How we brought new people into politics and union activity

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Jean Lane is secretary of the Party workplace branch ORGANISED!

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Name Address Send to Socialist Organiser, 28 Middle Lane, London N8 8PL. INITIALLY I suggested setting up a Labour Party workplace branch to some of the people who had been involved in the local Broad Left. :

We all thought it was a really good idea. The Broad left in Coventry wasn't working - it was only a few people and we couldn't get others interested.

The only opposition we got was from the union officials. They don't like my politics, so they don't trust anything I get upto.

They said that the workplace branch would be dealing with union issues and would step on their toes.

I had to promise that it would have no connection with the union and that it would not deal with union issues. That's the rules, anyway.

In practice this will create quite a few difficulties. We want to invite Alan Fraser down to speak, for instance, and they'li step on that straight away.

We want to talk about things like YTS (the Tory Youth Training Scheme) and they'll say: No you can't. That's our business.

You can't really separate politics and union issues, but we'll just have to avoid clashes as much as we can over the next few months.

Mainly what we do at workplace branch meetings is just political education - with speakers and videos on various political issues like racism and sexism.

Then I think we will get people who come to the workplace branch meetings and say - why don't we discuss YTS? Why don't we discuss privatisation? And then the officials won't just have an argument with me - it will be with the workplace branch and all the members.

Have most of those who come to the meetings been active in the No. The people who are coming to the workplace branch particularly the young people who haven't been involved in anything before, have had very little to do with the union. They haven't even bothered coming to union meetings.

I think the reason why they will come to the workplace branch rather than the union is that in the workplace branch we can have those discussions and speak freely. Those goes specially for the young women. Union meetings are really intimidating for them.

If a young woman comes to a union meeting and stands up to speak, you'll get a lot of muttering from the blokes at the back, and then some bastard of an official will say 'Can you repeat that, love?' She goes completely tonguetied, sits down again and never comes to another meeting.

The effect of the workplace branch on me and other political people in the Post Office is brilliant, too, because it gives us a far wider audience to talk to politically. We can contact people we never knew existed.

I had one bloke come up to me after our first meeting and say - I'm sorry I missed your meeting, I'll be along to your next one. I had never seen him, I didn't know who he was, but he had been in the Labour Party for years.

In the normal run you just don't meet these people, you don't find out what their views are, and you don't get to talk to them.

I think the workplace branch will encourage people to start getting involved in the union and raising political issues.

I have heard people object to setting up workplace branches because it gives the union a let-out not to discuss politics because the workplace branch will deal with it.

But we've got the bureaucrats trying to stop political discussion in the union anyway. The workplace branch gives people a chance to discuss politics and encourages people to go and discuss politics in the union, knowing that there will be someone there who will back them up.

How did you start the workplace branch?

We put out a leaflet saying do you want to fight the Tories? and suggesting issues that ought to be discussed like cuts, privatisation, racism and sexism.

The résponse was very good. We've got 18 members.

We've had two meetings but the first one didn't work because the rules say we have to have ten paid-up Labour Party members to set up a branch, and only six were at the meeting.

At the second meeting we had more people, and we elected the officers. We had a discussion on how to make contact with the rest of the Labour Party in the City, including the other workplace branches, and what sort of things we wanted to do.

One woman suggested we invite Amrit Wilson to speak on racism. Someone wanted to discuss El Salvador. Others suggested films - Rosie the Riveter and Harlan County, which is our next meeting.

Since our very first meeting we've got seven or eight new people to fill out membership forms to join the Labour Party. At the second meeting • the majority were young cadets, delivery officers, aged 17 or 18.

But we had a good cross section as well. We had someone from the POEU and we had the secretary of the local Comof Post Office Unions. We had people from the offices, and delivery officers, and drivers.

Most of the people who've been interested weren't Labour Party members before. I think they're joining, really, only because they want to come to particular meetings and discuss those particular issues. I don't know how active they will be in their wards.

The workplace branch is important because it gives people a way to get into politics.

I remember when we were tryuing to get a lot of Asian youth into the Labour Party after Satnam Singh Gill was killed. They would come to two or three ward meetings and then decide they would rather go to the football match instead.

It was completely understandable. Those kids were forming self-defence committees, talking about racism and fascists, and then the Labour Party meetings would be discussing the broken paving slabs down such and such a street or something that was going on in some committee or other in the council house.

With the workplace branch we can relate directly to what people want to talk about and want to do.

At our first meeting one of the women said it was one of the nicest Labour Party meetings she had been to for years.

Meeting times are a problem because the Post Office works 24 hours and there's always a shift at work. We're meeting at 7.30 on Monday nights, which isn't ideal. Saturday afternoon would be better but those who were initially interested couldn't make that time. We're meeting in a pub in town. No way would we get a room inside the Post Office.

What about involving women? Workplace branches should make the Labour Party more accessible, not only because they are more interesting but also because of the time and place where they meet.

