Newsline articles censured by NUJ

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AT A meeting between British Shipbuilders (BS) and the Shipbuilding Negotiating Committee (SNC) of the Confed on Thursday March 31, BS's already announced 9,000 redundancies were broken down into areas.

It is proposed that 300 will made redundant at Scott Lithgow on the Clyde, and 1,400 at Cammell Lairds on the Mersey. We have not yet been informed where the others are.

The SNC was also told again that BS could not afford to pay a wage rise this year.

In Cammell Lairds, the redundancies are proposed to start with 500 going in September, followed by another 300 in December and the rest in May 1984.

The SNC is supposed to be drawing up proposals to be presented to the lay delegates' conference in April. There has to be a united resistance to these redundancies in British Shipbuilders and throught the supply industries, which will also suffer if the redundancies go through.

The SNC's response to the closure of the Robb Caledon yard in Dundee last year was to call us out on strike every Monday. It had the effect of dissipating, rather than strengthening, go 1500 to go militancy.

Every shop stewards' committee has seen the way the SNC acts. It is the stewards' committees, and mass meetings, that should propose the action to the delegate conference.

Mass meetings should be held in every yard. One thing has to be clear: if there is one enforced redundancy, every worker in BS must come out in support.

•Cammell Lairds Confed stewards' committee has called on the shipbuilding combine committee to draw up plans for alternative socially-uscful production in the yard. THE EDITOR and leading reporter of Newsline have been censured by the National Union of Journalists for a series of attacks they made on me following 'Operation Major', the police raid on the homeless in Oxford last year.

Alex Mitchell•who wrote the articles, and Paul Jennings, the Editor of the paper, have been found guilty of a breach of the NUJ Code of Conduct in that 'they presented conjecture as established fact and continued to do so after Mr. Molntyre had pointed out this error' The National Executive of the NUJ upheld a report from its Complaints Committee which found that a complaint I brought against the two Newsline journalists was 'well founded The Newsline, paper of the Workers' Revolutionary Party, had accused me of being … a copper's nark, a twister, and a liar.. The article said I collaborated with the police in setting up the Oxford raid which arrested 286 homeless people and charged more than 170 of them.

In fact, as Newsline has known from the beginning, I had no advance knowledge that the police were to raid claimants, although I learned through my job they were investigating a number of landlords in Oxford.

Mitchell and Jennings simply relied for their attacks on two front pages of the Oxford Mail, the paper for which I work, and said that as a working class paper they were entitled to launch attacks in any form they thought best. They further accuse me of abusing the procedures of the Both Newsline journalists have an opportunity to appeal, but the decision of the NUJ is a welcome vindication of my decision to use that avenue. It provided a forum to judge whether the allegations presented over a large number of Newsline articles could be substantiated. Patently they could not. Far from being an abuse of the NUJ system, it's a tribute to the NUJ Code of Conduct that members can seek Iedress through it in this manner.

Perhaps as an NUJ member by Peter Melntyre with some experience of the structure of the union I was in a better position to defend myself than many of the victims of Newsline character assassination jobs. But it is possible that Newsline may have to hesitate before setting out to blacken the names of other lefts from rival political tendencies.

Nor can Newsline claim that the NUJ have returned an adverse decision simply because the WRP claims to be revolutionary. Only last month the NUJ successfully and correctly defended Newsline against attempts by Scotland Yard. to deny the paper press facilities.

At virtually the same time as the NUJ result was being announced, the trial of one of the agents for Oxford landlord Jeremiah Cronin was just concluding. The agent accused of conspiracy, James Carron, admitted taking money off claimants. in Oxford, but claimed he was acting on behalf of the landlord.

Cronin, who has never been charged, said after the case that police never even put this allegation to him while he was held by them for two days. A number of lawyers have been left convinced by this and other evidence that. a deal was struck between Thames Valley Police and some Oxford landlords either before or just after they launched Opera tion Major. Claimants D fence Campaign continues to call for enquiries into this and every other àspect of the raid.

The Newsline could have used its resources to research these questions. Instead, it simply castled in on Operation Major by using the raid as an opportunity to attack me, and through me, Socialist Organiser.

Personally, one of the most nauseating aspects of the whole episode has been the Jekyll and Hyde face the WRP presents to the world. Meeting Mitchell at various hearings, I have become convinced he finds it possible to call someone a copper's nark, liar, twister, and a variety of other choice epithets, without considering it anything much out of the ordinary.

Dressed like a 1950s lounge lizard, and maintaining an air of urbane affability, he addresses the world as a scribbler trying to earn an honest penny.

Inwardly, meanwhile, the Healyite is busy spotting police agents, murderers of Trotsky, and other agents of imperialism, whose one aim is to deny the WRP its place in the sun. Thus is the Marxist dialectic contained within the same pinstripe frame. The NUJ Complaints Hearing has brought Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jennings one small brush with reality.

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