Better Dead Than Red

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Healey wields the axe - and Kinnock says: submit for the sake of democracy -Women demand a voice THIS YEAR's Women's ference - to be debated as section. the YS elects its that at looot ono LINE trade union bureaucrats, whose block votes control Party conference, and the badly scared Parliamentary This puts tremendous power in the hands of the labour movement establishment. It implies the power to licence all Labour Party rank and file publications: for a newspaper cannot be published without a sustaining network of supporters, unless it has wealthy patrons.

They say that this is not a return to the proscribed list. They are right. It is potentially much worse.

Today it is the 'extremists'. Later it will be bodies like the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. It is not quite 20 years since attempts were made by Party leaders to expel THIS YEAR's Women's Conference marked a turning point for women in the Labour Party. Its decisions to support demands for direct access to forums of power within the party -the Annual Conference and the National Executive Committee - have set the stage for a major debate on the Women's Organisation on Monday afternoon of Conference week.

At the heart of the debate will be twenty-six resolutions calling for five major changes to the women's organisation.

The first, and politically most significant, demand is for the right of Women's Conference to submit five resolutions to Annual ConBertrand Russell for his CND activities.

Something like 300 parties are said to oppose the register. But the union block vote will decide the issue. If they win they will claim that democracy demands acceptance of the decision. With an appeal to the Left's own arguments for democracy, smart-alecs like Kinnock are trying to bamboozle and split us.

In fact a decision for the register will have very bad democratic credentials. A majority of the rank and file in the CLPs will oppose the register: in contrast, the rank and file was overwhelmingly for the democratic reforms.

The block votes of mainly undemocratic unions backed up the rank and file on democracy in 1980 and ference -of right.

The demand - agreed by an overwhelming majority at Women's Conference - has by far the broadest support and is contained in sixteen of the resolutions submitted for debate.

The second major demand is for the Women's Section of the National Executive Committee (NEC) to be elected by, and accountable to, the Women's Conference. At present the Women's Section is the only section not elected by its own 'constituency': while the trade unions elect their representatives to the trade union section, the socialist societies elect their 1981: now they will be used to steamroller and flatten rank and file opposition to the new drive for an authoritarian Labour Party.

Right and duty

In any case we have a democratic right and a socialist duty to resist attack on the basic rights of the Party rank and file. Reselection and the other democratic reforms were about forcing people to follow Party policy in their function as Party representatives; this is about the right of Labour Party members to organise and fight for their ideas within the broad mass party of the trade union movement. There is no valid comparison.

If they win at conference, we must mount a campaign section, the YS elects its representative at the YS Conference and CLP's elect representatives to the consitituency section, women remain disenfranchised. Their section, elected by the Conference as a whole, is in effect elected by trade union bloc votes.

The result is that little consideration is given to the interests of the 'electorate' for this section -women - and to their need to 'stengthen the fight for a fundamental shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families', according to Norwich South CLP.

Third is the demand TT of determined and sustained resistance. Every single expulsion must be fought. Parties must defend the right of Militant supporters to continue to distribute their paper within the Party. The rank and file of the unions must be mobilised against the bureaucrats.

We must explain what Foot's war on the socialists implies for the next Labour government. Programme 82 spells it out plainly. It is a diffuse list of a thousand and one promises, in no way a socialist answer _ or any answer _ to the crisis of British capitalism.

We will fight every inch of the way to stop the witchhunters gutting the Party and saddling the working class with another term of Thatcherite rule. that at least one woman be included on the final short-list for a constituency's parliamentary selection.

The Women's Action Committee of CLPD has found while campaigning on this issue that of all the demands this one arouses the greatest antagonism from men, on both left and right wings of the party. In particular it attracts the jibe (most frequently from Militant supporters) that it is simply a device to secure the interests of middle-class women careerists; a jibe which in the words of one WAC organiser 'again manages to render working class women, their needs and Frances Morrell told Socialist Organiser:

MY CONSTITUENCY Labour Party, Islington South, wouldn't dream of expelling one of its own members.

We have never expelled anybody, and we're not clear why we should start now. If the NEC seriousiy asks us to do that when we have won a massive victory against the trend in the council elections, I would think that the NEC has really gone off its head.

The whole purge doesn't make much sense. Whose interest is it in to have such a decisive dispute within the Party over a fraction whose influence on Party policy is in reality very minimal? It can only be understood in the context of the very successful pressure for a more democratic party. It is a manifestation of the opposition of the Party establishment to a rank and file who can both participate in the making of policy and hold representatives responsible for its implementation.

As far as the LPYS goes - it's been shut down before, and the Party establishment has not realised that if you want a YS movement worth its salt it won't be a rubber-stamping organisation. I want a YS, and accept that they are going to be a troublesome crew, critical of all sorts of people including myself. demands, invisible.' The remaining resolutions contain two demands: first that the Women's Conference should, after more than 60 years, be formally constituted and permitted to follow the widespread practice within union and labour party conferences of electing its own executive. Second, that the women's organisation should be staffed by women and the party urged to 'examine its practices as an employer to ensure that women are not discriminated against, implicitly or explicitly' ANN PETTIFOF

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