Our meetings aren't at all accessible in that way, any more than any other Labour Party meetings are. But we have got. quite a large number of women involved. Probably more than half the people who have joined are women. But they're all young, single post-women. • A lot of these young women have come because they know me personally, but also they know my politics and agree with most of what I say.

Do you think they would have come along if it had been three or four men from the Committee who had organised the first No, they wouldn't, because they just didn't identify with those people anyway. Neither, probably, would a lot of the men.

It seems there have been no more s than 50 workplace branches set up nationally. Perhaps that's an underestimate, but it is still not a lot. Do you find that surprising when it is so easy to set them up? -Not really. It is very easy to set them up, all you need is ten members. But with the way the union is organised and the attitude of trade unionists, people have forgotten their history, their roots. They have forgotten that the Labour Party came out of trade unions and they've forgotten the militancy that got trade unions set up in the first place.

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«SCIENCE -SPUTLIGHTY Bomb drops wo C I WONDER if, when Tories watch Ken Loach's latest production, "The Blue and the Red" , they will fall about laughing at what they see as outlandish accents and. ridiculous sloganising by socialists?

Will the noisy scrum of paper, badge, pamphlet and sticker sellers outside the Labour Party Conference, the attacks on leaders, the challenges to the chair and the nightly refrain of "What's it to be then fish'n chips or wimpy" only prove to these ladies and • gentlemen that the lower orders are lower because of their failure to embrace sophistication, civilisation and sound common sense?

No doubt. But then Ken Peter Cashman: a class view on unemployment onferenc Andrew Hornung previews a Ken Loach film to be shown this Saturday, Ist, at 7:30pmm on Channel 4.

Loach's film (subtitled "Impressions of Two Political Conferences") isn't meant to coldshower the Thatcherites into compassion and conversation. It is a neat - and often hilarious - statement of just how far apart the class attitudes of the rank-and-file members of the two major parties are.

The prospective parliamentary candidate for St. Albans (now an MP) comes to the rostrum late and apologises, "My extremely efficient -oom-maid es, two placed my notes in the garbage at the Royal Crescent Hotel :" The class struggle is fought on every front, evidently. "I'm a stockbroker. I specialise in the oil industry, " he explains in interview. "I came into politics in reaction to socialist trends." "I'm a great believer in hard work and initiative, declares a Keighley Conservative. "Self-sufficiency is gift divine."

Meanwhile at the Labour Party Corference, Lol Duffy, a shipyard shop steward and deleanalyses the run down of ahip- from Wallasey CLP, building and the failure of the Party leadership to fight for working class interests. Peter Cashman, also from Wallasey; talks about unemployment: "I've worked 22 weeks in two years."

Will the Tory viewers be able to keep a straight face listening to Cecil Parkinson coo: "Harrogate? I'd love to. If I don't get to Harrogate once a month, I feel I'm missing out. Everything happens in Harrogate." Will they fail to be tickled by the sight of the formally dressed couples cha-cha-cha-ing limply before a backdrop announcing 'The Resolute Approach'?

More important - seeing that the film is being shown on the eve of the Labour leadership election - what will Labour viewers think seeing Kinnock do the intellectual twist at the Tribune meeting? Swerving like Socialis: Organte:.

By Les He UP TILL now, scientists studying the effect of nuclear war have tended to concentrate on the immediate effects of bomb blasts but recently scientists in Germany and the US have started looking at the long term implications.

The list includes months of darkness, near-freezing temperatures, even in the tropies, and world-wide crop failures.

A one megatonne (Mt) bomb, equivalent to one million tonnes of INT, would throw tens of thousands of tonnes of fine dust into the air. If about 6,000 Mt of bombs were detonated, about half of current stockpiles, the atmosphere would be filled with dust, while the heat of the explosions would ignite vast forest fires in the northern hemisphere, filling the atmosphere with smoke. The result would be darkness at noon for up to four months.

Chemical reactions near the bomb blasts would result in the formation of great clouds of oxides of nitrogen, the ingredients of "photochemical smog" already found in Los Angeles, where sunlight causes irritating and harmful substances to be made out of air pollutants.

The effect of darkness on life would be devastating: The dust the world's fish, increased rates of cancer and mutation and the blinding of large numbers of animals through the formation of cataracts. These would wander around starving.

The fall-out of radioactive particles would furthermore ensure that most animals and fish would be unsuitable for human consumption.

My reading of these theories is that virtually all life in the northern hemisphere would be extinguished, and in the south it would be set back quite considerably. Though a few humans would probably survive, life on earth would have been set back several hundred million years.

THE tale of doom in the previous item is obviously not convincing enough for the US Congress. They've just decided to "send a message" to Russia after the Korean jet disaster in the form of a vote to start making a new generation of poison gases for war.

These are the so-called binary weapons, which are stored in bombs or shells as two separate harmless chemicals. When the shell or bomb is detonated, the chemicals react to make a deadly