Peckham shows need to convince workers

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Southwark workers demonstrate against a right wing Labour council. They'll need more than fine words from us to convince force the Labour leaders toi HARRIET Harman predictbreak with the bosses and ably won the Peckham bythe bankers, to stand by the election last Thursday, but Labour Conference's radical the result serves to further policies and to give real sup- warn the Labour Party that port to the health workers it is losing much of its tradias part of the fight to bring tional support.

Right wingers like Spellar vote fell from 60% to 50% will oppose this tooth and while Dick Taverne for the 'nail, but Labour Party mem- SDP polled almost 33% of bers and trade unionists now the votes cast. The Tory have a way of dealing with candidate lost his deposit. . the likes of spellar. re- •*The turn-out was very selection". low - 38% - but this is THERE wasn't much celebrating amongst Labour supporters in Birmingham when the news finally came through on Friday morning.

John Spellar had won back Northfield for Labour by 289 votes. Hardly a famous victory in a constituency that had been solidly Labour at every election since the war - until upper class twit Jocelyn Cadbury snatched it from Social Contract-supporting hack Ray Carter in 1979.

(When poor old Jocelyn saw what Thatcherite Toryism meant in practice - or so the story goes - he was overcome with remorse, and being a wettish sort of a chap, did the decent thing with a double-barrelled shotgun).

Damp

But it wasn't just the slimness of the majority thai lampened socialist euphoria after Labour's first by election gain from the Tories since 1971. Rather, it was the nature of the candidate and his policies.

John Spellar is a malevolent Koll Harris figure who boasts of being "to the right of' Frank Chapple, his Northfield result was his purge of Militant.

He publicly barred Tony Benn from setting foot in the constituency during the campaign, and told a Birmingham Labour Solidarity rally that he didn't want left wingers to even canvass for him.

He makes no bones about leadsympathy for, the SDP leadership, probably would have gone with them but for his union connections and a shrewd eye for by Jim Denhar Interestingly, his one concession to Labour Conference policy is his outspoken support for import controls, especially on Japanese cars (Northfield constituency includes the BL Longbridge plant).

Flock

Not surprisingly, Labour activists in Birmingham weren't exactly flocking into Northfield to go on the knocker for John Spellar. In fact, a good proportion of what canvassing was done, seems to have been carried out bv AUEW full time officials sent in by Labour Solidarity.

If the labour rank and file were less than enthusiastic about Spellar, it seems that the electorate as a whole could scarcely contain their indifference.

The poll was 54%, meaning that 10,000 fewer people bothered to vote than at the general election. Spellar took 36.2% of the vote while Tory Roger Gale took 35.6%. And this in a constituency with 18% unemployment!

It hardly seems to vindiREG Freeson, sitting Labour MP for Brent East, has written a 42-point (!) letter to Labour Party general secretary Jim Mortimer appealing for a further inquiry into Brent East Constituency Labour Party.

Brent East is already -because of the May elections and an earlier inquiry _ one of the very few reChapple: Spellar's boss cate Spellar's claim that the voters of Northfield had rallied round "the traditional Labour Party with traditional Labour policies" once they saw the looney left in retreat and realised just what a sensible moderate fellow that nice Mr Spellar was.

The Socialist Organiser Longbridge bulletin put out on the eve of the poil summed up our attitude:

"We still say vote Labour (even though there is a Communist Party candidate standing who may seem more attractive to socialists) in order to deny the bosses' Party a victory...

But the fight. must be kept up after the election to down the Tories.

chapter ingstone.

The outcome of the earlier inquiry is that the CLP is being 'strongly supervised' for six months by assistant nationa! agent Joyce Gould. But Gould has given an undertaking that, as far as she is concerned, selection can go ahead as MOOSY AUTOS repairs Plan Labour's share of the soon as she is satisfied with the CLP's Standing Orders and has verified membership figures for 1981 (on which branch delegations are based). Neither of these will take leng.

This obviously disturbs Freeson, who stands in danger of losing to Livingfairly typical for Peckham. Only 57% of the electorate voted in the 1979 general election (compared with a national average of around 70%) and in the local elections last May, many wards achieved turn-outs of only 25%.

The reasons for this are not hard to find. With the result a foregone conclusion many Labour supporters don't bother to vote. But more importantly, an increasing number of Labour voters in recent years have stayed away from the polls in protest at the failure of Labour, either nationally or locally, to do anything about the appalling conditions in this inner-London constituency.

They no longer believe that any party is willing or able to do anything for them. stone.

Freeson's is an letter is an amazing web of truth semi-truth.

The most serious allegar tion, in the light of the present make-up of the NEC, is that the "evidence of unconstitutional conduct in relation to the selection procedure] is more than THESE P KIVEKSIDE LADDER ›APPORTS MUR ALBEE NO TO TOWAHAN BE 15tS peTTER Angerine Southwark council was dominated by a right wing and corrupt leadership for many years. The new leftwing council only came to power six months ago and has yet to prove that it is prepared to mount a fight in defence of the working class of the borough.

Suggestions thất the Council may impose a rate increase of the order of 100% next spring indicate that they may prove unwilling to mount such a fight and thus lose more support.

The formation of the SDP has given some disillusioned Labour supporters an alternative to vote for -since they would never vote for the Tories (in the May local elections not a single Tory was returned to Southwark council from the wards in Peckham constituency).

But support for the SDP is limited. The eleven Labourcouncillor defectors to the SDP all lost their seats in the May council elections and the 33% share of the vote won by Taverne last week was only achieved on the basis of a massive election campaign which they could not hope to repeat at a General Election.

Abstention still remains the form of protest exercised by Labour's traditional supporters in Peckham. If that lost support is to be won back, then Southwark Labour Party must show by its actions that now it is controlled by the Left it will act in the interests of the working class of Southwark by fighting to implement its manifesto commitments and confronting Heseltine if necessary rather than passing on the costs to its supporters in the form of massive rate increases.

And Harriet Harman, as the first of the three left wing Prospective Parliamentary Candidates in Southwark to get to Parliament, must convince the working class of Peckham that her victory means a new style of representation of working class interests.

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boss at the EETPU. His main claim to fame prior to the

"parasites" speech at Black- pool, calling for a full scale

Swindale reports

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