Socialist Organiser

The weekly of the fused Workers Socialist League, July 1981 to April 1984

Bristol cam paigr

Socialist Organiser no. 121, 24 February 1983 · scan p. 11 · about 477 words

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Repeal the Immigration and Natonality Act Stop race checkst stopracistdeportations •Unite the divided families now. ON Saturday 19th, supporters of the campaign to defend Muhammad Idrish, a Bengali social worker threatened with deportation, leafletted and petitioned at the Cenotaph in the centre of Bristol.

Unfortunately there was a poor turn-out and promised media coverage failed to materialise; but plenty of signatures were collected. violence. There the peaceful protester from Bishop Aukland was knocked down by a scab truck.

In London he was introduced to Michael Foot. He handed Foot a 3,500 name petition supporting the sacked 43.

What more do you want? Peaceful protest, marches, a petition, working through your local MP, lobbying your union and the TUC, lobbying the Labour Party and speaking to its leader, and even having the matter raised in Parliament.

What a model of democratic activity! Yet... all those closed doors, those polite but arbitrary refusals - or warm responses leading to mockingly hollow The next step in the ca.

paign is a lobby of the Hon Office on Thursday 249h, be. led by Bristol MP Arth Palmer.

For more informatic contact: (Bristol) Graha Reid, 62 Bedminster Parad Bristol 3, (0272) 66793 Aloke Roy, (0272) 57053 (Birmingham) Ahsan (02. 551 1846; Barry Lovejo (021) 523 8923.

David Amı gestures - those smiling but still implacable rejec tions and all those reasonec but ultimatistic noes! All ol them, no doubt, with the courtesy of courtiers and the finality of a bullet.

And among the demo. cratic deaf there numbered naturally all the institt tions naturally all the institu bureaucratic labour move. ment. In a_ sense, their attitudes have condemned Eddie Horner to life in prison as surely as he condemned DC Porter to death.

Of course, Eddie Horner did not take the only course left open to him. There were in principle two others possible.

He could have given up, resigned himself to impotence - even comforted himself in the thought that nothing abnormal had happened, except perhaps that he had been daft enough to believe that things could have been otherwise.

The other possibility was to take a much harder road - harder than resignation and harder too than terrorism - the road of revolutionary socialist struggle to rouse the working class to overthrowing capitalism. The harder road is the long, patient one of directing the burning hatred of injustice inside millions of workers against its proper target.

Individual terror and the delusions of power that are its customary trappings are the product of an unshakeable sense of impotence. The Marxist, the revolutionary socialist, is unshakeable in his or her sense of class power.

Without this, Eddie Horner's impotent rage has done nothing but licence the state to make him once again - more térribly than ever - its victim.

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Sunday 12 noon Jubilee Gardens near Waterloo Station

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