Socialist Organiser

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

[nearly enough. After 18 weeks out families with…]

Socialist Organiser no. 141, 21 July 1983 · scan p. 15 · about 747 words

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nearly enough. After 18 weeks out families with small children and heavy financial commitments are facing a degree of hardship.

Invite Greenings to send a speaker to your Branch, shop stewards' committee, trades council, etc.

Send donations to Len Blood, 26 St. John's St., Newton-leWillows, Merseyside.

ment threats to break up the ILEA; we are expressing the democratic views of our members.

We have called on the ILEA Labour Group to think again before it is too late and work for a voluntary agreement for the movement of teachers which would defuse the situation..

Despite the strongly held position of ILEA that they would not "'negotiate under pressure" they have agreed to negotiate with the teachers' side and have agreed to give back a number of jobs they had previously refused.

IT has been pointed out to us that an unsigned article in the issue of Socialist Organiser dated 2 June 1983 on the busines backgrounds of Tory MPs failed to acknowledge the obvious source of the facts and figures it used. This was the Labour Research Department.

Usually writers in Socialist Organiser give credit for work drawn upon. Of course this has frequently meant making acknowledgement to the Labour Research Department, which services labour movement bodies with facts, figures and analyses. Our failure to credit LRD this time was an oversight for which we apologise to them.

Readers can subscribe to 'Labour Research' monthly for £11 (to LRD, 78 Blackfriars Rd, London SE1 8HF, 01-928 3649). Details of other LRD services from the same address.

THE POEU's fight against the privately owned Project Mercury is continuing.

The situation changes very quickly and further developments will probably have taken place since the time of writing.

The latest edition of 'Campaign News', ', the newsheet of the LNCI branch, explains the calling out on strike of all members on a Crossbar unit at Covent Garden telephone exchange.

The members were called out on strike from Monday 11 July in response to BT management's (this time successful)

attempt at connecting up some Mercury lines to the BT network.

This is the second attempt by BT management to connect up Mercury circuits through the BT network, and was carried out, over the weekend, in a building not used solely by BT.

No details of planned further connections are known at the moment, but the connection which was made was only phase one of a two phase operation which is necessary before the lines will actually work. Phase two will not be carried out at the same building as phase one.

These difficulties, together with fears that Tebbit's secondary picketing law may be invoked, might be the main reason why there have been no pickets.

But if BT management continue to connect up Mercury circuits, this will seriously undermine the national levy collection which is being .conducted to fund selective industrial action and also to campaign amongst the membership.

It would seriously damage the fight for the blacking of Mercury as well as the union's opposition to the Privatisation Bill which has now had its second reading.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the industrial action will have to spread outside of ing will need to be introduced despite Tebbit's laws.

150,000. But that movement wasted its strength and declined for a number of reasons.

Only a minority turned to the labour movement. A brief victory for unilateralism at the 1960 Labour Party conference was overturned by the still very strong right wing in 1961.

The militant wing turned to led by one of the great figures of British radicalism and reformist socialism, the octogenarian Bertrand Russell. Then in 1963 the US-USSR Test Ban Treaty induced a false sense of sécurity that lasted two decades.

That feeling of security is gone and replaced by alarm. But the new mass movement for nuclear disarmament has yet to learn the central lesson of the old CND's experience of growth and decline - the campaign against nuclear weapons and nuclear bases must turn to the labour movement.

The great message of the TGWU conference is that it is possible to win the labour movement to the irreplaceable action that will stop nuclear weapons. The central truth that the antiwar movement needs to learn, and to organise itself around, is that working class action is the only thing that will stop them.

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London in response to manage- ment's actions, and that picket-

brave but impotent: direct action - to mass sit-downs,

← Contents of Socialist Organiser no. 141

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