to a meeting you are organising ... and its amazing how much you can cram into a space this size!

Just write to Nik Barstow, c/o 41 Ellington Street, London N7. ed attack on Tory policy with Labour's alternative policies to win the next Those " • he says, •who attend [the September 11 conference) are bringing the Labour Party closer to the irrevocable split"

Have you got that? If you try to influence Conference, or afterwards oppose a Conference decision to begin a process of driving out the Left, then you are not a democrat, you are splitting the Labour Party and sustaining Margaret Thatcher.

The effects of this right wing tripe should not be underestimated. The call for unity against the Tories is a powerful one with Party activists.

Is the Left under an obligation, according to the principles of accountability and democracy we have fought for, to comply with a Conference decision to set up the register? No, we are nut, and there is no valid comparison with the demand for compliance with majority decisions by MPs and Party leaders.

That was a demand that those privileged layers of the movement carry out democratic decisions or face removal from their positions if they refused. It was a demand for Party control over the activities at Westminster and elsewhere of its representatives. It concerned the way the Party related to the outside world.

The register concerns internal Party affairs. It is an attempt to regiment the Party rank and file, to set up the Parliamentary Labour Party and various cliques of bureaucrats as the arbiters of what can and cannot be done inside the Labour Party, the broad political party of the labour movement.

We never argued against the MPs for a totalitarian 'democracy', with the sort of rigid centralism which is implied in the register.

The ultimate logic of the register is to put the Parliamentarians and trade union bureaucrats in control of whether or not rank and file and unofficial newspapers can be published: for a newspaper requires either vested wealth or a sustaining.organisation.

• Next meeting of the Unregistered Alliance: Thursday September 2, 7.30pm at County Hall, London.

• Unregistered Alliance's proposed resolution for the September 11 conference 'Fight the Tories, not the Socialists':

'That the conference should express:

.. Total opposition to the NEC decision, the compulsory register of groups [the new proscribed list], and any disciplinary action arising out of it;

= Full support for refusal to cooperate with any inquiries into groups and orgNobody proposed …to forbid the MPs to argue for policies and to organise to win support for their policies; we demanded and demand that they should act according to Party policy in Conference Fund their capacity as representatives of the Party and of Labour voters, retaining the right within the Party and trade unions to fight for their own policies.

The point of the proposal to set up a register is the openly proclaimed intention to conduct a political purge of the Party - to gut the Left and to break the drive for democracy, accountability, and socialist policies.

No serious democrat will accept the right of even the most democratic of assemblies to make anti-democratic decisions, or feel obliged to bow down before the claim that the antidemocratic decision was taken democratically. Even bourgeois democracy includes (or at least in its vigorous youth used to include) the right to resist, to organise to fight back, and to refuse cooperation.

If the conference decides to set up the register, every democrat in the Party will have the right and the duty to continue to oppose it and to attempt, by non-cooperation or whatever tactic is appropriate, to frustrate the attempt to turn the Labour Party back into the intolerant, oppressive, and often depoliticised disgrace to the labour movement that it was for so anisations in the Party;

C Full support for those groups and organisations who have refused to 'register';

[ Full support for those CLPs who have already indicated that they will refuse to discipline or expel any member for any reason arising out of the NEC report on the Militant tendency;

• Support for the confer.

ence of Constituency Parties against the witchhunt [Saturday October 30].

• Contact: Unregistered Alliance, c/o 28 Middle Lane, London N8 8PL. long.

We have the socialist duty to resist. And we have the democratic duty too.

That is the basic argument. But there are other and important ones.

Just how democratic will a decision on the register be, if it is taken in October? As democratic as the Lahour Party conference. But that in turn, as we have argued throughout in Socialist Organiser, means: as democratic as the trade unions are.

All in all, not cratic.

The decision on the register can be carried at conference only by the block votes of the union barons. Which union conferences voted for it? Which trade union branches have discussed it? Very few indeed.

With re-selection and election of the Party leaders, the rank and file was overwhelmingly for the proposals. That lent a powerful aura of rank and file democraçy to the campaign, despite the fact that victory at Party conference depended on undemocratic unions like the T&G. A decision to set up the register at Blackpool will not be a democratic decision but the product of a bureaucratic carve-up by the union bosses, whose objective is to quell the rank and file drive for democracy and accountability before it spills over decisively into their unions.

As we have said before in Socialist Organiser, the Marxists are the easy target, the first target -but not the main target. The main target is the broad left without which there could not have been the formal advances for democracy that have been won (so far mainly on paper).

The serious socialist or supporter of Party democracy who goes along with the register because it is a 'democratic decision' is a dupe of those for whom the register is a blow in the war to quell the democratic revolt of the rank and file.

We are back to the basic lesson of the setbacks the Left has had in the last year, of which the proposed register is one result. The Labour Party will not be democratic until the unions are. We must combine the fight against the register with a campaign to democratise the unions and for a really democratic Labour Party conference.