[IN REPLY to Mick Jarmaine's letter. on the…]

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IN REPLY to Mick Jarmaine's letter. on the People's March in SO 116, I would like to agree about the cynical motives of Foot and the right wing in the Labour Party. It isn't just the resources which would be put into a People's March, but also the political awareness and mobilisation this would create in the working class.

As Shore tries to dump policies won by the movement at Labour Party conference on the 35 hour week, with no loss of pay and payment for school students over 16, and shows reluctance to talk of big reductions in unemployment except as an argument to push through an incomes policy, a march calling for full employment which mobilises hundreds of thousands of working people can only be progressive.

Mick is fundamentally mistaken to think that only direct action by the unemployed themselves can change the political situation.

A central task for labour movement activists is to mobilise around the issues of unemployment and unilateral disarmament, linking these mobilisations up with the election of a Labour Government on these policies. This mobilisation will create. massive difficulties for the bureaucracy in the labour movement, who are hell bent on ditching these policies and will create better conditions for a fighting leadership in the labour movement.

I was on the last People's March - as indeed Mick was - and agree with Mick about the undemocratic and corrupt practices of some elements in the leadership of the march. However, the question is, can this be stopped by sitting on the fence or by getting stuck in now to prevent a repetition.

Finally I would like to say a word about campaigning against unemployment.

The attempt to build unemployed workers' groups have been a dismal failure and the only real campaign has been the People's Campaign for Jobs. It may not be perfect, but it has the links with the trade unions and politicad parties of the working class, and at the moment this is the terrain which the fight against unemployment will carry on in.

We have to try and make it an ongoing campaign which doesn't just end after the march, and this may be the way organisation of the unemployed linked to the working class movement will proceed. We cannot hark back to the 1930s and Wal Hannington as we are in a different period, where the working class hasn't suffered a major defeat and therefore unemployed people still look to the trade union movement despite its massive faults.

DAVE AYRTON Sheffield