Gays tell Labour: Don't say we ost votes

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OUR bulletins, paper sales, and meetings at Labour Party con ference are important. But they also cost money. Some of it we'll make good by collections at the conference. But there will The work at Labour Party conference also takes a lot of time and energy - so we've not got full fund figures this week.

There's £20 from Ian Nichol, £6 lium Steve Hall, and z2 from Barnsley. We haven't got details of the rest, but it's certain Send to: The Treasurer, 214 Sickert Court, London N1 JOHN SMITH (IFL)

TGWU pickets at Ellesmere Port Stephen ONE Sunday anernoon, just after the general election, I watched an edition of the Channel 4 programme. «Union World" in which reasons for the Labour Party's defeat were being discussed. Sitting with the presenter were union stalwarts and champions of the masses, David Basnett and Gavin Laird.

"Do you think," said the presenter, "that the Labour ¡Party's advocacy of such middle class concers as animal rights and gay rights caused disaffection amongst the mass of tradi. tional Labour voters?"

Basnett pulled one of those merry little grimaces like a grave opening and mumbled on about "getting back to priorities" • But there it was - the assumption în the question had been accepted. Gay rights was a vote loser.

That! assumption is rights:

We: are concerned that homosexuals are. unfairly treated. We will take steps to ensure that they are not unfairly discriminated against - especially in employment and in the definition of privacy contained in the 1967 Act -along the 'lines set out in Labour's Programme, 1982"

Liberal sentiments → weakly expressed - give the lie to the Party hierarchy's views on gay rights more than if nothing had been said at all. We are embarrassment, we are divisive and we are, in the final analysis, expendable.

We are not even to be heard - if the annual conferences of the Labour Party are anything to go by. And this year's conference will be no exception, with not even a mention for gay rights. Yet. again, we are relegated to a fringe meeting -symbolic of our position in Party consciousness.

But this will not always be the case. Mainly through the work of such organisations as Labour Campaign for Gay Rights, many people in the Party are beginning to realise that the fight for gay rights is as much a part of the socialist struggle as are the issues of class, race and sex.

Indeed, it is our threat to the very basis of capitalism - literally how it reproduces itself -that has set off a nervous reacbe about £150 to cover from general funds.

we need a lot more money! tion in the press. Only recently we have had an attack on gay : rights of almost unprecedented proportions, provoked by the rape of a six year old boy in Brighton by three men. It was interesting to note the subtle propaganda at work as many of the reports linked homosexuality with paedophilia with child molestation, as if homosexuality was the start of a slippery slope.

If the capitalist establishment can see what a danger gay liberation is to its being, why can't the Labour Party see it in that way and support us for precisely the same reason? And why is it that the "left" persists in perceiving gay rights as marginal to its demands?

For instance, many gay socialists, like myself, consider the left's advocacy of Eric Heffer for the leadership to be an obscenity when considering his dubious record on sexual politics.

Until recently, it was difficult to argue with gay people that they should align themselves with the socialist cause in general and the Labour Party's in particular. The Liberal Party •seemed the logical choice for gays because of its consistent (if liberal) advocacy of gay rights.

Until, that is, the last election where it was clear to see the poisoning influence of the SDP on the "radical" Liberal tradition - now withering at its very roots (sic).

Many Liberals were appalled that any mention of gay rights had been expunged trom the Alliance manifesto. And their worst fears were realised at the rece:it Liberal Assembly where Alex Carlile, 'home affairs spokesperson, told the Assembly that, as far as he was concerned, the Party had no policy on gay rights.

This was good only in that it may serve to show gay Liberals the worthlessness of tokenism: the Liberal Party's support for gay rights has been dropped as quickly as it was adopted, there being no ideological backing within the Party for anything other than a reformist approach to the oppression of gays.

For those of us in LCGR toltiism or tolerance is unacceptable. What we demand is a recognition of the revolutionary potential of sexual politics and a socialist perspective of it within the labour movement. We are convinced that nothing less than that will lead to true freedom.

2SY.

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