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One can picture the Shores, Hattersleys, Duffys and Basnetts bending under this inexorable logic and meekly handing over the apparatus of the Labour Party to the left wing!

But while Militant anticipates an unstoppable rise of their fortunes, the eyes of Socialist Action have been focused through articles by John Ross on another comforting notion - the decline of the Tory Party!

Never mind their massive majority and the immediacy of the Tory attack that will follow: Ross assures us that: "These election results are part of a decline of the Tory vote which has now been going on for fifty years" • (This conclusion is reached by starting from the 'National Government' landslide in 1931).

Strangely, Ross does not find Ioom to mention the parallel decline in the Labour vote, which is now at its lowest since 1918. His conclusion - even while the Tories draw up legislation designed to sever Labour's links with the unions and destroy it as an electoral force - is that the main danger is from... the SDP!

"The Tory Party will rapidly become dramatically unpopular" Ross writes. They are likely to be "crushed in by-election after by-election". • The problem is that "the entire press, and every other weapon [?], will be mobilised to ensure that the Alliance defeats So? "The aim must be to get this government out and to force a new general election in which the Tories are crushed"

It's a pity that amidst these heady speculations on the future, Socialist Action didn't find time to consider the lessons of the failure of the Socialists for a Labour Victory campaign, and to recognise now (as they did not prior to the election) the need for such campaigns to have an independdent rank and file orientation if they are to resist pressures from the leadership and reach out to the vital new forces in the working class that must be won to the fight for socialist policies. Jeremy Corbyn reports from Westminster THE election campaign just gone will go down in history as one of the turning points in our struggle; Labour fought on a manifesto that included many of the main policy proposals put forward from our conferences over the years and the old right of the Party quite clearly tried to sabotage the Party.

Speeches from Callaghan and Healey were deliberately at odds with the Party policy, and Frank Chapple, chairman of the TUC, went so far as to endorse the SDP candidate in North Islington.

On the other side the Tories and SDP bought themselves massive amounts of newspaper and other forms of advertising, exploiting the unfairness of the electoral law, and created a media stampede which was trying to tell working people that there is no alternative to mass unemployment, inner city poverty, nuclear arms and discrimination against women and ethnic minorities.

The Saatchi and Saatchi route back to victorian values does not preclude the use of high technology mass indoctrination techniques or the use of the 'big lie' of opinion polls.

The Tory election machine and the willing chorus from Fleet Street in praise of Thatcher are frighteningly reminiscent of the 1968 Nixon campaign for President in the USA. Perhaps when unemployment has gone over five million and the jobless school leavers are up to ninety per cent of the press lords will be prepared to publish "The big lies of 1983' What the Party has to recognise now is that the crisis of capitalism has reached such proportions that another five years of the Thatcher Tories will wreak total havoc on millions; unemployment is already at four million and in inner city, areas like Islington the underlying trend is an even faster rise and for youth, already sixty per cent

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ne' MP