John Bloxam, S.O. Secretariat

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Britain bolsters junta NeJ/ TURKEY frOm AMA INFORMATION BULLETIN Turkey -a nation behind bars ondon N16. Speakers include Jeremy Corbyn MP, Anthon endall (leader, Hackney Council), Turkish trade unionists, and i speaker from the Kurdistan Solidarity Campaign. turday September 10, 2.30pm, Stoke Newington Town H ian to Bri An! line of the Latin America Newsletter to support strikers. Despite his illness he attended the Fülham CND meeting the night before he died.

He was associated with a long list of political and union causes, most notably the fight in the labour movement for troops out of Ireland and against. media censorship of the Irish war. He was about to attend this year's Trade Union Congress as a member of the NUJ delegation.

Jonathan began his working life as an actor associated with a number of fringe theatres in the 1960s when radical theatre companies were springing up in profusion.

In the early 70s he gave up acting and went into book publishing where he helped pioneer the recruiting drive by the National Union of Journalists.

In 1971 he was victimised and sacked after forming an NUJ chapel at Calder and Boyers but he remained an active campaigner for the union. In 1974 he moved to THREE LABOUR politics, just returned from a visit lurkey, have reported that tish embassy officials in from the branch, a position he held until hís presidential year, and then again until his death..

Affiliation

One of his main campaigns was for the affiliation of the NUJ to the Labour Party -a cause he advocated in his presidential speech.

He was a long standing member of Fulham Labour Party and a former GMC delegate. He was a delegate to Hammersmith and Fulham Trades Council and a former executive member.

In addition, Jonathan was active in CND, Amnesty International, The Campaign for Press Freedom, The Turkish Solidarity Campaign, and the Troops Out Movement.

Jonathan was elected President of the NUJ on a left ticket. but his year in office showed up many of the problems left wingers face when they win such positions. ists for the military there.

•We were all shocked by the all,

MANY PROMINENT labour movement figures union presidents and the like - will give their 'names' to this or that

campaign.

It's much more unusual for people in such positions to identify unequivocally with a Marxist organisation and to take their share of its day-to-day work. Yet that is what Jonathan Hammond did.

When Socialist Organiser was started in 1978, a lot of prominent Labour Party and trade union people associated themselves with us. As political issues developed, and as we became more organised, setting up the structure of the Socialist Organiser Alliance and its local groups, they moved away or remained on its fringes - all except one of them, and that one was Jonathan.

He was conscientious about taking his ten copies of SO to sell each week and paying for them. by the British embassy in Ankara, said Chris Smith, MP for Islington South. 'The officials we met at the British embassy acted as apologists for the current Turkish regime. They might as well have been officials of the regime itself' The other members of the delegation were Clare Short, MP for Birmingham Ladywood, and ex-MP Alex Lyon.

DISK trial

They had visited the trial where 78 members of the DISK trade union confederation are charged with 'seeking to overthrow the constitution of the Republic by force'. For 52 of then, the military prosecutor has demanded the death penalty.

The indictment has been published as a thick book. 'The whole of this book' , said Alex Lyon, 'does not specify anyIf there was a delay in delivering them, he would be on the 'phone to ask why.

He attended SO Secretariat meetings regularly, and travelled across the country to chair SO delegate meetings. Whenever he could help with the practical work, he did. He worked with the rest of us as a comrade, not as an 'important person' coming to visit.

In one of his books, the US Trotskyist James P Cannon recalled that in the socialist movement before World War I, the main leaders were 'celebrities' with professional occupations outside the movement.

•'They decided things. They laid down the law. They were the speakers on ceremonial occasions; they posed for their photographs and gave interwhere one single act of violence. The defendants are simply being indicted on the basis of their speeches, articles and papers.

'Men are likely to be condemned to death because they have done what any trade unionist in this country would consider it his right to do Hunger strike The delegation was also able to give some information on the recent mass hunger strike in Turkish jails, despite a blackout on it in the Turkish press. In istanbul, where it started, the hunger strike has been broken and worse conditions imposed in the jails as retaliation. Pockets of resistance may still continue outside Istanbul.

The three politicians will be compiling a report on their visit, and raising the issues both in Parliament and within the 30p plus 16p post from BM Box 5965, London WC1N 3XX views to the newspapers. Between them and the proleta rian Jimmy Higginses in the ra nks, there was an enormous gulf.

"As for the party funct tionaries, the people who devote dall their time to the daily work routine of the party, they r vere simply regarded as flunkey 's to be loaded with all the disag able tasks, poorly paid blamed if anything went wrong...

'When we organised the Communist Party... in 19 19... we put a stop to all this i nonsense...

'All this nonsense" is still rife in the British labour m ovement today. For someone in i the upper ranks of that movemel nt to reject it is rare indeed. It is i the measure of Jonathan's com mitment as a socialist that he dir TO All We have a great deal of credibil -ity in areas of the trade unions and of constituency Labour Parties where we are strong because of our hard work and willingness to work with others on the left while retaining our distinctive approach.

We should, first of all, take the lead and strive to create Labour Party workplace branches as as means of combining trade union and Labour Party work and reinvigorating the basis of the Labour Party. We should seek to build new SO groups and develop the ones we already have, and, within this organisational priority, determine how many people we can put forward in each area as prospective councillors and parliamentary candidates.

Within this developing organisational framework, we should fight for our policies and to call to account those MPs, councillors and union leaders who collaborate with the Tories...

Jonathan Hammond,

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Socialist Organiser no. 144 September 1 1983 Page 12 Agem-da LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE MEETING we VOLUNTEERS wanted! Wirral Trades Council have acquired a building at Cen-

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