[This letter has also been sent to Socialist…]

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This letter has also been sent to Socialist Worki In Islington we are used to the right-wing local paper attacking the Labour Party and our councillors.

Its favourite tactic for doing SO is 'exposing' individual aspect of our manifesto (support for gay rights for example), claiming that is all we are interested in, and then saying 'But what good will this do for ordinary ratepayers?' We don't expect the same sort of treatment from left-wing newspapers yet on August 21 we got it from Socialist Worker. simons article ite Under Mike Labour's Left' used a very similar 'straw man' technique: it 'exposed' our manifesto commitment to decentralisation of council services, claimed it was our only answer to the government's attacks, and then said, but what good will this do tenants and council workers?' A few individual councillors may see decentralisation as a way to avoid a fight with the Government. But a joint meeting of Islington Labour Party delegates and our councillors decided in July to mount a major campaign from September to carry council rents rates down - regardless of what the Government says.

Yes, there is talk of a 40% rate rise - from the right wing in the Labour Party. But it is the left wingers in the Labour Party who are leading the fight to stop the Council from following that cop-out road that was taken by Lambeth and Lothian.

Because we do understand that it is vital to gel che full support of the council's workers for such a fight, we have committed the council to supporting the national wage claims of the local authority unions in this year's pay rounds. We want to break the idea that Labour councillors should good employers, albeit instead be bodies fighting on the side of the working class.

But, that said, the view that it is 'ironic' that council workers 'will have to organise and fight' whether there's a left-wing Labour or an SDP council just misunderstands the basic Issue. Left-wing councils would mean nothing at all if there was not class struggle and it would be the most naive 'municipal socialist' view to think that the class struggle will stop in one borough if there is a left-wing council. Like many other Labour Party members who work for Islington, I know that it is up to us, the workers, to organise and fight if we want the council to follow the right road.

At least, as Labour Party activists, that is what we are trying to do; trying to turn the Labour Party outwards from resolutionmongering to the real fight. So tar, though you would never have guessed it from Mike Simons' article, we are winning. But Socialist Worker seems content to sit on the sidelines and passively predict that it will all go rotten.

You may, in the end, be proved right, but no-one will thank you for it unless you join in with the fight that's going on now instead of setting up straw men. Yours fraternally, Nik Barstow, Chair Islington Labour Parties. Dear S.0,