CND leaders step up witch-hunt

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THE LEADERSHIP of CND has railroaded through its National Council a series of proposals which are tantamount to the suspension of Labour CND as an autonomous body.

Assisted by the staged resignations of a small CND leaders have moved • At the same Council meeting a series of proposals on the future of Youth CND presented by an unrepresentative 'YCND Interim Committee' were also pushed through.

No members of the elected YCND National Committee (which has been removed from office by the CND executive) were allowed to speak, whereas in the Labour CND debate one of the resigning executive members (not a delegate) was allowed to speak at length. • As a result YCND structure until the recall conference (if there is one) is such that the governing body is unrepresentative of the youth in the campaign.

These can be seen as the next steps in the witch-hunt currently being carried out in CND.

It is no coincidence that at the same time CND executive is switching the emphasis in campaigning, retreating from a firm unilateralist stance to advocating a Nuclear Freeze.

YCND and Labour CND were the two specialist sections most vehemently opposed to this switch in policy, and were intent on CND maintaining unilateral nuclear disarmament as its major campaigning aim.

This, we can safely assume, is why the Labour and Youth sections have been crushed by the CND executive.

The 'Agenda' article in Monday's Guardian (October 17) by E.P.Thompson reflects the direction in which the CND executive wants to travel -'Lord Carrington, where will you be on October 22?', a pursuit of the idea that CND can 'persuade' the Tories to ditch Daily Hail EXPRESS The Daily Urgaph nuclear weapons, A more realistic proposition must surely be the organisation of the labour movement against nuclear weapons - the blacking of work on cruise missile sites, for example, which was recently backed by TGWU conference.

Unfortunately the CND executive and many National Council members do not conform to this view.

This can be changed at CND conference in December, where election of 20 National Council members and other officers (including the executive committee) takes place. The regional Annual General Meetings where regional delegates to National Council are elected (five per region), are also important witche hunts in CND it is important that there is a strong left presence at the National Conference. Then a campaign could be launched to oppose the witch-hunts and to organise the Left in CND .to fight within the campaign for the unequivocal retention of unilateral nuclear disarmament as CND's primary aim.

Times should not give prominence to reports unhelpful to the Government. To spare Evans' susceptibilities, the memorandum was marked private and personal. If Evans had not now published it

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against CND and youth sections. Tim Pilsbury reports