After Bermondsey ATTer bermonasey DON" TI MOURN: ORGANISE! Build a socialist campaign to defeat Tories! Build a socialist campaign to defeat Tories!

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Thatcher's Tory government is the most hated British government since World War 2.

It has presided over the growth of unemployment to a real figure of over 4 million. It has allowed whole communities to be devastated by the slump and by its own policies. It has watched complacently as a whole generation of working class youth is thrown on the scrapheap at the very beginning of their adult lives.

It has thrown hundreds of thousands of women back into the crippl ing limitations and confinement of the home. It is an obscenely racist government.

It is devastating and dismantling the welfare state.

It has brought in waves of anti-union legislation aimed to hamstring and cripple the trade unions as fighting organisations of the working class. If Thatcher wins the coming election, the Tories will outlaw strikes in certain industries, and legislate to sever the existing links between the trade unions and the Labour Party, trying to drive the unions out of politics.

Yet the opinion polls consistently show a strong Tory lead. Almost unbelievably, there is a serious chance that Thatcher will win the next election! A general election in June or October could see the reinstallation for a second term of this, the most savage, relentless, ana callous government of the rich over the poor for two generations, with a new mandate from its victims to continue running rampage through the lives and prospects of millions of British workers!

The very thought of it should galvanise the entire labour movement into action. The prediction of the opinion polls must ring out in the labour movement like. a bugle call to action. This vicious government cannot be allowed a secona term!

We need immediately to mount a tremendous campaign of education and agitation in every corner of British life against the Tories and in favour of the return of a Labour government. The overwhelming majority of the working people of Britain can and must be roused out of despair, passivity, and resignation, and organised to fight back!

There are hundreds of thousands of Labour Party supporters, trade unionists, black militants, unemployed youth, angry women, and CNDers, who can and must be organised to mount and spearhead such a campaign, and to rouse the labour movement and its natural allies against a second term for Thatcher.

This is properly the work of the official Labour Party - the political wing of the labour movement. But Labour isn't doing it, and the reason why the Tories are now poised for an election victory is because Labour hasn't been doing it.

Michael Foot's promise when he was elected leader to mount a crusade that would unleash a "storm of protest and opposition" in the streets of every city in Britain has long been forgotten. The dominant NEC right wing is too busy fighting socialists in the Labour Party to seriously fight the Tories.

During the Bermondsey by-election some of the right wing colluded with the press to sabotage Peter Tatchell's campaign.

We must make every effort to get the best possible official Labour manifesto.

But it is only,too probable that the official manifesto will contain no more than a feeble reflection of the wide range of socialist and radical measures which are official Labour Party policy.

The Labour Party and trade union leaders have arranged a meeting - a re-run of Bishops Stortford - for this spring. Already there have been secret dinners to get incomes policy into the manifesto.!

Neither in its will to mobilise the labour movement to fight the Tories, nor in the policies it will most likely propose Sub-groups should be organised to campaign in every area of British society, from individual trade unions faced with Tebbit's laws through all the vast range nstead of Thatcherism, will the official Labour Party campaign be capable of generating the energy, conviction, elan, combativity and dynamism that the election campaign will need if we are to have any hope of stopping the Tories.

What they did during the Bermondsey by-election suggests that some of the right wing do not want to beat the Tories, but would prefer a defeat which they can blame on the Left and use to justify a full-scale purge.

Before we can hope to stop the Tories we must put a stop to the right-wing saboteurs. If the established leaders are irresponsible, defeatist and even, some of them, treacherous, and will neither lead the tight nor organise it, then the rank and file must do all these things and do them urgently - the rank and file of the unions, of the Labour Party, and of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

We must now launch the anti-Tory crusade Michael Foot promised but never mounted.

Peter Tatchell said what needed to be said after the Bermondsey result: "Don.t mourn this loss, organise for a win in the general election We need to establish a campaign representing and uniting broad segments of the lahour movement, the women's movement, blacks, youth, and gays. It might perhaps be called 'Anti-Tory League and Labour Victory Campaign' , or 'Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory 83' of groups and areas of life being devastated or threatened by the capitalist slump and the Tory government which worsens its effects like a plague following famine.

We can link up especially with CND activists to fight for Labour conference policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Dennis Healey has already made it plain that he expects this policy to be watered down in the official manifesto.

The campaign would produce literature against the Tories, for Labour conference policies and for Clause Four - leaflets, posters, broadsheets.

We would seek the affiliation of Labour Parties, trade unions, campaign groups, ethnic associations, etc. Local campaigns would be set up to galvanise the local labour movement. No-one who wanted to fight the Tories and to rouse the labour movement, or to campaign for aspects of Labour Party conference policy, would be excluded.

In this way the campaign could in many areas enable the local Labour Party to bind together bigger forces for the general election campaign than it could otherwise hope to.

The campaign would organise meetings and rallies Tallies throughout the country for national and local speakers who represent Labour Party conference policy or important aspects of it. The enthusiastic mass meetings for Tony Benn organised by the Rank and File Mobilising Committec for Labour Democracy would be the model. This time such meetings would he the starting point for a turn by the militants and the activists into the working class communities. on an anti-Tory crusade.

In short, it would be a distinct left wing activist campaign within the official Labour Party campaign - with a distinct voice, but also, of course, boosting and strengthening the official effort to maximise the Labour vote.

The campaign would build on the experience of the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, which mounted an independent left wing campaign within the Labour campaign in the 1979 general election. What the SCLV did then, can now be done on a vastly expanded scale, reflecting the growth of the Left since 1979 and in response to me mass naucu tha mana hatrad of tho incumbent Tory government.

The new campaign would combine the experience of the SCLV with the way the Anti-Nazi League mobilised hundreds of thousands in 1977-8.

This is how to stop the right wing losing us the next election. It is the way to release, organise and focus the energy and enthusiasm needed to avert the nightmare prospect of a second Thatcher government which, according to the opinion polls, looms ahead of us if we don't act now to avert it.

It is the way to organise those alienated and repelled by John Golding's version of the Labour Party, so that they become a force now in the fight to kick out the Tories.

In this way a powerful labour movement drive against the Tories can be achieved and the unity of the Labour and trade union left restored - unity in the first place and immediately against the Tory enemy, but also unity around LabIn this week's paper:

Back page, and four-page special feature inside: Miners fight for jobs.

Pages 2-3: Why Labour lost Bermondsey; CLPs defy NEC orders to expel Militant. Page 11: Balance sheet on the water workers' strike.

Page 12: Labour movement conference discusses British Army's role in Ireland. Page b: Women's tul preview.

* To make space for coverage of the miners' dispute, we've had to cut two pages of letters, debate, and reviews. We'll be back with those features next week!

Hour's left wing policies which would imply a commitment to fight for them even= against a new Labour government.

By organising around Labour conferen ce policies, we will not only be fighting. the Tories now, but also preparing, educa ting, and organising the forces to resist the inevitable negative aspects of a new right wing led Labour government, and to con tinue the fight for policies and for democracy and accountability in the labour movement.

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122 March 1983 Page

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Chris Knight. and John O'Mahony

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